Trump’s Africa Policy: Benign Neglect or Strategic Retreat?
T he most consequential Africa policy decision an American president can make is often the one they don’t make. In November 2025, the United States released a new 29-page National Security Strategy. Africa received three paragraphs — framed almost entirely as a minerals extraction opportunity and a theatre for countering Chinese influence. [1] That compression tells you nearly everything you need to know about how the Trump administration sees the continent. Not as a partner. Not as a civilisational equal. As a resource base and a chessboard. But the full picture of Trump’s Africa policy in 2025 and 2026 is more complicated than simple neglect. It is a policy defined by sharp contradictions: transactional engagement on minerals while dismantling the aid architecture; selective security cooperation alongside sweeping aid freezes; rhetorical praise for Africa as a commercial partner even as AGOA — the continent’s most important preferential trade agreement — was allowed to lapse. ...