Date: Sunday, 09 September 2018
It is often hard to figure out precisely what President Donald Trump’s security strategy is. He seldom talks about U.S. national interests and priorities other than trade. His broad regional policies are vague or missing altogether. This is particularly true for Africa. Nearly halfway through his term, Trump has made no speeches on Africa, has not visited the continent, and was slow to appoint an assistant secretary of state for African affairs, America’s key policy coordinator for that part of the world. All this suggests that after 50 years of modest involvement in African security, the United States may be writing the continent off.
Africa has always been at the fringe of American global strategy. The United States came late to the region, only showing an interest when the European colonial empires began crumbling in the 1960s and 1970s. Even then, Washington’s motives were mostly to check the Soviet Union and China. The fear was that if communism dominated the continent, it might starve the West of Africa’s raw materials, particularly vital minerals like cobalt, manganese and platinum. However preposterous this idea looks in hindsight, many American political leaders bought it and set the United States on a course where all that mattered was that African governments were relatively stable and anti-communist or, at least, non-aligned. Being autocratic or pathologically corrupt was not an impediment to cordial ties with Washington.
The collapse of the Soviet Union initially left the United States without a central purpose in Africa. Washington did welcome the subsequent movement toward democracy and responsive government on the continent, providing some support. But the seminal events for American policy in Africa during the 1990s were humanitarian disasters generated by African conflicts, particularly in Somalia and Rwanda. While neither Americans nor Africans wanted large numbers of U.S. troops on the continent, the United States developed a number of training and educational programs to help African militaries and governments build their own capability for crisis management, conflict resolution and peacekeeping. The hope was that Africans themselves could prevent or manage future humanitarian disasters.
After the 9/11 attacks, American security policy in Africa shifted almost entirely to counterterrorism. Once again, Washington was willing to overlook undemocratic practices so long as African governments promoted stability and opposed violent jihadism. Believing that economic growth could undercut the resentment and anger that radical jihadists exploited, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama also implemented modest U.S. assistance programs.
Despite that, violent jihadism grew deeper roots in the weakly governed northern half of the African continent, from Mali to Libya, and has even established a foothold in the southeast, in Mozambique. Boko Haram, a Nigerian movement that, like many African extremist groups, spread to neighboring nations, has proven devilishly difficult to eradicate. The same holds for al-Shabab, which is based in Somalia but also threatens Kenya and other nearby states. And across the region of Africa known as the Sahel, which lies between the Sahara desert to the north and the savannah belt of the continent to the south, a patchwork of extremists—part revolutionary jihadists, part heavily armed criminal gangs—destabilizes governments and preys on local populations.
Today, the way forward isn’t clear. For decades, the United States considered aid for African security a long-term investment in the continent’s political and economic potential, but Trump sees things differently. Given Africa’s limited current economic importance to the United States, he seems satisfied to sustain some small military training missions and keep the jihadists on their heels with drone attacks, even while withdrawing many of the U.S. special operations forces that had been supporting African counterterrorism operations since 9/11.Greater Chinese and Russian involvement in Africa, whether economic or in the security sector, will not endanger U.S. national interests.