More than eight years after France intervened in Mali to beat back an Islamist insurgency in the former French colony, French President Emmanuel Macron has made it clear he has had enough.
But France is struggling to win American backing for its exit strategy at a time when French public opinion is souring on a distant, open-ended war in defense of a government that has repeatedly failed to make peace with its northern neighbors or to contain a spike in terrorist acts. The French moves come just weeks after Malian officers staged a military coup, the second in less than a year, raising concerns in Paris about the reliability of one of the French government’s most important counterterrorism partners in the region.
