Close Military Bases, Not Embassies
David Swanson / World BEYOND War

(April 20, 2025) —The Trump clowns are planning to close US embassies in Africa.

Good riddance, right?

Wrong.

They still plan to work on “coordinated counterterrorism operations” and “strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources.”

They also still plan to maintain US military bases across the continent. They’re shutting down all kinds of offices, but not Africom.

Senegal President asks France to close bases in country.

In US culture and media, where it’s one’s duty to pretend that the military budget and everything that goes with it does not exist, one could hardly be blamed for thinking that the closure of embassies actually meant a full departure.

And one could hardly be blamed for thinking this a positive development. Those embassies have steadily been transformed over the decades into weapons dealerships, military sidekicks, and dens of spies. (The CIA may yet point out to Trump how many embassy employees are CIA and make him an offer he can’t refuse.) It’s hard sometimes to imagine other functions.

In fact, in US culture, withdrawing the US military from a place is usually called “isolationism” as if militarism were the only way to interact with people. But that’s the one thing that’s not ending in Africa or anywhere else.

The US government is cutting off all sorts of aid, but not what it calls “military aid” or “defense aid” — meaning the US military giving money and training to other countries’ militaries (never mind all the trainees who do coups). Go here, pick a year, and click on “Department of Defense.”

Most of Africa has been loaded up with US-made weapons, and there’s been no indication of a halt to that (despite the planned closure of the dealerships). Go here and scroll back through the years.

The blue countries below are the ones without US troops:

The red countries below have had US wars or military interventions over the past 80 years:

The red countries below are under illegal US sanctions:

Maintaining the militarism but dropping even the pretense of anything else is not progress.

Ways to relate to people other than through mass slaughter include cooperation on environment, healthcare, migration, and international law; and actual aid. Such approaches can be perverted into “soft power” and used for ulterior purposes. Eliminating them is asking for trouble, for hostility, for misunderstanding, for incapacity to handle any conflict through anything other than bombs and missiles. As everywhere else on Earth, the people of Africa have no widespread interest in competing with Donald Trump’s greedy business interests, but do have an interest in peace.

Comment

C. Rowley — It’s certainly dumb from the standpoint of US interests in trying to control/dominate other countries to vacate some of its embassies but I’m not so sure that it’s clearly a bad thing  for the interests of an African (or any Global South) country under US-Western domination for the imperialist force to reduce its (more nefarious and more effective) use of “soft power diplomacy” while retaining its hard military force in its efforts to maintain control over those foreign countries.
Many US foreign policy mongering imperialists (like Suzanne Nossel, former head of US Amnesty International, who either quit AI or was forced out a year after Ann Wright and I took issue with her and Madeleine Albright’s use of “humanitarianism” pretense to support and laud NATO (i.e. “Keep Up the Good Work” in Afghanistan) understand this.
They say that both “soft power” and “hard military force” are necessary and used most effectively in tandem/combination.  Nossel coined the term “smart power,” to basically describe how “soft power diplomacy” (which tends to ALWAYS be perverted by the spying on, bribery and blackmail manipulation of less powerful or vulnerable foreign officials as well as more slimy economic sanctions and mere threats of military force–all conducted out of US embassies).
The imperialist Think Tank consensus is that the State Dept’s “soft power” is the more effective mode and should almost always suffice for the US to get its way “diplomatically.”
According to “Smart Power,” it’s only when the various forms of “soft power” (which also includes control of media messaging) are not working (and which also includes when the foreign country ceases believing in mere US threats), is military force warranted to make the threats credible via actual use of military force.
So yes, this combination of soft and hard power is considered the “smart” way to advance US interests but I don’t think this necessarily applies for the country or countries being dominated/controlled.