Selective Vision: Power, Principle, and the Sahel

History doesn’t repeat itself by accident. It repeats because power refuses to learn.

What you are about to read is not reactionary politics, nor is it outrage for its own sake. It is pattern recognition—built from history, geopolitics, and the quiet consistency of how empires speak when their influence begins to fracture.

When Emmanuel Macron appeals to the world for unity in defense of Ukraine, the language is crisp and moral. Sovereignty must be protected. Civilians must be shielded. International law must be respected. It is a familiar register—urgent, principled, and universal in tone.

That register changes the moment Africa enters the frame.

For years, France spoke to the Sahel not in the language of rights, but of security—counterterrorism, stabilization, emergency assistance. These words promised order. What followed was something else: widening violence, civilian harm, and a steady erosion of trust. The result was not partnership but rupture. France did not choose to leave Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger; it was pushed out by governments responding to public anger and a collective judgment that French “help” had failed to deliver peace or dignity.

The contradiction sits at the center of Macron’s Africa policy. Assistance arrived like medicine meant to dull pain, never to cure disease. Food relief, medical aid, training missions, and counterterror forces provided temporary relief while leaving intact the structures that produced instability in the first place—economic extraction, political dependency, foreign military architecture, and the hollowing out of local legitimacy. If assistance were working, insecurity would have declined. Instead, it metastasized.

This is why chaos expanded while help increased.

The Sahel became a zone of permanent emergency. Such emergencies are useful. They justify presence, preserve leverage, and keep the calendar forever set to “urgent.” Ending the crisis would have required dismantling the very arrangements that made intervention necessary. So the symptoms were managed. The cause was not.

France framed its role as indispensable to regional stability. On the ground, many experienced it as the management of instability—enough order to prevent collapse, not enough sovereignty to allow autonomy. Over time, the moral vocabulary wore thin. Protests grew. Coups followed. Expulsions came. What collapsed was not only a mission, but credibility.

Against this record, France’s appeal to universal values in Europe lands with a thud in Africa. Sovereignty is sacred in one theater and negotiable in another. Civilian suffering is intolerable here and contextualized there. Ukraine becomes the acceptable face of humanitarian outrage; the Sahel remains the managed periphery where violence is normalized and explained away as complexity.

The deeper problem is not inconsistency; it is structure. Western assistance that never ends is not generosity—it is control by another name. Medicine without surgery. Bandages without healing. Africans were not asking for endless help. They were asking for the space to solve their own problems without guardianship.

And there is a final irony that history will not miss. Emmanuel Macron arrived at the World Economic Forum wearing glasses, aides noting he had just undergone eye surgery. After years of instructing the world on vision, morality, and responsibility, his sight may be corrected—but his blind spots remain. Ukraine is seen with perfect clarity. Europe’s suffering is sharply in focus. Yet the devastation in West Africa, carried out under the banner of “assistance,” still goes unseen. Vision, it turns out, is not only optical. It is moral. And no procedure fixes that.