Niger Orders American Exit

Happy Thursday! The United States is now the 23rd happiest country in the world, according to the annual World Happiness Report, falling out of the top 20 in the global index for the first time due largely to discontented Americans in their twenties. 

But nobody bothered to talk to any members of the Morning Dispatch team—the cheeriest 20-somethings around—when they were compiling the data. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Federal Reserve on Wednesday held its benchmark interest rate steady—at a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent—following a higher-than-expected inflation reading earlier this month. “We know that reducing policy restraint too soon or too much could result in a reversal of the progress we have seen on inflation and ultimately require even tighter policy to get inflation back to 2 percent,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters following the decision. The stock market rallied, however, after updated projections from the central bank showed a majority of Federal Open Markets Committee members forecasting three rate cuts in 2024.
• The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule on Wednesday limiting vehicle tailpipe emissions in an effort to push manufacturers toward electric vehicles. The new regulations target light-duty vehicles—like cars and SUVs—and require manufacturers to limit how many pollutants cars in model years 2027-2032 can emit. The rule, while aggressive, is less stringent than the agency’s original April 2023 proposal, which would have required some 60 percent of all vehicles in the 2030 model year to be electric. The final rule issued this week, however, would likely see some 30 to 40 percent of the 2030 pool be EVs, depending on the level of emissions from the other cars in the model year.
• A State Department spokesperson announced Wednesday that the agency is organizing daily helicopter flights out of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to evacuate American citizens to the neighboring Dominican Republic as the situation in the violence-plagued Caribbean country continues to deteriorate. According to the spokesperson, more than 30 people will be able to leave the capital every day, and 15 people were airlifted on Wednesday. On Sunday, a government-chartered flight from the northern city of Cap-Haitien brought 37 Americans back to the United States. 
• North Korean state media claimed Wednesday that the country had successfully tested a new solid-fuel engine for hypersonic missiles capable of reaching U.S. targets in the region, like Guam or Alaska. The reported test came just a day after North Korea fired ballistic missiles off its east coast during Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Seoul, South Korea.
• Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar unexpectedly announced his resignation on Wednesday—one year ahead of planned elections—as his party, Fine Gael, polls poorly against nationalist party Sinn Féin. “I believe this government can be re-elected and my party can gain seats,” he said. “But after careful consideration and soul searching, I believe a new [prime minister] and leader will be better placed to do that.” He will officially step down when his party selects a new leader in April but plans to continue to serve as a member of parliament for his constituency.
• Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong resigned on Wednesday, just a year after he was first elected to the role. The Vietnamese Communist Party, which controls the country, said in a statement accepting his resignation that Thuong had violated party rules—though the statement did not specify his offenses. Thuong’s resignation from the largely ceremonial role comes amid an anti-graft campaign that forced his predecessor’s ouster last year. 
• Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the trial in Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’ sprawling racketeering case against former President Donald Trump, granted Trump and his co-defendants permission to appeal his recent decision allowing Willis to stay on as prosecutor despite her longtime romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the former special prosecutor on the case. Trump’s lawyers now have 10 days to file an appeal with the Georgia Court of Appeals, which will have 45 days to decide whether to take it up. In the meantime, “The Court intends to continue addressing the many other unrelated pending pretrial motions,” McAfee wrote in his order.

‘There Are No Winners in This’

U.S. State Department and Pentagon officials traveled to Niamey, the capital of Niger, last week for talks with the West African nation’s ruling military junta. The delegation’s stated goal was to “continue ongoing discussions” on the resumption of American security cooperation with the Nigerien military and putting the country back on a path toward democratic governance.

We wish we could have been a fly on the wall for those conversations, because they apparently did not go very well. Fewer than four days after the trip concluded, Col. Maj. Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for the military government, went on state television to announce the end of Niger’s security pact with the United States.

“The government of Niger, taking into account the aspirations and interests of its people, revokes, with immediate effect, the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees,” Abdramane said Saturday. The declaration throws into limbo the status of both the remaining 1,000 American troops and military personnel in Niger and a key airbase in which the U.S. has invested more than $100 million to support counterterrorism operations across the region.

Less than a year ago, Niger represented a bastion of democracy in the Sahel—a strip of semi-arid land south of the Sahara Desert also known as the “coup belt” for its frequent military takeovers—and remained one of the West’s last security partner in the region. But that status came to an end in July, when a group of military officers ousted the democratically elected Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum in a classic coup. As we wrote last last summer: 

The new junta puts the U.S. and France in a challenging position. Both countries have bet big on Niger as a security partner to stem the tide of Islamist violence in the region. Approximately 1,100 American and 1,500 French troops are currently stationed in the country. U.S. Special Forces have trained and advised the Nigerien commandos on counterinsurgency missions, and the country hosts a large U.S. drone base that is “important for U.S. intelligence gathering in the broader Sahel region,” Chris Faulkner, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, [told TMD] (speaking in his own personal capacity). The French forces partner even more actively, conducting combat missions alongside the Nigerien military. (The European Union, Germany, and Italy also maintain smaller military presences in the country).

In eight months since they took over, the officers revoked Niger’s security pact with the European Union and ousted all French troops from the country. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a key 15-country bloc in the region, imposed sanctions on Niger in the aftermath of the coup and initially told the putschists to stand down within a week or face a military intervention. But the alliance didn’t follow through on its threat to use force and eventually lifted the sanctions last month in an attempt to restart dialogue with the junta.

The U.S. initially explored diplomatic options to restore democratic order in Niger, but formally declared the takeover a coup in October, legally preventing the U.S. from providing the new regime with security assistance. Still, American officials wanted to avoid the sharp break that the French experienced. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee met with the junta—dubbed the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Homeland (CNSP)—late last year to discuss renewed ties. “In our discussions, I confirmed the intent of the United States to resume security and development cooperation in phases, reciprocally as the CNSP takes actions,” Phee said at a press conference in Niamey in December.

Last week’s follow-up visit—led by Phee and Gen. Michael Langley, the leader of U.S. Africa Command—appeared to backfire. Abdramane condemned what he described as U.S. officials’ “condescending” approach to the conversations, saying, “This attitude is likely to undermine the quality of our centuries-old relations and undermine the trust between our two governments.”

Pentagon officials said earlier this week they’re still determining the implications of the decision from Niger’s leaders, including whether U.S. military personnel will be forced to leave the country. “We are aware of the March 16th statement by CNSP announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said on Monday. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification. These are ongoing discussions.”

“We want to see our partnership continue if there is a pathway forward,” she added.

Singh described the conversations as “direct and frank,” and disclosed that the delegation raised concerns about Niger’s growing ties to Russia and Iran. The Wall Street Journal had reported on Sunday that U.S. officials accused Niger of considering an agreement to sell uranium to Iran, and Abdramane’s statement alluded to the discussion. “The government of Niger regrets the desire of the American delegation to deny the Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and the types of partnerships capable of helping them truly fight against terrorists,” he said. 

Some experts in the region have criticized the Biden administration’s approach to the junta as bifurcated and misguided. “We’ve got two heads,” Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst who specializes in African security issues, told TMD. “One head is thinking about democracy and values; the other head is thinking [about] realism. Because we can’t make up our mind … we end up cutting the baby in half and really accomplishing nothing. We’re neither promoting democracy nor doing that super realist thing, which is making friends with these juntas and winning them over.” 

If the CNSP makes good on its announcement, the U.S. military would lose access to bases crucial for combating terrorist groups in the region—including the Islamic State in the Sahel and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin. The U.S. maintains two air bases in Niger: one located in Niamey and another larger facility, Air Base 201, in the northern part of the country that provides drone surveillance for counterterrorism operations. 

“Up until the coup last year, [in] the first half of 2023, Niger had the lowest level of jihadist violence that it had had since 2018,” J. Peter Pham, a former U.S. Special Envoy for the Sahel, told TMD. The decline in violence, according to Pham, was “because of the base, because of the intelligence, the surveillance, the reconnaissance that was taking place there, as well as the training of the Nigerien Special Forces.”

With both the French and American security forces no longer working with Niger’s military, the country risks a resurgence in violence and terrorist activity similar to what Mali and Burkina Faso experienced after their coup leaders ousted Western forces. “This decision will likely result in Russia and China being invited to fill the security void, and terrorist groups like ISIS-Sahel and Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin will expand their territorial control,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Mike McCaul said in a statement on Sunday. 

And the consequences don’t stop with Niger. The Office of Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment released last month warned that the instability in Niger and throughout the Sahel “raises the likelihood that these crises will metastasize and spillover to neighboring countries in Coastal West Africa in 2024.” 

Pham agreed. “If Niger starts to go the way of Mali and Burkina Faso,” he told TMD, “then that just increases the font along which the extremists can spill over into the coast.” 

But the Pentagon is not planning an imminent withdrawal from Niger while the diplomatic discussions remain ongoing. “Hopefully, this is the opening gambit in a renegotiation of the relationship,” Pham said, “and that calmer heads on both sides have an opportunity to rethink what both sides would lose in a break. There are no winners in this.”

Worth Your Time

• How did critiques of “late-stage capitalism” replace screeds against “The Man” in popular discourse? And what is the actual meaning of those ubiquitous complaints? “If there’s one unifying theme here, it’s that capitalism is not an economic model in these gripes—not really,” Jeremiah Johnson wrote in American Purpose. “It’s more of a blame-the-system impulse. People are either mad at the state of things, or they at least want to signal that they are. It feels sophisticated to blame ‘capitalism’ (or ‘America’ or ‘individualism’), and it’s less work than actually deep diving into the guts of policy and figuring out the specific steps needed to correct the issue. Easier to blame late-stage capitalism, completely blind to the irony that people have been talking about ‘late capitalism’ for around 100 years. Late capitalism was a term before our grandparents were born, and there will still be people talking about it when our grandchildren are old. There are of course a few lonely souls who can actually define capitalism correctly and make coherent arguments about it. Rare as they may be, some people actually are writing detailed critiques of capitalism as an economic system. Good for them, even if I think they tend to be wrong more often than right. I hope they keep going. But that’s not the typical way this argument goes. The typical way it goes is basically two words: ‘Ugh, capitalism.’ There’s no escaping this, not until we have another generational shift and complaining about capitalism becomes as culturally passé as complaining about The Man Keeping You Down. It’s likely that as capitalism replaced The Man, some other boogeyman-societal-force will replace capitalism a few decades from now. In the meantime, we should at least notice the pattern.”

Presented Without Comment

New York Post: John Hinckley Jr., Who Once Tried to Kill Ronald Reagan, Claims He is a Victim of ‘Cancel Culture’ After Concert Nixed

Also Presented Without Comment

ESPN: Dodgers Fire Shohei Ohtani’s Interpreter Amid Allegation of ‘Massive Theft’

The Los Angeles Dodgers interpreter for Shohei Ohtani was fired Wednesday afternoon after questions surrounding at least $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from Ohtani’s bank account to a bookmaking operation set off a series of events.

Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime friend and interpreter for Ohtani, incurred the gambling debts to a Southern California bookmaking operation that is under federal investigation, multiple sources told ESPN. How he came to lose his job started with reporters asking questions about the wire transfers.

Initially, a spokesman for Ohtani told ESPN the slugger had transferred the funds to cover Mizuhara’s gambling debt. The spokesman presented Mizuhara to ESPN for a 90-minute interview Tuesday night, during which Mizuhara laid out his account in great detail. However, as ESPN prepared to publish the story Wednesday, the spokesman disavowed Mizuhara’s account and said Ohtani’s lawyers would issue a statement.

“In the course of responding to recent media inquiries, we discovered that Shohei has been the victim of a massive theft, and we are turning the matter over to the authorities,” read the statement from Berk Brettler LLP.

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Axios: Melania Trump on Future 2024 Campaign Trail Appearances: “Stay Tuned” 

Toeing the Company Line

• Final reminder: The deadline for entering our March Madness bracket pool is this morning! To join, click here (you will need a free ESPN account) and select “Join Group.” The password is “TMD2K24!” Anyone is invited to participate, but if you want to be eligible for prizes—including a Lifetime Membership to The Dispatch, a TMD mug, or a gift card to The Dispatch’s merch store—you must a) be an active paying Dispatch member on or before March 21, 2024, and b) fill out this form so we can connect you with your ESPN entry. Help us push the pool size to more than 1,000 entries!

• In the newsletters: Drucker and Mike recapped the Ohio Senate primary and provided an update on RFK Jr.’s efforts to get on the ballot, Scott explained (🔒) what we should make of the potential for a glut of Chinese imports, Nick took a closer look (🔒) at the importance of Tuesday’s primary results, and Jonah mused on (🔒) “bloodbaths” and Biden from a La Quinta Inn parking lot in Maryland.
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David dive into the battle over immigration law in Texas on Advisory Opinions, and Jonah is joined on The Remnant by Tim Carney to discuss the travails of raising kids in modern America.
• On the site: John Hart responds to The Dispatch’s recent editorial and argues there’s a lot the 70 percent who don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch can do to make our politics sane again. Plus, Sahar Soleimany reviews Arash Azizi’s book, What Iranians Want, on the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement. 

Let Us Know

What do you think is driving the United States’ downgrade in the latest global happiness index?