As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda this week on his second tour of the continent since taking office, he will encounter a much-altered landscape. In March, Washington got a wakeup call it was not expecting when, in a United Nations General Assembly vote, nearly half of the countries refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were African.
But that this vote was a surprise demonstrated both Washington’s deafness to long-standing complaints on a range of issues from many African countries, and its blindness to its own hypocrisy toward bilateral relations with countries on the continent. The growing assertiveness of African countries, individually and collectively, in global affairs, as well as their bristling at the historic power dynamics between the West and Africa, has been building since well before the Trump administration defined the growing great power competition on the continent in zero-sum terms.
This mounting frustration comes in response to a long-gathering climate crisis that the continent as a whole didn’t contribute to, but for which many of its inhabitants and governments are bearing the greatest cost—from encroaching deserts to parched water sources. It is also a response to the health care chasm that throughout the coronavirus pandemic has seen citizens of the Global North receive as many as four COVID-19 vaccines per person, while nearly 75 percent of Africa’s 1.4 billion people have yet to be fully vaccinated. And it’s a result of a global energy crisis that is today seeing industrialized countries restarting coal-fired power plants while denying African countries the financing needed to exploit their own oil and gas resources domestically because they aren’t renewable.
To counter these legitimate complaints, Blinken points to all the other commitments the current and previous U.S. administrations have made across the continent. These include generous support to humanitarian needs, significant contributions to many international peacekeeping operations and the consistent championing of the democratic aspirations of those countries that are struggling with a resurgence of coups and democratic backsliding. This defense, development and diplomacy trinity has been central to U.S. engagement across Africa since the end of the Cold War. However, the U.N. vote in March demonstrated that this playbook is not enough to make amends for the perceived relegation of African voices from global decision-making circles, even though the U.S. continues to rely on it.
Indeed, in just the past few weeks, Washington has doubled down on this approach by pledging an additional $1.4 billion of new money to combat the famine-inducing effects of climate change in the Horn of Africa. And on this trip, Blinken is expected to use his good offices to mediate growing tensions between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo—two imperfect yet essential U.S. partners in East and Central Africa—over Kigali’s documented support for armed militants in eastern Congo.
Very little in the Biden administration’s approach to Africa thus far suggests that it believes this to be a relationship of equals.
But as much as these traditional U.S. commitments dwarf those of other great powers on the continent, Washington has been slow to the realization that they are no longer a sufficient response to China’s use of no-strings-attached mega infrastructure projects and Russia’s efforts to play up historical grievances in their pursuit of allies in a redefined multipolar world.
Recognizing these challenges, as well as Washington’s declining influence, Blinken is using this trip to course correct by unveiling a new U.S. strategy for Africa that, in his words, promises to “reinforce the U.S. view that African countries are geostrategic players and critical partners on the most pressing issues of our day.” But while no doubt a welcome message to many of the continent’s leaders, just saying it doesn’t make it so.
In a speech unveiling the new U.S. approach at the University of Pretoria in South Africa yesterday, Blinken repeatedly returned to the refrain that “the U.S. focus is not on saying to friends and partners: you have to choose,” but rather, as he told journalists just after his speech, “on providing a choice.” To frame that choice in a more amiable light than that of strategic competition, Blinken ran through a litany of existing U.S. development and assistance programs—from then-President George W. Bush’s 2003 PEPFAR initiative to provide AIDS relief; to Feed the Future, launched by then-President Barack Obama in 2010; to the Global Fragility Act, which former President Donald Trump signed into law in 2019—describing these programs not as signature aid initiatives, but as “partnerships,” noting that in moments of “unprecedented crisis … that’s what partners do for each other.”
But worse than just putting old wine in a new bottle, Blinken’s highlighting of an aid-dependent relationship seems to refill the poisoned chalice that African governments and populations have tired of drinking from.
Indeed, very little in the approach of President Joe Biden’s administration to the continent thus far suggests that it believes this to be a relationship “of equals,” as Blinken promised—a promise that not coincidentally borrows from China’s own 2021 strategy toward Africa, “A Partnership of Equals.” On issues from climate, to energy, to health, African voices are routinely marginalized in global institutions where decision-making is weighted by veto power or voting share, as it is in the U.N. Security Council and the World Bank boardroom, respectively.
Moments like the G-7 Summit in June reveal the true and ongoing nature of Western engagement with African governments. There, in Germany’s Bavarian Alps, U.S. and European leaders met behind closed doors and agreed upon a devastating new sanctions regime on Russia that has since crippled many African countries’ ability to pay for, insure and transport critical wheat and fertilizer shipments from Russia. In a 90-minute session on the last day of the summit, once these sanctions had already been announced, a group of five low- and middle-income countries—including Senegal and South Africa—were invited to address the summit on the subjects of health and climate, but not the sanctions. This caused Senegalese President Macky Sall to remark that Africa “is caught between the hammer of war and the anvil of sanctions.”
Sensing an opening, and seeking to amplify African governments’ and populations’ resentment of Western hypocrisy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov set out on his own barnstorming tour across Africa last month. On his four-country visit, Lavrov laid out Moscow’s vision of the continent in the same words Blinken would use a week later when he said that “African states play an increasingly important role in global politics and economy, take an active part in solving key modern-day problems.” But unlike Blinken or the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who also just visited the continent, Lavrov went a step further, calling for the reform and expansion of the U.N. Security Council with permanent, veto-wielding seats for African countries and other developing countries from around the world. This is in line with long-standing proposals from the member states of the African Union for a greater voice in international decision-making.
Lavrov punctuated his visit with a reminder that defined what Russian partnership with Africa looks like: “Our country does not impose anything on anyone or tell others how to live. We treat with great respect the sovereignty of the States of Africa, and their inalienable right to determine the path of their development for themselves.”
If Blinken’s short Africa tour is going to have any substantive meaning, and the Biden administration’s strategy is to have any hope of winning back friends on the continent, it won’t be through the steady drip of COVID-19 vaccine donations and emergency food aid. It will be in carrying through on promises to give African states a seat at the table where decisions are made about which global sanctions to levy, which wars to condemn and which lending choices to prioritize—and then following through on those promises with action.
African governments and populations have made it clear that they are tired of Washington and the other G-7 capitals imposing separate rules on them than they do on themselves. The test of Biden’s new approach will be whether Washington is truly willing to break from its immediate past practice and treat African states and people as equals. The risk is, of course, that like the U.N. vote on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, if given the choice, Africans may well express their views in ways Washington might not like.
Cameron Hudson is a senior associate in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He previously served as the director for African affairs at the National Security Council.
