On July 28, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his Mauritanian counterpart, President Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani, in the Chinese city of Chengdu. Xi’s meeting with Ghazouani was his second in the space of eight months, as the two leaders met at the China-Arab States Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 9, 2022. After their meeting, China signed a cooperation agreement, which spanned the agriculture, fisheries, and green energy sectors, and granted $21 million in debt relief to Mauritania.

Xi’s meeting with Ghazouani was seemingly routine in nature. Mauritania joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2018, and China concurrently upgraded its ties with Burundi, which joined the BRI the same year, in a similar fashion. But the timing of China’s courtship of Mauritania was striking. It occurred just hours after Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani staged a coup against President Mohamed Bazoum in Niger. And it was followed by German Development Minister Svenja Schulze’s Aug. 14 visit to a United Nations refugee agency in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. Schulze’s visit was a tacit acknowledgement of how Mauritania, a country of 4.6 million people, had accepted up to 100,000 refugees from neighboring countries.

These meetings underscore Mauritania’s status as the sole bastion of relative political stability in the Sahel region, which consists of junta-led regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger. It also encapsulates the often-overlooked intensification of geostrategic competition in Mauritania. This competition revolves around Mauritania’s natural gas reserves and the green energy potential presented by its vast desert terrain—not to mention its strategically valuable position on the Atlantic coast.

China’s courtship of Mauritania mirrors parallel overtures by other great powers and regional powers in the Middle East. These outreaches span from counterterrorism initiatives to green hydrogen development and will likely intensify if the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) decides to intervene militarily in Niger.

---

After securing independence from France in November 1960, Mauritania’s political trajectory was firmly enmeshed in the Sahel’s vicious cycle of instability and human rights abuses. Mauritania aligned with Morocco in the 1975-1991 Western Sahara War against the Sahrawi separatist Polisario Front. This intervention, which coincided with Morocco’s Green March annexation of the Western Sahara, resulted in a disastrous defeat for Mauritanian forces.

As Mauritania prepared to end its involvement in the conflict, Col. Mustafa Ould Salek staged a coup d’état against Mauritania’s first postcolonial president, Moktar Ould Daddah, in July 1978. Less than a year later, Salek was ousted in a second coup for accepting a unilateral cease-fire with the Polisario Front and inflaming racial tensions between the southern region’s Black Mauritanians and the northern region’s Arab Moors.

Salek’s swift rise and fall set the tone for Mauritania’s political course over the next three decades. It experienced coups in 1980, 1984, 2005, and 2008, and weathered serious coup attempts in 1981 and 2003. Communal violence between the dominant Mauri Arab-Berber population and Black African minority persisted and resulted in the exodus of tens of thousands of Black Mauritanians to Senegal in April 1989.

Mauritania also gained global notoriety for the continued enslavement of its Black population by Arab masters. This practice persisted after Mauritania’s abolition of slavery in 1981 and its subsequent banning in 2007. A May 2016 U.N. Human Rights Council report warned that Mauritania’s state anti-poverty agency, Tadamoun, had assumed a “very low profile” in addressing slavery’s consequences. The International Labor Organization went further, stating in June 2017 that slavery continues “on a widespread basis, despite numerous discussions.”

NATO’s security cooperation with Mauritania is driven by European countries’ desire to rein in migration flows from the Sahel.

Despite its history of coups and the endurance of slavery, Mauritania’s counterterrorism campaign and democratic transition have been among the Sahel’s few success stories. Since al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb militants abducted police officer Ely Ould Mokhtar in the Mauritania-Mali border town of Adel Bagrou in December 2011, Mauritania has not experienced terrorist attacks.

Its July 2010 anti-terrorism law, which allowed mobile combat-trained desert units called special intervention groups to attack terrorists, weakened militants on the country’s northern borders. State-approved outreach by imams to Salafist communities, which extolled Islam’s “tradition of tolerance,” encouraged would-be extremists to integrate with Mauritanian society. The U.N. has hailed the efforts of female Islamic scholars, such as Zeinabou Maata, in convincing the wives, sisters, and mothers of Salafist detainees to abandon their extremist views.

In September 2018, Mauritania’s political system took an unexpected turn toward liberalization. Legislative elections featured the opposition National Forum for Democracy and Unity party, which had boycotted previous voting cycles. The African Union endorsed the credibility of the ruling Union for the Republic (UPR) victory. Even more strikingly, anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid won a seat in the legislature. Abeid ran for office from prison but his campaign triumph facilitated his eventual release.

In June 2019, UPR candidate Ghazouani triumphed in Mauritania’s presidential elections with 52 percent of the vote, and Abeid came second with 18.6 percent. Despite concerns about the military’s post-election crackdowns on protesters, France hailed Ghazouani’s victory as a “historic democratic moment,” and the EU praised the “atmosphere of peace and calmness surrounding the vote.”

Mauritania’s transformation into a safe harbor in the volatile Sahel region placed it in the crosshairs of external power rivalries. Although Mauritania joined NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue partnership program in 1995, its succession of coups restricted cooperation with Western countries. After the August 2008 coup that propelled Ghazouani’s predecessor Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz to power, the United States and France swiftly cut all nonhumanitarian aid to Mauritania.

In October 2009, Aziz met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and business leaders in Paris, and relations between Mauritania and the West thawed. This was welcome news for Western companies, such as Canadian gold miner Red Back Mining and Australian uranium miner Murchison United, which maintained their commercial interests in Mauritania after the coup.

As Mauritania’s security situation improved and its political system became quasi-democratic, its relations with NATO strengthened dramatically. NATO trained Mauritanian military personnel and established four crisis management centers in the country, which aided its ability to combat security and public health threats. In January 2021, Ghazouani became the first Mauritanian president to visit NATO headquarters. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg gave Ghazouani a red-carpet welcome, as he hailed Mauritania as a “leader in the G-5 Sahel group” against terrorism and pledged to deepen border security cooperation.

Mauritania’s invitation to the June 2022 Madrid summit as a non-NATO partner fueled speculation that a NATO base could be erected on its strategically valuable Atlantic coast. The expansion of NATO’s security cooperation with Mauritania is also driven by the desire of European countries to rein in illegal migration flows from the Sahel. Mauritania is a popular transit route for African migrants seeking to enter Europe via the Canary Islands. In November 2022, Spain struck a deal to provide logistical assistance for Mauritania’s efforts to rein in undocumented migrants. The recent suspension of European Commission migration cooperation with Niger further elevates Mauritania’s significance in this sphere.

---

As European countries seek out alternative energy suppliers, Mauritania has assumed new strategic importance. Mauritania is slated to become a gas exporter to Europe by the end of 2023 as Phase I of the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim project, led by British Petroleum and Kosmos Energy, is completed.

Mauritania can also readily position itself as West Africa’s renewable energy hub, with 700,000 square kilometers (270,000 square miles) of available territory for solar panel and wind turbine construction. In March 2023, German project developer Conjuncta signed a memorandum of understanding with Egypt’s energy provider Infinity and the United Arab Emirates’ Masdar for a $34 billion green hydrogen project in Mauritania. This project could lead to the production of up to 8 million metric tons of green hydrogen per year.

As Mauritania could help derail Russia’s weaponization of energy against Europe and give NATO a foothold next door to the Wagner Group’s Mali operations, the Kremlin has expanded its engagement with Nouakchott. Although Russia’s diplomatic ties with Mauritania have been traditionally spearheaded by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, his boss, Sergey Lavrov, made a historic visit to Nouakchott in February 2023.

Lavrov’s meeting with Ghazouani officially aimed to improve working conditions for Russian fishermen in Mauritania’s exclusive economic zone. But Lavrov also offered support for Mauritania against terrorism in the Gulf of Guinea. The Wagner Group views coastal West Africa as a key frontier for expansion, as it promoted anti-French propaganda in Ivory Coast and dispatched a delegation to Sierra Leone.

Closer security links between Russia and Mauritania could augment Wagner’s outreach efforts in this strategically important region. Lavrov’s proposal to train Mauritanian doctors underscored his willingness to look past Mauritania’s pro-Ukraine voting record in the U.N. General Assembly and bolster Russia’s soft power.

China’s investments in Mauritania are more complementary to European interests. In December 2016, the Mauritanian government awarded a $325 million contract to China’s Poly Technologies Company for the development of N’Diago Port on the Senegal River’s banks. N’Diago promises to be a hub for energy exports to Europe and links Mauritania to Senegal, a key target country for German gas projects in Africa. Nevertheless, Western policymakers are concerned by the corruption allegations that have swirled around the N’Diago port project since its inception, as well as Poly Technologies’ violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Mauritania’s multivector foreign policy extends to its engagement with the Middle East. Former Saudi King Faisal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud’s critical role in brokering the 1969 Mauritania-Morocco thaw and a decadeslong influx of Mauritanian Islamic scholars to Mecca and Hijaz created firm foundations for Mauritania-Saudi Arabia cooperation, Accordingly, Mauritania deployed 500 troops to aid Saudi Arabia’s 2015 military intervention against Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen and severed diplomatic relations with Qatar after the 2017 blockade by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt.

Saudi Arabia has returned the favor by launching investment projects, such as a $100 million loan to provide the city of Kiffa with potable water from the Senegal River, and striking a military training agreement with Mauritania in January 2017. The UAE’s $2 billion investment pledge, which was struck during Ghazouani’s February 2020 visit to Abu Dhabi, equates to 40 percent of Mauritania’s GDP and is a bedrock component of Ghazouani’s  welfare and infrastructure initiative, titled “The Priorities.”

Mauritania has become an appealing destination for external power investment in a volatile region.

The amelioration of regional rivalries since the January 2021 al-Ula Agreement, which ended the blockade of Qatar, allowed Mauritania to deepen its links with erstwhile adversaries. In April 2023, Qatar Energy acquired a 40 percent stake in Mauritania’s C10 offshore exploration zone, which holds substantial oil reserves. Building on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s February 2018 visit to Nouakchott and decades of development assistance to Mauritania, Turkey and Mauritania inaugurated a so-called Trade House to bolster commercial relations in May 2023.

While Mauritania’s track record of human rights abuses and fractious civil-military relations render its long-term stability an open question, it has become an appealing destination for external power investment in a volatile region—especially after the Niger coup. Mauritania’s efforts to act as a bridge-builder between military juntas and their neighbors, which is evidenced by its support for Mali’s reinstatement in the G5 Sahel bloc and its key role in a proposed $900 million trans-Sahel power transmission line that will pass through Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, could bolster its diplomatic profile as ECOWAS considers whether to intervene in Niger.

Ghazouani’s ability to pair Mauritania’s growing diplomatic profile with long-term economic growth and effective counterterrorism measures will determine whether it can avoid being dragged into West Africa’s coup belt.