The city of Brooklyn, New York generates approximately 6 times the wealth generated by the country of Niger every year, despite having a population equal to only 10% that of Niger.
Niger's stunning poverty was never at any point a global headline or an American foreign policy priority. Whatever happened to an impoverished, insignificant country in the African Sahel region wasn't really anybody's business.
The only time the US took note of Niger was when it spent $100m (approximately 0.4% of the country's GDP) on a military drone base in Agadez. Miserable multi-generational poverty? Extremely flawed faux-democracy? Who cares. Just a bunch of black Africans who are poor and powerless, as God surely intended.
Now that the poorly-governed country has (unsurprisingly) suffered a military coup and the drone base, uranium mines and gas pipeline intended to sideline Russia are under threat, suddenly Biden, Harris and Blinken have Tyrone on speed dial, urging him to send Nigeria's woefully under-equipped military into Niger to restore the status quo.
As usual, whatever will become of the 21 million impoverished Africans in Niger, plus the 200 million slightly less-impoverished Africans next door in Nigeria is not just less important, but completely irrelevant as far as American foreign policy doctrine is concerned.
Africans are apparently just 1.2 billion+ inconveniently-located organic obstacles between The Countries That Actually Matter and their foreign policy goals + cheap natural resources.
We thought we were in 2023, but it turns out we live in the timeline where our version of 1884 has Gender Studies and TikTok.