Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.
First off, we’re thrilled to announce we’re adding an ace new reporter to our team. Lili Pike has joined Foreign Policy as the newest staff writer, and she’ll focus on China and U.S.-China ties. Stay tuned for tons of great news, scoops, and analysis from her.
By the way, there’s a major NATO summit coming up in Washington next month with dozens of world leaders. We’ll be on the ground reporting on all the major developments and scoops throughout the summit with special daily editions of SitRep. Stay tuned to your inboxes, and spread the word if you know anyone who would be interested in signing up for SitRep and following along.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The U.S. military chief visits Africa, a lawmaker pushes State Department reform, and the United States effectively bans the Russia-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
The United States’ top general visited Africa this week to meet with his counterparts, as Washington struggles to regain its military footing on the continent following high-profile setbacks and failed counterterrorism campaigns.
U.S. Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Botswana for an annual conference between U.S. and African military commanders. It marks the first time that the United States has co-hosted the annual conference with an African country—and the first time it was actually held in, well, Africa.
Those firsts reflect a growing sense in Washington that it has to shift its approach and start engaging with African militaries on more equal footing, particularly as competition across the continent with adversaries such as Russia and China heats up.
Eating humble pie. This new realization comes after the United States faced an embarrassing setback for its presence in the Sahel region of West Africa, as brittle and mostly autocratic governments with which the United States had partnered on counterterrorism were one-by-one toppled in a spate of coups.
Niger, at one point, was the last U.S. partner standing (complete with a $100 million U.S.-built air base), until its government, too, fell to a coup last year. Now Niger’s new ruling junta has ordered the United States to withdraw all troops after a botched U.S. diplomatic effort to salvage ties, opting instead to boost its partnership with Russia. Russian troops have already started moving in to parts of those same bases that the United States still also occupies as it carries out its withdrawal.
All the while, terrorist groups have gained ground across the Sahel. The terrorism threat “very much has increased across the region and now is at the cusp of affecting coastal West Africa,” Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. Africa Command, told reporters in a briefing on Thursday. “The bottom-line answer is it is less safe. But our way forward is to engage with these countries [and] identify what their needs are in which they will lead an enduring solution.”
But not enough rethinking. The problem, analysts and independent experts say, is that there’s not enough soul-searching going on in Washington now about its counterterrorism record in Africa. Africom has achieved notable tactical successes—including the successful evacuation of U.S. personnel from Sudan as the country erupted into civil war in April 2023 and the killing of top Islamic State and al-Shabab leaders in Somalia in separate operations last year.
But the United States can boast no wider strategic successes, experts say. Somalia remains an oft-forgotten miniaturized forever war, reeling from instability and chronic terrorism threats despite decades of U.S. military operations with a roughly $2.5 billion price tag. The withdrawal from Niger represents a stark failure of its own and one the Kremlin was all too happy to seize on.
“Moscow basically beat us for pennies on the dollar in the Sahel, and we need to really assess just how badly things went wrong,” said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Follow the money. Part of the problem is how the United States allocates money to military engagement versus diplomacy and development across Africa. As always, it’s the Pentagon that gets the big money, with the cash-strapped State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development struggling to catch up.
“It’s fair to argue that despite all the soft-power stuff we try to do on democracy promotion and development, all of that pales in comparison to what we do on the [counterterrorism] front,” said Cameron Hudson, an expert on U.S.-Africa ties at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Pentagon fundamentally ignores the kind of signal effect it sends in terms of what’s important to us when we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on [counterterrorism] versus a few million, maybe, on democracy and governance issues.”
Now seeking new friends. Brown, in Botswana, made clear that the United States is shopping for new partners in West Africa to reestablish a U.S. military footprint in the region after being booted out of Niger. He said there were some interested buyers but didn’t name any country specifically.
“There [are] other countries in the region where we already have either small presence or have relationships,” Brown told reporters. “Part of this is looking at how we continue to build on those relationships, which may provide opportunities for us to posture some of the capabilities we had in Niger in some of those locations.”
Following the recent European Parliament elections, Ursula von der Leyen, António Costa, and Kaja Kallas are expected to get the most senior positions at the European Commission, European Council, and foreign-policy service, according to Politico Europe.
Outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been unanimously appointed as NATO’s next secretary-general by all 32 members of the alliance. Rutte will take over the job on Oct. 1, relieving Jens Stoltenberg, who has been in the role for a decade.
Also in Brussels, Carmen Romero, NATO’s deputy assistant secretary-general for public diplomacy, is moving across the hall to serve as director of security policy in the alliance’s political affairs and security policy division.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has selected Derek Chollet, the State Department’s counselor, to serve as his new chief of staff, replacing Kelly Magsamen, who is stepping down at the end of the month.
Chollet is also the nominee for the Pentagon’s top policy job, but his nomination has been stalled by Senate Republicans over his role in the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Tom Sullivan will take over Chollet’s job at the State Department.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has fired the commander of the country’s joint forces, Lt. Gen. Yuriy Sodol, after his subordinate officers alleged that Ukraine had lost dozens of cities and thousands of soldiers under his watch. Ukrainian Brig. Gen. Andriy Hnatov has been appointed to replace Sodol.
Over in think tank land, Elizabeth Dent is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy focused on the Gulf states, Iraq, and Syria. She was previously a director for the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Future-proofing the diplomatic corps. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine has introduced legislation to try to prevent the deepening politicization of the State Department by requiring that the bulk of the department’s top posts go to career professional diplomats.
The Ambassador Oversight and Transparency Act is part of a growing wave of efforts by lawmakers to prevent political appointees from taking a larger slice of the pie of plumb ambassador posts and powerful assistant secretary positions back in Washington. The United States is the only developed country in the world where presidents put deep-pocketed political campaign donors in major ambassador posts, even if those donors don’t have any prior diplomatic or national security experience. (Both Democratic and Republican administrations do this.) The ratio of political appointees has increased in recent years, leaving career diplomats less opportunity for career growth.
“I do think people are becoming more aware of the need for high-quality appointees, as we’re watching what Russia and China do,” Kaine, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told SitRep in a recent interview. “We’ve had hearings before where we’ve asked the nominee if they’ve ever even been to the country and the answer was no.”
Kaine said his new bill “wouldn’t be a guarantee against an unqualified person” being nominated to senior State Department posts, “but it would be a guardrail.”
Washington kicks out Kaspersky. The Russia-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has been effectively banned in the United States, as the Commerce Department banned the sales of its products and the Treasury Department put sanctions on 12 of its executives. The Commerce Department concluded that Kaspersky’s links to Russia and its potential to aid the Russian government in misusing U.S. user data present an “unacceptable national security risk.”
Kaspersky lambasted the U.S. decision in a statement, saying it was “based on the present geopolitical climate and theoretical concerns, rather than on a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of Kaspersky’s products and services.”—Rishi Iyengar
Taiwan comes to town. A large Taiwanese industry delegation visited Washington this week, including hundreds of companies and new Economic Affairs Minister Kuo Jyh-huei. They are here for SelectUSA, the Commerce Department’s annual conference dedicated to drumming up foreign direct investment, but the trip had geopolitical undertones as well, as the United States and Taiwan look to strengthen economic ties and cooperation on strategically important technologies as competition against China heats up.
Alexander Yui, the island’s new representative to the United States, said Taiwanese investments in the United States surged 790 percent last year, largely driven by a $65 billion plan by semiconductor giant TSMC to build chip factories in Arizona.—Rishi Iyengar
When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Ukrainian cybersecurity professional Yegor Aushev put out a call online asking for volunteers to help defend Ukraine’s systems from Russian cyberattacks. He got more than 1,000 volunteers in 48 hours. More than two years on, Aushev’s company, Cyber Unit Technologies, has built a training platform used by Ukrainians to boost their cyber-resilience by simulating Russian attack scenarios.
Foreign Policy sat down with Aushev and his co-founder, Ole Dubnov, when they visited Washington. Here are some takeaways from the conversation (edited for length and clarity):
On Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine:
Yegor Aushev: In the first quarter of 2024, we saw two times as many cyberattacks on Ukraine from Russia in comparison with the first quarter of 2023. So they’ve started to attack more, and they attack a lot of commercial sector entities and local authorities, not only military or government.
On Russian cybertactics:
YA: At the beginning, I would say we were surprised that they are not as organized as we expected in terms of technical knowledge. We hadn’t fought them directly before, but when we met them in the same systems that we were protecting and they were attacking, we understood that they are not so scary. At the same time, they’ve become more and more organized.
On how the United States and others can learn from Ukraine’s experiences:
YA: We are more than happy to share our experience of fighting in cyberwar with our partners. It should be mutually beneficial. It should be a win-win solution because we cannot always be like a little brother asking for pocket money. We should be a reliable partner.
Ole Dubnov: Look at Ukraine as a template of what works, and then use this template. Don’t reinvent the wheel in Asia, don’t reinvent the wheel in Africa—just build the ecosystem how it was done in Ukraine because it was done under live-fire conditions.
Thursday, June 27: U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. President Donald Trump participate in the first presidential debate of the U.S. election campaign.
The European Council holds a two-day leaders’ summit in Brussels, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to sign security guarantees with the EU.
Friday, June 28: Iran holds early presidential elections following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May. Mongolia holds legislative elections.
Sunday, June 30: France holds snap parliamentary elections, with the far-right National Rally party expected to pick up seats over French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party and centrist allies. (Macron’s job is not at stake.)
Thursday, July 4: The United Kingdom holds elections. The Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, is widely expected to win back power from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives.
“Everybody who is watching this debate is just a complete masochist. … But that’s just American politics right now.”
—Tricia McLaughlin, a former senior advisor to former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, to Politico on the upcoming presidential debate between Trump and Biden.