What started as an internally-driven coup in Niger on July 26, West Africa’s seventh in three years, has rapidly come to threaten Western interests. The fast post-coup developments mirror those in Mali and Burkina Faso and highlight the difficulty — and perhaps impossibility, in the short term anyway — of sustaining the West’s hard security and geostrategic interests and simultaneously its commitment to democracy in various parts of Africa.

-Vanda Felbab-Brown in Brookings