Caught between climate change, migration, and social upheaval, Niger and the Sahel are the crucible of Western failure.
Almost 30 years ago, in the February 1994 issue of The Atlantic, I wrote a lengthy cover story, “The Coming Anarchy,” that ended with these words: “The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an expanding desert. The real news wasn’t at the White House, I realised. It was right below.” In fact, the Rabin-Arafat handshake led to a peace process, the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine, that ultimately collapsed; whereas my main contention in “The Coming Anarchy,” that the Earth’s natural environment, including drought and desertification, would emerge as “the national-security issue” of the 21st century, has been vindicated. Though now it goes by the term “climate change.”
Whereas the opinion pages of the 1990s, both liberal and conservative, were obsessed with the ideal of democracy shaping the post-Cold War world, I concentrated on how the increasing lack of underground water and nutrients in overused soils would, in indirect ways, inflame existing ethnic, religious, and tribal divides. This factor, merged with an ever-growing number of young males in economically and politically fragile societies, would amplify the possibility of extremism and violent conflict. Natural forces were at work, I wrote, that would intensify political instability: if not necessarily everywhere, then certainly in the world’s least governable zones. The most benighted parts of West Africa were a microcosm, albeit in exaggerated form, of the turmoil to come around the globe. Africa certainly had something to teach us.
Indeed, the countries of the Sahel region of Africa, which a recent coup in Niger threatens to unravel, are afflicted by the demons of water scarcity and abnormally high temperatures. Women give birth there an average of six times during their lifetimes. Over 40 percent of Niger’s population lives in extreme poverty, with the result being high levels of forced migration, even as refugees stream over into Niger from conflicts in neighboring countries. This is why the concept of “climate wars” is an oversimplification.
The current situation in the Sahel is a culmination of multiple factors that have been brewing for decades: ecological degradation, economic hardship, a population boom, and political instability. The recent coup in Niger is just the latest sign that the West’s efforts to impose democracy in such a fragile region have often exacerbated the very problems they sought to solve. While the West pushes for democratic reforms, it is increasingly clear that such interventions, disconnected from the region’s realities, may cause more harm than good.
As I wrote in the 1990s, and as events have borne out, the real issue in many parts of Africa is not ideological but ecological. Climate change, combined with economic despair, creates fertile ground for extremism and political collapse. This reality is only now starting to be recognized by the West, as it confronts a series of failed interventions and an intensifying crisis in the Sahel.
The West’s ideological commitment to democracy in Africa, if not adapted to local conditions, risks becoming a tool for further destabilization. The growing influence of non-Western powers like Russia and China, which offer pragmatic support rather than ideological preaching, underscores the failure of the West’s approach. The future of the Sahel may well depend on a shift from democratic dogma to a more realistic, region-specific strategy for stability, one that addresses the root causes of conflict rather than merely responding to its symptoms.
