By Chris Olaoluwa Ògúnmọ́dẹdé
Like all U.S. presidents, Joe Biden took office in January 2021 with a decidedly low bar to clear for engagement with Africans. But his immediate predecessor, former President Donald Trump, had lowered that bar even further. Trump referred to African states as “shithole countries” and imposed visa bans on Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Tanzania.
And in its final months in office, the Trump administration blocked the selection of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala – a dual citizen of Nigeria and the United States – as the World Trade Organization’s first Director-General of African descent.
Given the contempt and hostility that characterized Washington’s engagement with Africans during Trump’s presidency, even the slightest improvement by his successor would seemingly indicate progress in the relationship. And for a time, it even seemed like Biden might surpass that bare minimum.
Less than a month after taking office, in a recorded message to Washington’s African partners ahead of the African Union’s annual leaders’ summit, Biden expressed his administration’s commitment to “rebuilding our partnerships around the world and re-engaging with international institutions like the African Union.”
At the second U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022, Biden declared that the United States was “all in on Africa and all in with Africa.” He promised at that same gathering to visit the African continent before the completion of his term and is expected to fulfill that pledge with a belated visit to Angola in December, during the transition period from his administration to that of his successor.
But after getting off to what at least appeared to be a good start, the Biden administration’s engagement with African capitals proved to be lethargic, reactive and unambitious.
In many ways, that shouldn’t be surprising. As a presidential candidate, Biden scarcely campaigned on issues of foreign affairs and was not expected to prioritize engagement with Africa following his inauguration.
His administration was always likely to grant more urgency to Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East given Washington’s strategic rivalries with Russia, China and Iran. As expected, those countries and regions took up much of the administration’s bandwidth amid devastating wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as well as an increase in tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
More broadly, over the course of his political career, Biden had not demonstrated much familiarity with or enduring interest in African countries or the issues they care about, except for his opposition to apartheid-era South Africa’s white-minority regime in the 1980s. For their part, few African governments expected any dramatic shifts in policy from the Trump administration, although they likely held out hope for pleasant surprises.
As noted, some did come in early, like Biden’s reversal of the Trump administration’s travel bans and lifting of Washington’s opposition to Okonjo-Iweala’s WTO candidacy. In addition, after a sustained wave of global pressure over pandemic-era “vaccine apartheid,” the U.S. announced in May 2021 that it would support a temporary waiver of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
Although the final agreement was weakened at the WTO at the demand of pharmaceutical companies, the Biden administration leveraged the opportunity-in addition to the distribution of vaccines and other emergency supplies to developing countries-to earn some goodwill from African states.
Over the course of its tenure, the Biden administration unveiled more initiatives with which it hoped to develop stronger relations with Africans. In August 2022, it released a strategy document that laid out what it described as Washington’s priorities on the continent for the next five years.
The following month, Biden told delegates at the United Nations General Assembly that the U.S. would support efforts to reform the Security Council, including permanent seats for African countries, although he did not lay out any specifics at the time. At the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, Biden called for the G20 to admit the AU to its ranks and promised to dispatch his administration’s top officials to the continent in addition to his stated plan to visit Africa.
The Biden administration’s words and deeds signaled that Washington still views Africa as a tertiary geopolitical battleground and is interested in engagement only on those terms.
Most recently, in September 2023, the U.S. and its European allies launched the Lobito Corridor project, a “strategic economic corridor” initiated under the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment that will link the Central African Copper Belt areas of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to European and North American markets via Angola’s Atlantic coast.
The Biden administration cast the Lobito project as the blueprint of what it described as an alternative model of cooperation with African countries, one that it argued leverages Washington’s ability to mobilize private capital to invest in key areas like infrastructure, digital technology and energy security. U.S. officials claim that Washington has mobilized $4 billion to develop the corridor, although they have not provided a breakdown of how they arrived at that figure.
Broadly speaking, African governments welcomed these developments and the proposals rolled out by the Biden administration, notwithstanding some of their misgivings about the substance of those policies and skepticism over Washington’s commitment to following through with the heavy lifting required to make them effective. And it is on the latter front in particular that Biden’s record of engagement with Africa fell short.
Overall, the outcomes of Biden’s policy proposals consistently failed to match the lofty rhetoric he and his officials aimed at African governments and their publics, on issues ranging from his democracy promotion agenda to his administration’s pledge to expand commercial relations with African nations. A major reason for this dissonance-but by no means the only one-is that Washington’s outreach to the continent is driven more by cynicism and an irrational apprehension over perceived gains by China and Russia than a desire to pursue a genuinely robust, sustained partnership with Africans.
In that regard, Biden was not much different than his recent predecessors, despite the insistence of his administration’s officials to the contrary as well as their pledge to chart a new course in Washington’s relations with the continent. Their own words and deeds-from their opposition to common African positions on key global issues to their inability to make an affirmative case about a partnership with the U.S. without casting aspersions on Africans’ engagement with China-signaled that Washington still viewed the continent as a tertiary geopolitical battleground and was interested in engagement only on those terms.
On other scores, as well, Africans did not see the Biden administration’s behavior as diverging significantly from that of its predecessors. Biden invited the leaders of Nigeria, Niger, Congo and Angola to a virtual summit on democracy despite their dubious track record on human rights, democracy and anti-corruption. During the pandemic, his administration imposed a discriminatory travel ban of its own on seven southern African countries after researchers in South Africa and Botswana identified the omicron COVID-19 variant.
And when nearly half of the African members of the United Nations did not vote for a U.S.-backed U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington-in concert with its European allies-launched a heavy-handed diplomatic full-court press to pressure African capitals into what the West regarded as stronger support for Kyiv.
Meanwhile, the administration’s ballyhooed “Africa strategy” was released only in August 2022, more than 18 months into its term. Its announcement of $55 billion in investments across the continent made at the U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit featured repackaged funds from existing programs, raising questions about the seriousness of the declaration. To serve as his point person for U.S. engagement with a continent where the median age is 19, Biden selected Johnnie Carson, an 81-year-old retired ambassador who had earned a reputation in many African capitals for undiplomatic conduct. Last year, Washington’s ambassador to South Africa publicly accused that country of arming Russia amid the war in Ukraine without providing any evidence to substantiate his claims.
In far too many examples, the Biden administration opted for a cynical, narrowly defined “stability” over accountability in dealing with Washington’s African partners that represented continuity with past policy rather than the change it had promised. Some examples include the military juntas in Guinea, Gabon, Chad and Sudan that toppled civilian leaders but nonetheless remain in Washington’s good books; partner governments in Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania whose record of human rights abuses and violations of democratic norms have drawn little rebuke from the United States; and Congo and Nigeria, where deeply flawed presidential elections were embraced by the U.S. due to realpolitik considerations of great-power competition. Washington’s inability to influence events in the Horn of Africa has been keenly felt amid devastating conflicts in Sudan and Ethiopia that have killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Few countries better illustrate the continued dysfunction of Washington’s approach under Biden than Niger, where despite the toppling of a U.S.-backed civilian leader by a military junta, the Biden team sought to maintain the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency mission in the country. In the end, however, the junta expelled U.S. troops from the country due to Washington’s perceived condescension, followed by the arrival of Russian soldiers and equipment weeks thereafter.
Biden’s trip to Angola, initially planned in October but postponed to December in what essentially amounts to a consolation visit of sorts, neatly encapsulates the halfhearted, uninspired nature of Africa policy during his administration. Despite Biden’s emphasis early in his term on democracy promotion, Angola was picked mainly for its strategic value in the competition with China over critical minerals for the green energy transition, despite its spotty record on democracy and human rights.
Regardless of who wins next week’s U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5, there is unlikely to be a radical shift from the status quo, to say nothing of a major improvement. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has no demonstrable record of meaningful interest in or engagement with Africa, while Trump-the Republican standard-bearer-spent his first term in office displaying his open disregard for the continent. As a result, any authentic interest Washington takes in Africa will continue to decline overall, as its footprint on the continent continues to be defined by competition with its geopolitical rivals, security cooperation and the race for critical minerals.
In fairness, this is not a problem that originates in Washington. Few Americans have any interest in Africa, and there is not a robust constituency in the U.S. Congress, the private sector or the U.S. think tank ecosystem for developing stronger relations with the continent. In a multipolar age when Africa’s global partnerships are rapidly increasing, that’s a major handicap for Washington’s ability to convince Africans of its sincerity in wanting to be their trusted partner.
All this stands in marked contrast to the United States’ African counterparts, where despite a clear-eyed understanding of the shortcomings of and limits to Washington’s engagement, there is still deep and broad cultural goodwill among African populations toward the United States. That means there are opportunities for the U.S. to achieve tangible accomplishments in partnership with African states and regional institutions, but it may fall to the continent’s governments to create those opportunities for themselves.
Chris Olaoluwa Ògúnmọ́dẹdé is an editor, analyst and consultant who writes about African politics, security and foreign relations, with a focus on West Africa. He was formerly an associate editor at WPR