The failure last week of a bid by soldiers in the West African nation of Benin to overthrow the outgoing president, Patrice Talon, was much more than big news in a small country that most people outside of Africa would have trouble locating on a map.

Far from merely being an internal event, the Benin coup attempt briefly placed the geopolitics of the entire region under a magnifying glass, laying bare deepening fault lines in a part of Africa that has recently grown ever more unstable.

The failure last week of a bid by soldiers in the West African nation of Benin to overthrow the outgoing president, Patrice Talon, was much more than big news in a small country that most people outside of Africa would have trouble locating on a map.

Far from merely being an internal event, the Benin coup attempt briefly placed the geopolitics of the entire region under a magnifying glass, laying bare deepening fault lines in a part of Africa that has recently grown ever more unstable.

Talon’s government was barely saved by a complicated multinational intervention that involved the dispatch of troops by members of the Economic Community of West African States, or Ecowas. Ecowas’s involvement was led by Nigeria, Benin’s giant neighbor to the east and Africa’s most populous country. Nigeria dispatched elements of its air force to bomb rebel positions and support rallying pro-governmental troops.

In the background, though, loomed France, which has recently been forced into a protracted but ignominious retreat from several of its former West African colonies due to a combination of smoldering resentment of its lingering hold over the region and anger over the failure of its long-standing efforts to beat back a variety of Islamist insurgencies via violent counterinsurgency tactics. Discreetly following Nigeria and Ecowas’s lead, which came at the request of Benin’s government during the coup attempt, Paris provided air lift and intelligence support to loyalist forces from a base in Ivory Coast.

Few things divide public opinion in West Africa more readily than France, and its mere involvement caused many people to cry foul. Those who did so paid little heed to the fact that Benin’s government was elected and Talon was preparing to leave office voluntarily after his second term, an increasingly rare phenomenon in a region where regime after regime has rewritten constitutions to remain........

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