Dope1: The wins. Can’t you see them piling up?
For those who don’t know, that base was used to target ISIS.

And, for the most part, it was a failure.

After the 2016 election in Niger, it began to produce its own militants and its military a significant number of human rights abuses. At a certain point you have to ask yourself, is spending $30 million a year to maintain an ineffective base just throwing good money after bad?

We -- and France -- had killed some jihadist leaders in the region but removing those targets did not fundamentally disrupt the insurgencies.

Add in the increasing difficulty of determining who were the bad guys and who were the good guys, and as France discovered, pretty soon you're striking a wedding party believing the targets were terrorists.

Oops.

Plus, Niger’s government has been the most recent to fall to a coup, in July 2023.

Which further complicates matters: there are restrictions in the region on U.S. assistance to junta-run countries.

And then there's a Congress with a significant number of members who refuse to even consider overseas counterterrorism spending.

For these and other reasons, the U.S. has decided to cut its losses by exploring new drone bases in three nearby coastal countries: Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin.