The United States needs to get way more proactive way more quickly in what is rapidly morphing into a huge crisis in the heart of Africa. Two weeks ago, a military junta suddenly deposed Niger’s pro-American, democratically elected president. The outcome of this coup could set the direction for years to come in a region that is home to critical raw materials, a base for jihadists driven from the Middle East and a source of strategic benefits for Russia. The takeover of Niger threatens to leave Russia with an all-but-complete stranglehold over the Sahel, an almost 1.2 million square mile belt of countries with more than 80 million people stretching from one coast of Africa to the other. Wagner’s Sahel interventions include the Central African Republic and Sudan, and it is burrowing into Burkina Faso as well...Given the stakes, the initial responses by those who support Niger’s ousted president have been ill-considered and anemic. The stakes here for the US and the West are enormous — both in terms of Niger and the broader Sahel region. As the Global Terrorism Index’s 2023 edition points out, the Sahel is now the “epicentre of terrorism,” with the Sahel accounting for more terrorism deaths in 2022 than South Asia, including Afghanistan, the Middle East and North Africa combined. Terror-related deaths in the Sahel constituted 43% of the global total of 6,700 in 2022, a shocking increase from 2007 when they were just 1%.