Out of Africa? Two Cheers for Secretary of Defense Esper

As President Trump finishes his third year in office, all the establishment near-hysteria about his purported “America First” foreign policy has been matched by little evidence of real change.

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Yet news emerged last week that suggests a limited U.S. military retrenchment may finally be in the offing. The New York Times reported on December 24 that Defense Secretary Mark Esper is considering a major reduction, or even a complete pullout, of U.S. troops from West Africa. Further reviews and drawdowns in Latin America, Iraq, and Afghanistan are also possible.

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The U.S. mission in West Africa, much of it in the hands of special operations forces, has included counter-terrorism, drones, and the advising and training of local forces battling insurgents in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. Boko Haram, the most prominent of these groups, kidnaps schoolgirls, murders thousands, and has pledged allegiance to ISIS. But Esper’s team is rightly asking what threat, if any, do African bush wars pose to Americans on U.S. soil. This question is long overdue—and it could also be asked of the Taliban, Somalia’s al Shabaab, and the ISIS remnants in the Levant.

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The most unhinged hawks can’t even bother to keep up with the details of U.S. overreach. Following the death of four American soldiers in Niger in October 2017, Senator Lindsey Graham confessed to NBC that he didn’t know America had 1,000 troops there.

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Esper came to the job with a standard upper tier Beltway military industrial complex resume, albeit leavened with combat service as an Army infantry officer in Operation Desert Storm. After a decade in the Army, he spent time at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Prior to taking over the Pentagon, Esper was the Vice President for Government Relations at Raytheon. No radical reformer he.

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Esper is laser-focused on great power competition, and especially on China. Unlike many with a 202 phone number, he seems to grasp that American power is not unlimited. The United States needs to prioritize and divest its military of non-essential (to say nothing of unachievable) missions.

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Mark Esper is a Beltway insider with, as best one can determine, wholly conventional foreign policy views. A revolutionary he is not. But with 200,000 U.S. troops deployed around the world, many of them engaged in pointless armed nation building, even a limited dose of realism and prioritization is welcome news indeed. Two cheers for Mark Esper.