Security

Jakarta. Southeast Asian leaders will begin meetings today against a backdrop of ongoing disputes over territory in the South China Sea, a lack of progress in resolving the security crisis in Myanmar, and heightening tensions between the U.S. and China. To Indonesia’s disappointment, U.S. President Joe Biden will not be attending the Jakarta meeting; Vice President Kamala Harris, who is attending instead, is expected to use the trip to burnish her foreign policy credentials.

Sochi. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow was close to launching a grain deal that would secure exports to six African countries in the next few weeks, but a potential grain corridor to other parts of the world was not so clear. The announcement came during a meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been trying to persuade Putin to renew grain arrangements with Ukraine since Russia pulled out of an Ankara-brokered plan in July.

Istanbul. Turkey and Japan will announce a partnership to help rebuild Ukraine once the war is over, Nikkei reported. The plan is to marry Turkey’s construction capabilities with Japan’s financial and technological prowess. Turkish and Japanese contractors have already secured separate contracts to help reconstruct critical infrastructure in Ukraine, but the planned collaboration will focus specifically on energy, transportation, and health care projects.

— Karina

Niger crisis drives wedge between US and France

THE NEWS

The wave of coups d’états sweeping Africa is fueling a rift between the world’s “oldest allies”: France and the U.S.

The toppling in late July of Niger’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, is being met with starkly different responses from Paris and Washington that could have major ramifications for Africa as a whole. French President Emmanuel Macron is openly backing calls by the West African regional bloc ECOWAS to potentially use military force to restore Bazoum and allow France to maintain 1,500 troops in its former colony. The Biden administration, conversely, has dispatched multiple envoys to Niger’s capital of Niamey in recent weeks, including a new ambassador, to engage the junta and seek a diplomatic solution, citing the regional instability military operations could bring.

The White House, unlike France, has refused to call the military intervention in Niger a “coup” and on Friday again said it believed there was still a diplomatic path forward. The administration’s statement came just two days after soldiers took power in another former French colony, Gabon — the eighth coup in Central and West Africa since 2020.

“We’re still pursuing what we believe to be potentially viable diplomatic solutions here to see that democratic institutions are respected in both countries,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

Macron, meanwhile, is engaged in a growing war of words with Niger’s mutineers that’s unnerving Washington. Niamey’s junta is seeking to expel both France’s military contingent there and its ambassador, both actions that could draw a French response. “I speak every day to President Bazoum. We support him,” Macron said on Friday. “We do not recognize those who carried out the putsch. The decisions we will take, whatever they may be, will be based upon exchanges with Bazoum.”

The French leader also seemed to belittle Niger and other former French colonies last week during speeches and media appearances. He told a French magazine that Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger all would have been overrun by Islamist militants if Paris didn’t deploy counter-terrorism troops there in recent decades. Without France’s military operations in the Sahel region “there would probably no longer be a Mali … Burkina Faso, and I’m not sure there would still be Niger,” he said.

JAY’S VIEW

America’s alliance with France traces back to the 1700s and the colonies’ revolt against the British crown. But Washington and Paris often pursue differing positions on key geopolitical and security issues, as recent history shows.

Macron’s government has tussled with the Biden administration on Asia. France was stunned in 2021 when the U.S. upended a French submarine sale to Australia by announcing Washington’s own strategic initiative to jointly build submersibles with Canberra and London as a way to compete with China in the Pacific. Macron later met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2023 and announced that Europe needed to maintain “strategic autonomy” from Washington and not get dragged into any war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan.

The U.S. has historically deferred to France in Africa, given Paris’s colonial history and economic and military influence in regions like the Sahel. But the reversal of France’s counter-terrorism operations in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in recent years is changing Washington’s calculations. Military coups in all three countries have driven out, or are driving out, French counter-terrorism forces. And the Biden administration is concerned that China, Russia, or Islamist forces could fill the void. Moscow’s mercenary Wagner Group has publicly cheered on Niger’s putschists.

The anti-French sentiment that’s driven the overthrow of Bazoum is emerging as another humiliating blow to French interests in Africa. But Washington has different interests in the country. The Pentagon has made Niger its key center for counter-terrorism operations in the Sahel. It has two drone bases there from which it targets al Qaeda-linked affiliates. This includes $100 million invested in a facility in the central Nigerien town of Agadez.

“Of course, what we hope for is that we have a peaceful diplomatic solution to this and we don’t have to leave,” the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, Gen. James Hacker, told reporters last month. The Pentagon maintains roughly 1,000 soldiers there and in Niamey.

Read the whole story here.

Dennis Wilder served as Senior Director for East Asian Affairs in President George W. Bush’s National Security Council from 2005 to 2009. He’s currently a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.

A highly scrutinized former Central Intelligence operative came in from the cold last weekend.

The U.S. government is currently investigating Kevin Chalker and his firm, Global Risk Advisors, over allegations that they engaged in hacking operations on behalf of the government of Qatar. (Semafor reported last month the State Department’s role in the probe.) Chalker and his legal team have denied the charges. And on Saturday he offered a thorough accounting and defense of his personal history in the Swiss German-language newspaper, Tages-Anzeiger, in which he delved surprisingly deep into his years in the spy world.

Chalker, 51, revealed what he said were his extensive efforts to combat Iran’s nuclear program. A participant in a CIA operation called “Brain Drain,” he said he traveled to the Middle East to convince senior members of Iran’s nuclear program to defect. His operation then exfiltrated them and their families and brought them to safety in the United States. “I was the only officer to meet individuals from all three generations of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons production program,” Chalker is quoted saying in a lengthy question-and-answer segment. “We prevented Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.”

I’ve extensively written about Iran’s nuclear program over the past decade, and it’s extremely rare for someone from the intelligence world to recount in such detail the shadow war against Tehran. An attorney for Chalker declined to comment on Monday about the accuracy of the article. But it’s safe to say that Chalker’s former opponents in Tehran will be studying it. 

— Jay

The number of days Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen working for the European Union, has been imprisoned in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for alleged espionage. Six people with firsthand knowledge of Floderus’ case denied that he had any involvement in spying.

— Karina

⋉ ADVANCE: Targeting exports. American and European officials will press the United Arab Emirates to halt shipments of dual-use products like computer chips and electronics that could be used to fuel Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported, amid concerns that Western-made goods are being sent to Moscow via Abu Dhabi.

⋊ RETREAT: Targeting mishaps. Ukraine claims that at least one Russian attack drone crashed into Romania overnight Monday, adding that it’s not the first time such an incident has occurred across its borders. Bucahrest, which is a NATO member, denied the Ukrainian account.

— Karina

Ukraine Defense Minister Designate Rustem Umerov

Ukraine’s next defense minister will need to advance his country’s counter-offensive against Russian forces. But to succeed, Rustem Umerov will have to excel as both a diplomat and a corruption fighter.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Umerov, 41, on Sunday to lead Ukraine’s defense ministry following an eclectic career that has included stints as a politician, businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He still needs parliamentary approval, but Umerov is another Crimean Tatar set to serve in the top rungs of Kyiv’s government. The Muslim ethnic group has historically controlled the Crimean Peninsula, and Umerov’s elevation is seen as a symbolic sign of Zelenskyy’s determination to wrest control of the territory from the Kremlin. “Mr. Umerov doesn’t need any additional introductions,” Zelenskyy said on Sunday during the announcement.

Umerov served as a key emissary for Zelenskyy during the early stages of the Ukraine war. He was sent to Belarus to negotiate with Russian diplomats shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded in February 2022. One of Umerov’s interlocutors at the time — the Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich — developed symptoms that were viewed as consistent with poisoning, raising the prospect that both men were targeted in a Kremlin assassination plot. Umerov downplayed the prospects of subterfuge and focused on other diplomatic missions. The American-educated official negotiated the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Turkey, which for a time allowed Ukraine to circumvent a Russia blockade and sell wheat on global markets.

Umerov will need to continue to harness his diplomatic skills in the defense ministry. His predecessor, Oleksiy Reznikov, was extremely successful at lobbying the U.S. and Europe to send advanced weapons systems to Ukraine, including anti-aircraft batteries and F-16 fighter jets. Kyiv is currently seeking to obtain from the U.S. ATACMS, which are long-range missiles that could give Ukraine the ability to more easily strike Russian territory.

Opposition is also simmering in the U.S. Congress to aiding Ukraine, in part, because of concerns about corruption. Umerov’s second key mandate will be to try and root out this malfeasance that’s been found in both the Ukrainian military’s procurement process and its mobilization of soldiers. One scandal that’s rocked Kyiv has focused on evidence some Ukrainians have been paying bribes to the government to avoid being drafted.

• The gerontocratic nature of U.S. government is back in the spotlight. But in many other parts of the world, politicians are actually getting younger.
• Why the Gabon coup is different from other military African takeovers.
• African governments are clamping down on TikTok over “inappropriate content.”