U.S. hands over $110m base to Niger junta to release 1,000 U.S. Army hostages, watches

Joe Biden is a lucky bungler.

With no Fox News cameras around and nobody paying much attention to what was going on in Niger, a disgraceful, utterly humiliating exit of the U.S. military from that benighted country now led by a military junta, has dealt the U.S. another strategic blow, and entirely preventably. The crummy little tinpot junta now running Niger has managed to kick Uncle Sam around, much as the Taliban and Iran did, creating an accumulating pattern of lost U.S. influence. And sure enough, they got us good, because Joe Biden let them.

According to the New York Times:

More than 1,000 American military personnel will leave Niger in the coming months, Biden administration officials said on Friday, upending U.S. counterterrorism and security policy in the tumultuous Sahel region of Africa.

In the second of two meetings this week in Washington, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt M. Campbell told Niger’s prime minister, Ali Lamine Zeine, that the United States disagreed with the country’s turn toward Russia for security and Iran for a possible deal on its uranium reserves, and the failure of Niger’s military government to map out a path to return to democracy, according to a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic talks.

The decision was not a particular surprise. Niger said last month that it was revoking its military cooperation deal with the United States following a highly contentious set of meetings in Niger’s capital, Niamey, with a high-level American diplomatic and military delegation.

The base was a critical node in the U.S. war on al-Qaida, ISIS, and all their evil little allies operating terrorist operations from the northern African region. Niger had been the U.S.’s bigfoot footprint in that region and its value was incalculable.

With that the baseline reality, some of the self-righteous karens at the State Department decided that now was just the time to lecture and hector Niger’s mirrored-sunglass coup leaders about ‘democracy,’ as if that place ever had any idea about the concept.

The coup leaders didn’t take it well, and ordered the U.S. out. To make matters worse, they held 1,000 U.S. servicemen hostage in the desert without water or food for weeks, as the U.S. attempted to hold on, until this past week when the U.S. agreed to fork over the brand-new state-of-art U.S. $110 million military base there just so we could get our servicemembers out. And to make it worse, they decided to hand it over to Russia.

The Times also notes that on Niger’s famous yellowcake front, they’ve decided to give access to that to Iran, which has lots of money from President Obama’s and Joe Biden’s release of impounded Iranian cash along with big nuclear ambitions. Niger’s coup leaders would probably like a slice of that for themselves, and the uranium they exchange it for will supply the missing magic to advance Iran’s evil plans.

Who the heck was behind this disaster, who couldn’t figure out that hot-from-a-coup coup leaders preening in their military uniforms might just take a ‘democracy’ diktat pretty badly? Who got into the screaming match instead of treated these characters with kid gloves as a national security matter? Who failed to forecast that they’d react the way they did?

And aside from the huge loss of military presence and the expensive base in the desert, now to be enjoyed by Russians expanding their footprint to west Africa, who is responsible for this horrific loss of U.S. influence? This roughly creates a second stepping stone of influence for Russia, which got the first lilypad in in Syria, when Obama drew his red line and turned tail, while this gives them a second base of influence. Advantage: Russia. Disadvantage: The U.S.

And how very embarrassing that they achieved their aim of taking the U.S. base through holding U.S. troops effectively hostage? Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has lots more links and background about this disgraceful Biden special, which has become a feature, not a bug, of his foreign policy.

While few in the U.S. pay much attention to Niger, you can bet our enemies do, as well as most educated European audiences, who aren’t that far from the place anyway.  They see the humiliation, they readjust their expectations, and Biden just hopes nobody in the voting public in the states notices.

Well, we’ve noticed, because we’ve seen this show before. It’s time to throw the whole Biden crew out come November, because if we don’t, there will be much more like this to come, as U.S. influence on the global stage shrinks down to nothing and our capacity to fight terrorism will be nil.

Image: Mr. Lechkar, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED