Africa’s Opportunities Are Surging and the US Is Missing Out

HAL BRANDS

Russia is lining up a naval base on the Red Sea. US President Donald Trump seeks peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while threatening war in Nigeria. Extremists are on the march from the Sahel to southern Africa. Across the continent, foreign powers are scrambling for vital resources and real estate.

Africa may not get as many headlines as other regions. But it’s where many of the most important trends of the modern era come together — and it’s a preview of just how ferociously messy a multipolar future might be.

For years, Africa was a strategic backwater. In 2000, the Economist famously called a region mired in debt and underdevelopment the “hopeless continent.” But now, Africa looms larger on the geopolitical scene.

The global map of economic opportunity has shifted, as better infrastructure — physical and digital — has helped connect a fragmented continent, while Indian Ocean ports provide links to lucrative markets in Asia and the Middle East.

In recent years, several of the world’s fastest-growing economies have been found in Africa. The continent’s middle class could exceed 1.1 billion people by 2060.

Africa is central to the world’s energy future, thanks to prodigious oil and gas reserves as well as generous deposits of materials — cobalt, manganese, copper — that are critical to renewables. It is a demographic powerhouse in a graying global system: The continent may account for half of all births by century’s end.

Africa certainly isn’t hopeless, these days. But it is still marked by some uglier trends.

As the global incidence of war rises, Africa is awash in conflict — whether the vicious civil wars that have recently consumed Sudan and Ethiopia, or multisided, cross-border struggles like those that have ravaged Congo for decades.

The continent has arguably displaced the Middle East as the epicenter of violent extremism: Terrorist groups torment governments and societies from Mali to Mozambique.

Bloody instability has led to democratic backsliding: The recent coup in Guinea-Bissau makes 10 military takeovers since 2020. Most of all, this mix of opportunity and volatility has made Africa a showcase for the many layers of rivalry that convulse the global system today.

The great revisionist states, Russia and China, see Africa as a place to enhance their influence while weakening America’s. Russia does so by using arms and mercenaries to intervene in conflicts and coups from Niger to the Central African Republic.

China uses trade, debt and infrastructure projects to entrench its economic and diplomatic influence. Africa’s wars provide a “test lab,” remarked one former Chinese officer, where Beijing can deploy peacekeepers and hone a superpower’s strengths.

Yet middle powers and micro-powers are also reaching for glory.

Middle Eastern players — Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey — have exported their rivalries into North Africa and the Horn, which they view as African extensions of their own regional neighborhood.

India considers East Africa the western edge of its geopolitical domain and a vital flank that must be held against China. Former colonial powers and advanced democracies seek African routes to resilience for critical mineral-supply chains.

If you want a sense of how complex and contested the African geopolitical environment is, look at Djibouti. That small country is positively littered with foreign military bases, because it sits at the strategic nexus of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

African states aren’t mere bystanders: The continent’s internal geopolitics have become fiercely competitive. Regional potentates — Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria — all seek primacy in their corners of the continent. Rwanda, once a failed state wracked by genocide, now projects power across Central Africa and the Great Lakes region.

Unfortunately, this mishmash of competing interests usually exacerbates Africa’s miseries. Rivalry between South Africa and Rwanda has long fueled war in Congo. A dizzying array of outside actors have pumped arms and money into Sudan’s brutal civil war.

Meanwhile, the US has often been lagging. For decades, it viewed Africa mostly through the lens of counterterrorism. It combined groundbreaking anti-AIDS initiatives that saved millions with disappointing development projects and military interventions — like the one that toppled Libya’s Moammar Al Qaddafi in 2011 — that sometimes went catastrophically awry.

Trade and infrastructure initiatives typically failed to keep pace with Chinese influence. The Lobito Corridor, which promises to link the Angolan coast to Congo’s huge mining deposits, is promising.

But when Vice President Kamala Harris visited Zambia in 2023, to show America’s commitment to the continent, she landed at a Chinese-financed airport and traveled on Chinese-built bridges and roads.

Donald Trump’s Africa policy will, characteristically, help in some ways and hurt in others. Trump has rightly focused on securing critical minerals amid intensifying economic rivalry with China. He has sought, with mixed success, to end wars in Congo and other conflict zones.

Yet Trump’s crackdown on foreign aid may cost African lives and American soft power. His tariffs have hammered developing economies that desperately need foreign markets. His threats to intervene militarily in Nigeria, to save its traumatized Christian population, blindsided the government there.

The better approach would be to tone down the theatrics, roll back the tariffs and stop letting the bad parts of Trump’s policy impede the good ones. It would also involve recognizing that a world in which Africa remains a bottom-tier priority for US statecraft is one in which American influence there will continue to decline.

Whatever he does, Trump won’t find Africa an easy place to navigate. But he won’t have the luxury of treating it as an afterthought. There, dynamism competes with disaster; multiplayer struggles intensify local conflicts. Africa’s global salience is growing, not least because of the viciously competitive era that is coming into view.

American Enterprise Institute