The article “A Trumpian Policy for Africa” discusses the expected Africa policy of Donald Trump’s upcoming administration as he prepares to return to the White House in December 2024. It contrasts Trump’s expected transactional approach with the previous administration under Joe Biden, which focused on building deeper, high-level ties and commercial relationships with African nations. Here are the key points:
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Contradictory Policies: Trump will inherit an Africa policy characterized by both attention and neglect. Biden made efforts to engage more with Africa, but U.S. embassies in the region remain underfunded and understaffed.
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Transactional Focus: Trump’s administration is likely to prioritize short-term, transactional deals, which could undermine long-term U.S. goals, such as competing with China’s influence in Africa. Other nations, like Russia and the UAE, are building lasting relationships, which the U.S. might struggle to replicate if it emphasizes quick deals.
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Impact on Relations: This transactional approach may compel African nations to reevaluate their interests but could also diminish Africa’s strategic importance in U.S. policy.
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Geopolitical Competition: U.S. policy under Trump will likely center on countering China’s growing influence through investments and trade, particularly in infrastructure. The U.S. will need to reauthorize and enhance the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) to offer more predictable trade benefits.
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Middle Powers and Regional Conflicts: The U.S. will also contend with middle powers like the UAE, which have become significant players in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. This may limit U.S. intervention in crisis situations, as seen with Sudan and Ethiopia.
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Specific Country Relationships:
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Somaliland: There may be recognition of Somaliland as a strategic move.
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Kenya: Trump might seek to negotiate a trade deal with Kenya, emphasizing bilateral over regional agreements, possibly undermining regional trade frameworks.
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South Africa: Relations could be strained due to its support for the Palestinians and its role in BRICS, which may lead to trade disputes.
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Opportunities for African States: African nations may use Trump’s focus on bilateral deals to improve their commercial ties with the U.S. They will need to navigate this transactional environment carefully while leveraging potential opportunities, such as energy partnerships.
Overall, African countries face both challenges and opportunities as they engage with the incoming Trump administration, and they will need to be strategic in how they manage their relationships with the U.S. to maximize benefits and mitigate risks.
The complete piece is as follows:
A Trumpian Policy for Africa
What the Continent Stands to Gain From a Transactional White House
By Ken Opalo
When he returns to the White House, Donald Trump, the U.S. president-elect, will take over an Africa policy riddled with contradictions. Since 2022, President Joe Biden has sought to improve ties between the United States and sub-Saharan African countries with a focus on high-level engagement and stronger commercial relations.
In 2023, senior officials made 17 visits to the region. Biden is currently visiting Angola, the first trip to the continent by a U.S. president since 2015. On the commercial side, U.S. firms have concluded over 500 deals in Africa valued at more than $14 billion during Biden’s tenure. The president’s single biggest achievement is the $250 million financing package Washington delivered to a consortium developing the Lobito Atlantic Railway that links mineral-rich parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to the Lobito port in Angola.
But even as ties have grown in recent years, Washington’s foreign policy establishment still considers Africa to be a strategic backwater. U.S. embassies in the region remain understaffed and underresourced. Further cuts in funding and personnel, as have been proposed by Trump’s transition team, would hollow out an already severely handicapped Africa team at the State Department and other agencies. It is no surprise that, despite the appointment of special envoys and the imposition of sanctions, the Biden administration struggled to intervene productively in any of the ongoing crises in the Horn, the Great Lakes, and the Sahel.
The second Trump administration inherits these contradictory tendencies of attention and inattention. All indications are that it will pursue U.S. interests in Africa through a singularly transactional approach, one that could threaten some U.S. goals in the region. Short-term transactionalism will likely make it harder for the United States to compete for influence with China, Russia, or even the United Arab Emirates. These countries have sought to build long-term relationships with African elites, demonstrating their reliability. By contrast, Trump’s likely emphasis on short-term dealmaking will make it harder for Washington to consolidate bilateral ties or resolve crises on the continent.
From the perspective of African states, Trump’s transactional approach will present both upsides and downsides. Over the last six decades, Washington’s inability to think about African states beyond questions of aid, humanitarianism, and democracy promotion has severely stunted U.S.-African relations. Under these conditions, naked transactionalism can force both the United States and African countries to assess the specific interests that define their relations and how best to pursue them. The downside, however, is that such an approach could further diminish Africa’s perceived strategic significance. Washington’s historical lack of investment in meaningful relations with African countries means that the White House has little to build on.
THE CONTEST FOR INFLUENCE
Consistent with Trump’s first term, his administration’s Africa policy will likely focus on the geopolitical competition with China across the continent. Here, the administration will confront the reality of the United States’ structural inability to compete with China in areas that matter to African states and societies. China maintains warm (and mutually respectful) high-level relations often founded on global South solidarity, and its trade and infrastructure investments have helped power regional economic growth over the last 20 years. The United States lags well behind in both areas.
The uptick in high-level engagement under Biden is likely to abate under Trump, while trade between the United States and African countries will remain at just over a sixth the volume of trade between China and African countries. Washington’s use of sanctions could even make this disparity in trade volumes bigger.
In recent years, the United States has suspended several countries—on the grounds of human rights violations or antidemocratic coups—from the tariff exemptions they were extended as part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a nearly 25-year-old piece of legislation that offers free trade access to certain sub-Saharan African countries. Such suspensions hamstring fledgling firms in countries that export to the United States and force them to seek markets elsewhere. And China can easily outdo the United States’ much-touted $250 million package for the Lobito Railway, raising much larger finance packages by leveraging both state-owned and private firms.
To effectively compete with China for influence in Africa, the United States must find policies that are better aligned with African states’ core interests, with particular attention to investments in infrastructure and trade. In practical terms, this will mean a reauthorization and improvement of the AGOA (which expires next year) to make eligibility criteria more predictable.
In addition, there is an urgent need for better coordination (potentially under the auspices of the U.S. government’s Prosper Africa initiative) among U.S. agencies and initiatives that focus on boosting commercial relations with African countries. If Trump does slap tariffs on imports across the board, as he has threatened to, African exporters may be turned off the U.S. market. Reauthorizing AGOA would then become all the more important. That said, it would still be up to African governments to take full advantage of the zero-tariff access to the U.S. market the act affords them; not all have done so in the past.
Trump’s Africa policy will likely focus on the competition with China.
Besides China, the United States will also have to contend with a number of middle powers that have made inroads in the region. Here, too, transactional concerns will carry the day. For example, the United States’ involvement in the crises in the Horn—including the civil war in Sudan, various conflicts in Ethiopia, and instability in Somalia—will be shaped by its wider interests in the Middle East, which are dominated by a desire to entrench the Abraham Accords, the series of deals struck at the end of the first Trump term to normalize relations between Israel and a few Arab countries.
To that end, the United States will likely avoid stepping on the toes of the United Arab Emirates, which has recently emerged as a major player in the Horn and is a key plank of the Abraham Accords. Trump will likely ignore credible evidence provided by the United Nations that the UAE is supporting one of the warring factions in Sudan. This would, in effect, make it more difficult for the United States to push for a cease-fire and a credible post-conflict political settlement in Sudan.
Washington will likely be attentive to the UAE’s interests in the Horn and the wider Red Sea region—which are focused on establishing trade and logistical networks as well as investments in agriculture, energy, telecoms, finance, and other sectors—when it comes to dealing with Ethiopia and Somaliland (a stable and democratic territory in the Horn of Africa). Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s highly personalized and repressive rule has ignited a series of armed rebellions that have been met with indiscriminate state violence and human rights abuses.
Somaliland is pushing for international recognition against the wishes of Somalia and in direct contravention of established antisecession norms within the African Union. The UAE is very likely to influence U.S. policy in both Ethiopia and Somalia, urging the recognition of Somaliland and more tolerance for Abiy’s style of rule. In the Great Lakes region, where the UAE has become one of Washington’s preferred partners in challenging China’s dominance in mining critical minerals, the United States could choose to ignore the sourcing of those minerals and the attendant abuses, violence, and criminality that surround their extraction.
The conflicts and recent coups in the Sahel present puzzles for U.S. policy in West Africa. The United States may seek to restore the influence of its ally France in the region, even though Paris is deeply unpopular there after decades of neocolonial meddling and failed campaigns against Islamist militant groups between 2014 and 2022. It is abundantly clear that decoupling its policies from France is necessary for the United States to earn trust in West Africa.
Unfortunately for Sahelian states, Trump’s transactional imperatives may push him in the other direction; he might very well be tempted to back France’s efforts to undermine hostile regimes or reinstall client ones in the Sahel in exchange for French cooperation on NATO reforms or other issues of greater importance to Washington. In the same vein, should relations between the United States and Russia improve on the back of the personal rapport between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Washington could end up stepping aside as Moscow solidifies its military and economic gains in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Mali, Niger, and Sudan.
THE TIES THAT BIND
Starting from a baseline of suspicion of multilateralism, the Trump administration is likely to focus a great deal on bilateral relations across Africa, guided by the logic of transactionalism. Yet even as it does so, Washington should not forget that Pan-Africanism is still a powerful mobilizing force in the region. Publics in individual African countries will follow developments in other corners of the continent with interest. Consequently, the United States’ missteps in one bilateral relationship have the potential to sour its relations across Africa.
Three countries, in particular, are likely to see changes in their relations with the United States that could reverberate throughout the continent. Trump is likely to recognize Somaliland, possibly as part of a deal that would crowd in the interests of both Ethiopia and the UAE. Landlocked Ethiopia would benefit from accessing the sea via Somaliland’s Berbera port, while the UAE would profit as the main investor in the development of this logistical corridor and its related security infrastructure. Recognizing Somaliland would undoubtedly rattle the rump state of Somalia, further destabilize the Horn, and elicit a sharp rebuke from the African Union, which has long opposed secessionist movements.
Short-term dealmaking will make it harder for Washington to consolidate ties and resolve crises.
A little farther south, Kenya will most likely command some of Washington’s attention. The Trump administration started to negotiate a free trade agreement in 2020 in no small part because of Kenya’s strategic importance as a diplomatic hub and security partner—as well as its major role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Biden downgraded the negotiations to a strategic trade and investment partnership, even as he deemed Kenya to be a major ally, but they have not yet concluded in a deal.
If Trump proceeds with bilateral negotiations with Nairobi, either building on the Biden administration’s progress or reviving the talks from his first term, it will be viewed as a signal that Washington is uninterested in striking trade deals with regional blocs. Other African countries worry that bilateral arrangements of this kind could undermine regional trade agreements, such as the African Continental Free Trade Agreement or the East African Community.
Relations with South Africa under Trump will also be understood as a barometer for U.S. tolerance of the right of African countries to conduct their foreign policies independently. South Africa will likely be in the administration’s crosshairs for being a core member of the BRICS grouping—along with Brazil, Russia, India, and China—as well as for its principled support of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and for accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice.
Republican legislators already sponsored a review of the U.S.–South African relationship, seeking to disqualify South Africa from the AGOA. A protracted trade and diplomatic dispute between Pretoria and Washington would be costly for the South African economy, which is already struggling after more than a decade of stagnation.
African countries should see Trump’s second term as an opportunity to cement the improvements to commercial relations that were made under Biden while remaining clear-eyed about the attendant risks of a transactional U.S. approach to Africa. Admittedly, this will require a high degree of savviness in managing the relationship with the United States. In addition, African states should prepare to creatively leverage some of Trump’s domestic policies for their own benefit.
For example, Trump’s nominee to run the Energy Department, Chris Wright, could be an ally in the quest to end energy poverty across the region—especially in countries that are major producers of petroleum and gas such as Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. Notwithstanding the expected unpredictability of the Trump administration, it should still be possible for African countries to deepen trade and investment ties with the United States to the benefit of their economies. That, in and of itself, would be a significant improvement for U.S.-African relations.
