The U.S. Needs a New Africa Strategy | Opinion

Earlier this month, an earthquake in the vicinity of Marrakech devastated Morocco, killing thousands and inflicting untold suffering. Last week, two dams in Libya broke, washing thousands more victims into the sea.

To the south of those afflicted countries, in Sub-Saharan Africa, seven national governments have been overthrown by military coups in the past three years, with civil war or near-civil war conditions raging across the continent's Sahel region. In most cases, the winners are military or paramilitary forces backed by Russia, mainly through elements of its volatile Wagner Group, which in June staged a failed challenge to Russia's own government at home.

As in many other African countries, these new regimes will welcome economic investment and logistical support from China, Russia's "unlimited" ally and the major challenger to what's left of U.S. global hegemony. As far away as South Africa, Moscow itself is peddling soft diplomacy, steadily drawing that country, a regional power and fellow BRICS member, into a de facto anti-Western alliance. Not far beneath the surface, radical Islam in Africa survived the near-total destruction of ISIS in the Middle East and occasionally lashes out in brutal ways.

U.S. Africa policy has been literally gun-shy since 18 American soldiers were killed in a disastrous humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1993. That trauma was reinforced in 2012 by the murder of four Americans during an Islamist attack on American assets in Benghazi, Libya. In the wake of those tragic events, Washington's approach has been a listless parody of itself, with earnest liberal mandarins tweeting moralizing soundbites at African leaders who thumb their noses and park generous, guilt-assuaging U.S. foreign aid payments in Swiss bank accounts.

Last August, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a "new" strategy for Africa that is light on action and heavy on wonky verbiage. It promises, in one typically abstruse passage, to "direct unilateral capability only where lawful" and to spend more time "listening" to the same unstable and ineffective governments that have led the continent into its current dire state.

This is not the stuff great powers are made of, and naturally the Biden administration's new policy will change little on the ground. As a joke circulating among African leaders goes, Russia will sell you guns, China will build your economy, and the U.S. will give you gentle lectures about LGBTQ rights. "The U.S. has a soft power problem," admits Alberto Fernandez, a retired diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea and is now vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), "we tend to be too bureaucratic and slow especially in an area we don't see as a priority."

Inevitably, as American influence has receded, our major adversaries have moved in. While U.S. trade with the continent declined by 54 percent between 2007 and 2017, Chinese trade with Africa surged 220 percent in the same period, with Russia's investment in Africa rising 40 percent since 2015. Both Moscow and Beijing host regular summits with leaders of African countries, producing major trade deals and strategic partnerships. Washington has only done so twice in the past decade, producing memos.

Why should we care? As recently as 2001, a report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that "the United States does not have strong economic or security interests in Africa" and could more or less neglect it. Even if that were true then, it most certainly is not true now.

"The future of Africa is the future of the world," says Ilya Alam, cofounder of the Ambrosia Foundation, a Florida nonprofit raising funds for medical missions and humanitarian relief in Morocco and Libya, among other African countries. "Freedom in Africa needs a new definition."

Today, Africa is home to nearly 1.5 billion people, and the continent's rapidly growing population is projected to reach 25 percent of the world's total by 2050. In the future Africans can either live in a massive emerging market in peace and stability or become migrants fleeing devastation and wont. Pan-African institutions are actively combining the continent into a trade zone that is beginning to adopt common policies. Many of the continent's 54 nations seem likely to coalesce into coherent voting blocs in the United Nations and other global institutions—blocs that may be aligned for or against U.S. interests elsewhere (some African countries are already taking pro-Russian stances on Ukraine despite the absence of any direct interest in the conflict). Africa's resources include vast amounts of oil as well as 30 percent of the world's supply of minerals vital for production in high-tech industries, a major sphere of competition between the U.S. and its adversaries.

Smarter U.S. strategic planners than Antony Blinken already consider Africa a battleground in a new Cold War rather than a distant subject for worthless white papers. As in the last Cold War, soft power will be an essential component in regional competition. A return of U.S. influence to Africa could well begin there.

Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.