Africa & Global Power

  I n December 2022, President Joe Biden hosted the first US-Africa Leaders Summit in eight years, gathering representatives of forty-nine African governments in Washington to announce partnerships totalling forty-nine billion dollars in commitments over three years. [1] The summit generated positive coverage, a flurry of bilateral meetings, and a joint statement dense with strategic language. It also took place at a moment when the United States was acutely aware that China had hosted its own Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summits every three years without interruption since 2000, that Russia had deepened military relationships across the Sahel, and that several African governments had declined to condemn the invasion of Ukraine in the UN General Assembly votes of 2022. The Biden summit, in other words, was less a product of strategic clarity about Africa than a reaction to the perception that America was losing ground. That reactive quality is the defining feature of US-Afr...

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. ...