Republican-leaning experts on the United States and Africa predict that a second Donald Trump administration would adopt a more ‘transactional, realistic and pragmatic’ approach to its relations with Africa. From diplomacy to investment, here’s an overview.
Donald Trump, re-elected to a second term in the White House on Wednesday 6 November, has never shown any interest in the African continent. He never visited Africa during his first term in office, between 2017 and 2021, and during a meeting in the Oval Office in January 2018, the American president showed his contempt for African countries and Haiti by calling them ‘shithole countries’.
Diplomacy
American domestic policy was the major theme,’ adds Mamadou Diouf, historian and professor at Columbia University in New York. Africa was not really part of foreign policy, which was more focused on the Middle East, Ukraine or relations with China. In Washington, the promoter of MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) had only received two African heads of state in four years: Muhammadu Buhari (Nigeria) and Uhuru Kenyatta (Kenya). His only significant diplomatic action was, in December 2020, to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara in return for Rabat opening diplomatic relations with Israel.
Donald Trump would have liked to see a withdrawal of US aid, but resistance from Congress enabled the main initiatives and allocated budgets to be maintained. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), thanks in particular to Prosper Africa, a plan designed to promote trade and investment in Africa in order to counter China’s economic expansion, has remained the world’s leading donor to the continent. Until 2021, its aid amounted to around 7 billion dollars a year.
Military cooperation
On the military front, Donald Trump could maintain his support for the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), set up in 2007 to coordinate security activities on the continent and support the fight against jihadist groups.
‘You will again see an aggressive fight against Chinese influence in Africa’, according to Tibor Nagy, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Trump and former ambassador to Guinea and Ethiopia.
Investments
In 2023, the United States said it had invested more than $22 billion since Mr Biden took office, but some fear that Mr Trump will reverse these investments and trade. The future president has a more protectionist and insular vision than Mr Biden, and one of the slogans of his first term was ‘America First’, notes the BBC. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), which has allowed eligible African countries to export part of their production to the US tax-free since 2000, is a major source of concern.
During his previous administration, Trump said the scheme would not be renewed when it expired in 2025. And during his 2024 campaign, he pledged to implement a universal 10% tariff on all foreign-made goods. This measure would make imported products more expensive, so African exporters would be likely to sell fewer of their products on the big American market.
But the situation could change. From Egypt to Ethiopia, via Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, many African presidents have welcomed the Republican candidate’s ‘victory’ and, like Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu, hope to be able to ‘cooperate more economically’ with the United States.
‘It is undeniable that access to the many essential minerals that Africa possesses in abundance is necessary for the American economy today, as well as for the technologies that will take us into the future’, said Ambassador J. Peter Pham, former US Special Envoy to Africa. Peter Pham, former US special envoy for Africa’s Sahel region under President Trump. ‘Moreover, the monopolisation of supply chains for these strategic resources by a single country, let alone a revisionist power like China, is a threat to the security of the United States.’
Immigration
Thousands of Africans have already suffered under Donald Trump’s exacerbated protectionism. For ‘security reasons’, his administration halted or restricted the issuing of visas to nationals of Libya, Somalia or Sudan (from 2017), Ghana (in 2019), then Chad or Nigeria (from 2020). The number of students of African origin coming to American universities was almost halved under Trump.
He is going to try to cut funding to certain African associations and NGOs,’ explains Charles Petrie, a senior United Nations official who has worked in Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This will have consequences for many sectors, such as environmental protection, a subject that does not interest him. There is a risk that aid for climate protection will be redirected towards other causes, such as support for evangelists or against the continent’s anti-IVG associations’.
This concerns Africa, because in 2022 around 13,000 African migrants were registered at the US-Mexico border, according to data from US Customs and Border Protection. By 2023, this figure had quadrupled to 58,000. Some of them claim to have fled war, persecution and poverty.
Source: Le Monde, BBC and Semafor
