It will be challenging for the new Trump administration to counter China and Russia’s influence on Africa, which has grown in the past 4 years, experts say.
JOHANNESBURG—The influence of the United States in Africa, a continent that’s grown in geopolitical importance in recent years, declined during President Joe Biden’s term in office, say analysts and former U.S. government officials.
Under Biden, the United States lost diplomatic and military presence in key regions; did not make significant advances in countering China’s growing footprint in Africa; lost ground to Russia; and was unable to secure adequate and reliable supplies of minerals critical to U.S. national security.
The administration also failed to address chronic staff shortages at U.S. embassies; surrendered the information space to Chinese and Russian propagandists who spread anti-American messaging across the continent; and took limited action against jihadist groups that have vowed to attack U.S. infrastructure and citizens.
Focused on wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and China’s military maneuvering around Taiwan, the outgoing Democrat administration “took its eye off the ball” in Africa, with Beijing and Moscow subsequently “running with it,” said Chris Isike, director of the Africa Center for the Study of the United States in Johannesburg.
“On paper, Biden and his people certainly credited Africa with the importance it deserves,” Isike told The Epoch Times.
“But, in practice, a lot of the talk didn’t translate into action, except for trade and business deals here and there.”
He noted that, for example, the Biden administration promised to push for expanding the United Nations Security Council to include Africa, but it hasn’t happened.
“There’s a feeling of disappointment around Biden in Africa,” he said.
Yet the relationship between the president and the continent he claimed a special affinity with, by virtue of his anti-apartheid activism and leadership of African subcommittees on Capitol Hill when a young senator, started well.
On Dec. 15, 2022, Biden hosted African leaders from 49 countries at a summit in Washington, an event seen as a strong indication that the U.S. was finally ready to challenge China’s huge presence on the continent.
He announced multibillion-dollar aid and trade packages and emphasized that global challenges would not be solved without African leadership.
“When Africa succeeds, the United States succeeds; quite frankly, the whole world succeeds as well,” said Biden, to applause. “The United States is ‘all in’ on Africa’s future.”
However, economists say Biden’s financial promises remain largely unfulfilled, and Isike said Africa continued to “play second fiddle” to other U.S. priorities, while China strengthened investments and trade on the continent.
Cameron Hudson, a former CIA analyst who worked on Africa in roles for both Democrat and Republican administrations, told The Epoch Times Biden’s Africa Strategy said “all the right things,” but most of it remains undelivered.
“We must credit the Biden administration for being the first to craft a modern, strategic, and comprehensive vision of Africa, not one defined by charity or geopolitics,” he said.
Biden’s U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa, released in 2022, recognized that by 2050 Africa will be the most populous region in the world, with by far the youngest population, home to minerals needed to power a modern world and economy and with enough voting weight in global institutions to give the continent a significant voice in global decision-making.
But Africans now view Biden’s promises to prioritize their continent in line with America’s priorities as “largely empty rhetoric,” said Hudson.
“Biden promised to accelerate high-level exchanges with Africa. But all that happened is relatively low-level engagements, with lower-level U.S. and African officials holding talks,” he said.
Hudson pointed out that in his nearly four years in office, Biden hosted only four African leaders inside the Oval Office.
South African international relations scholar, Moeletsi Mbeki, said for someone who’d initially appeared eager to engage with Africa, Biden had a “strange way” of demonstrating this.
“He repeatedly promised to visit Africa and he repeatedly broke those promises,” Mbeki told The Epoch Times.
Biden is scheduled to make his first visit to Africa, to the oil and mineral-rich southern African nation of Angola, in the first week of December.
“It’s only now, when his administration is in its death throes, that we see him coming to Africa. It feels empty, though, a tick-the-box exercise that reinforces the view that Africa will always be very low on the priority list for U.S. leaders,” said Mbeki.
“The optics are not good.”
Oscar Otele, head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, said perhaps Biden’s biggest achievement on the Africa front was his successful lobbying for the African Union to be a permanent member of the Group of 20 major economies, the G20.
South African independent security analyst, Chad Thomas, said the U.S. losing a foothold in the Sahel region, where Russian-backed military juntas are in control, was “inexcusable.”
“So you’ve got this nexus of countries, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, where there’s been an upsurge of terrorism in the last few years, where groups linked to ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) and other global terrorist networks have become really strong,” he told The Epoch Times.
“U.S Africa Command was keeping a lot of this terrorism in check because it had a major spy base, a drone base, in Niger.
“When the Biden administration took a moral position condemning the coup in Niger, the military leaders obviously didn’t like it and they forced the U.S. military out of the country, and Mali and Burkina Faso did the same.”
Washington has so far failed to negotiate a deal with an ally to establish another drone outpost near the Sahel.
Hudson said the lack of resources and staff in Africa had led to some of the Biden government’s strategic errors.
“Much of that is a hangover from the first Trump administration when it implemented a hiring freeze in 2017. The void that was created has never been filled adequately,” Hudson said.
Hudson’s assertions are supported by several State Department reports.
The American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents U.S. diplomats, said that a shortage of mid-level staff, bureaucracy, and other institutional issues all contributed to the problems in Africa.
Analysts Edward Burrier and Thomas Sheehy, in recent research conducted for the United States Institute of Peace and published in June 2023, said failure to cut into China’s dominance of minerals extraction in Africa leaves the United States vulnerable.
“These metals are what the modern economy runs on: we need them for our phones, electric vehicles and satellites, and so much more,” Burrier and Sheehy wrote.
“Forecasts estimate that in the coming decades, the world will need many times more cobalt, copper, lithium, and manganese, among other minerals, than what is currently being produced.”
As their study highlights, this poses a strategic challenge for the United States, as China dominates global critical mineral supply chains, accounting for 60 percent of worldwide production and 85 percent of processing capacity.
Africa is home to one-third of the world’s mineral resources.
Burrier and Sheehy say China’s massive infrastructure builds in Africa under its Belt and Road Initiative since 2012 paved the way for state-backed Chinese companies to own mines across the continent.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone, which supplies 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, Chinese entities own or have stakes in nearly all the country’s producing mines.
“Beijing has recently ramped up its buying streak,” wrote Burrier and Sheehy. “Chinese mining and battery companies have invested $4.5 billion in lithium mines in the past two years and are behind much of Africa’s lithium projects in countries like Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mali.
“It is estimated that China could secure one-third of the world’s lithium mining capacity by 2025.”
Lithium is a key component in rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras, and electric vehicles.
Burrier and Sheehy describe China’s extraction interests in Africa as “just the tip of the iceberg,” as it also has a stranglehold on the refining and processing of these minerals.
Under Biden, the United States recognized this and signed off on the Lobito Corridor Project to the tune of an estimated $3 billion.
Involving the construction of a railway connecting the DRC, Angola, and Tanzania, it will facilitate the transport of critical minerals to the Angolan port of Lobito, for shipping to the United States and Europe, but will only be completed around 2030.
In soft power terms, a Gallup poll published this year shows the United States lost its place as the most influential player in Africa to China during Biden’s term.
The survey noted that Moscow’s image in Africa had improved even more than China’s, despite dropping initially when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“Moscow’s growing popularity in Africa is a reflection of the fact that it’s winning the Info War in Africa hands down,” said Emma Sadleir, director of the Digital Law Company, which analyses information spaces across Africa.
Russia is paying African social media influencers and, like China, is setting up news channels across the continent to foist propaganda on Africans.
“The successful campaign to force American and French troops out of the Sahel was achieved primarily by means of social media,” Sadleir told The Epoch Times.
The United States’ response under Biden?
“Nothing. Promises of support for independent African media that mostly never materialized,” said Herman Wasserman, who heads media studies at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University.
“The United States is going to have to be tougher under Trump, or its image in Africa will continue to fade.
“I’m not saying the United States must start paying influencers or start establishing propaganda outlets. But I hope the incoming Trump administration gets a bit more serious about funding independent journalism to get America’s messages across to African publics.”
Peter Pham, who served as a top Africa official for the first Trump administration, said he expects the new president’s strategy on the continent to be “more transactional and rooted in practicality.”
“Ideally, we don’t want any coups and conflict in Africa. But the reality is they happen and that means sometimes America has to invest a certain amount of cooperation with people who might not have done the best things, in order to safeguard American interests,” Pham said.
“U.S. efforts to counter China and Russia in Africa cannot be entirely about human rights and democracy issues.”