In 1958, at the request of France, America be late to diplomatically recognize the new nation of Guinea. French officials he told it His American colleagues that doing so would cause a “devastating moral disaster” in France—an assessment that the US State Department’s powerful Bureau of European Affairs wholeheartedly supported. And so, it took months for Washington to establish diplomatic relations and nearly a year to appoint an ambassador to Conakry, damaging America’s relationship with one of Africa’s most important post-independence countries. This episode repeated itself over the years and cleared the way for foreign dissidents to quickly plant a flag in West Africa at the expense of the United States.
This pattern has continued to repeat itself. The United States has often subordinated its interests in Africa to pursue goals in other regions. Initially, it was in the service of European priorities, but gradually expanded to include Middle East and Indo-Pacific issues. By the time I became a special assistant to President Joe Biden and the director general for African affairs at the National Security Council, the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world was frequent and increasingly difficult. Each act of geographic preference acted as a tax, draining more resources and reducing additional decision-making space. The overall effect was that US policy with Africa was withdrawn, changing its trade, vitality and efficiency.
In 1958, at the request of France, America be late to diplomatically recognize the new nation of Guinea. French officials he told it His American colleagues that doing so would cause a “devastating moral disaster” in France—an assessment that the US State Department’s powerful Bureau of European Affairs wholeheartedly supported. And so, it took months for Washington to establish diplomatic relations and nearly a year to appoint an ambassador to Conakry, damaging America’s relationship with one of Africa’s most important post-independence countries. This episode repeated itself over the years and cleared the way for foreign dissidents to quickly plant a flag in West Africa at the expense of the United States.
This pattern has continued to repeat itself. The United States has often subordinated its interests in Africa to pursue goals in other regions. Initially, it was in the service of European priorities, but gradually expanded to include Middle East and Indo-Pacific issues. By the time I became a special assistant to President Joe Biden and the director general for African affairs at the National Security Council, the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world was frequent and increasingly difficult. Each act of geographic preference acted as a tax, draining more resources and reducing additional decision-making space. The overall effect was that US policy with Africa was withdrawn, changing its trade, vitality and efficiency.
Handling of the Cold War in Washington of Guinea was not unique. In 1955, the State Dept sent a memo for his posts on his policy towards sub-Saharan Africa:
Our ability to pursue action with respect to the African region concerned will always be affected by the requirements of our policy towards the Metropolitan Authority. … (I)fa competition occurs between the needs of our European policy and those of our African policy, we will have to identify the best needs of our union system in Europe.
This reliance on European interests and the bureaucratic weakness of the newly established Office of African Affairs greatly hampered American policy. One former ambassador he wrote in his memoirs that the European Office was “dictating our African policy.” Examples are many: Washington moved slowly to recognize Zanzibar’s independence from Britain and blocked support for self-government in Angola, Mozambique, and other Lusophone colonies because America’s basic rights in the Azores and Portugal’s position as a NATO partner came first. In the foreword to a 2004 book on US policy towards Portugal’s African colonies, former US Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. he agreed that US policymakers “were torn between supporting African demands and protecting our strategic military balance in the Azores. In the end we did nothing, and the communists occupied the vacuum.”
In the early 1970s, the policy tension between African and European interests began to raise its head in relation to other regions. American diplomats in Africa were frustrated by the fact that they were ordered to waste precious time on the impossible task of persuading regional governments to de-recognize Beijing in the 1960s and early 1970s. One American diplomat he remembered spending many hours trying to convince the representative of Taipei to postpone his departure from the Republic of Congo, while another. he narrated that he was under “great pressure to get the Togolese to vote for the two-China policy … the only time the Department ever showed any interest in Togo.”
Shortly before the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research he concluded that “the increasing proportion of African countries in the Arab side of the Middle East conflict interferes with another issue on which Africans and Americans do not agree.” This eventually hijacked parts of US policy towards the region: In 1974, US officials he suggested that Israel has been an obstacle to productive discussions with Congress on the Horn of Africa, and even Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. he complained that the White House Office of Management and Budget was preventing him from transferring funds earmarked for Israel to support his African agenda.
During the Biden administration, I saw firsthand how these trade deals and other regional priorities tied up US policies in Africa. In my case, however, it wasn’t one or two or three places—it was everywhere at once. It peaked in part because restoring US leadership after the COVID-19 pandemic and the first Trump administration required directing resources to many regions. It also resulted from increased interest in Africa from America’s allies and adversaries. Like me he wrote in the United States’ Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa 2022: “The world is well aware of the importance of Africa, and encourages countries to expand their political, economic and security cooperation with African nations.” Competing administration priorities and the balancing act with close allies left African policy, at times, captive to European, Indo-Pacific, and Near Eastern interests on the continent.
This policy problem came into focus within our first year. After angering France with the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal, the US leadership needed to appease Paris with a deal elsewhere. The answer, of course, was in Africa. We were instructed to do more to help France in the Sahel, organizing a series of policy meetings and consultations in Paris. guided and our newly confirmed assistant secretary for African affairs. This went beyond the usual (and much criticized) American desire to defer to France in its former colonies or to provide a security response to the French military—methods that have often jeopardized American interests. This was more transactional: Africa was offered as a sacrificial lamb.
The same attitude plagued the allocation of resources, especially when Indo-Pacific priorities were involved. Although Africa has comparatively less money and manpower, we often fought a losing battle to preserve what little we had. The Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, replaced more than a dozen deputy defense positions on the continent as part of a broader. relocation of resources to China. When the revolution in Sudan in October 2021 required the suspension of 700 million dollars allocated to support the country’s democratic revolution, approximately 200 million dollars of the total funds were. purloined for various Pacific island states. We had little money left for Sudan and other issues in the region.
Surprisingly, despite what observers would have thought, it still felt like pulling teeth to get additional funding to deal with Chinese threats in Africa. We met with constant opposition from parts of the government and defense departments to help us prevent African nations from hosting potential Chinese naval bases.
The most vexing problem, however, was our alliance with the Near East. In echoes of that earlier era, our cooperation with Israel and the Gulf states often took precedence over American interests in Africa. During the first administration of Trump and Biden, there was pressure to register more countries to the Abrahamic Agreement with Israel, even when that required avoiding or complicating our existing bilateral policies towards those African actors. At one point, I was asked to reallocate funding from Africa to support the Middle East priority.
Furthermore, our close cooperation with some Gulf states made it difficult to engage in open dialogue about their actions to bring stability to the region. Amidst reports of Emirati support for the military’s Rapid Assistance Forces in Sudan, most US private conversations and public statements tread lightly on the issue. And when we disagreed on the direction of the policy affecting the interests of Africa and the Near East, we were arguing from a position of weakness.
None of this is to say we didn’t win some debates about proposed meetings or certain plans, but the burden of proof was almost always on the African team. There was a lingering fear that we might upset partners in the Gulf or elsewhere if we chose a policy that favored African priorities, even if we were discussing cooperation in Africa.
The effects of all these accommodationsof course, it is a policy that is overshadowed by other priorities. It is perfectly understandable that some issues take precedence over those of Africa—indeed, sometimes they should. But the overall toll of these businesses is undervalued. Since each exchange occurs in a vacuum, it hides the overall effect until it is too late.
Moreover, this approach not only weakens and gradually weakens the policies of the United States, but also weakens the political position of the country in the continent. At least one East African leader asked several US officials if the US trusts even its African partners to deal with the Sudan ministry due to the US supporting the peace process led by Saudi Arabia. The West African prime minister asked me why we didn’t do more to deal with extremism in the Sahel, which he saw as a threat that paralleled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The foreign minister repeatedly urged us to stop following French policies, which he considered toxic and counterproductive. The cost of being last in line—and being seen as marginal—is real and damaging.
There is no quick fix for this challenge. Policy exchanges are part of the process, and the importance of Africa to US national security will certainly prompt such calculations in the future. What is needed, however, is more transparency, accountability, and fairness in the American approach. Aggregate policy premiums need to be tracked as a whole, not as individual transactions. Moreover, not everything that happens elsewhere outweighs US interests in Africa. Sending valuable resources to other parts of the world, for example, may have a common trend there but bring great losses to African interests.
He said clearly, respect for American allies and partners is not the same as advancing the interests of the United States. Often it is quite the opposite.
