The Biden administration is pushing a revamp of lagging U.S. relations with Africa with a charm offensive that has included a summit of continental leaders in Washington, a parade of high-level diplomatic visits to resource-rich nations and promises of vast private investments.
Yet analysts say the White House has barely managed to counter the trade and economic inroads and increasingly robust political influence that China has established over the past decade.
Beijing is out-trading and out-investing the U.S. across Africa by nearly 400%, putting the Chinese Communist Party in the driver’s seat of an increasingly Cold War-style competition for friends and influence on the world’s fastest-growing continent with one of the largest reserves of precious metals and other natural resources.
Polling shows most Africans favor U.S.-style democracy over Chinese autocracy, but few dispute that Beijing has established a massive foothold with infrastructure development. China has also become Africa’s top foreign direct investment and trade partner.
“They are dwarfing us when it comes to commercial investment and trade,” said Joseph Sany, who heads the Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace.
China might not employ the Western playbook, but that’s a secondary consideration for investment-starved African leaders.
“Even if China’s investments involve opacity and exploitation, their increased commercial engagement has forced Washington to shift its priorities,” Mr. Sany said in an interview. “The Biden administration is faced with the challenge of flipping the script of U.S. policy.”
Analysts say many Africans see the U.S. tied down by a war in Ukraine and determined to challenge China for dominance in East Asia. They conclude that the developing countries of Africa can hardly be a top priority for U.S. administrations, whether Democratic or Republican.
“Instead of seeing Africa as the weakest link in a network of American allies and partners around the world, and shaping U.S. policy purely around aid, we need to start leading with trade and investment. But we have a lot of catch-up to do compared to China. A lot of catch-up,” Mr. Sany said.
He said President Biden’s overall messaging on Africa struck the right tone but warned that U.S. programs for generating the kind of private investment that can truly compete with China on the continent need major streamlining and attention — soon.
The Trump administration pushed market-focused reforms at the slow-moving U.S. Agency for International Development to counter China’s massive Belt and Road investments. Fifty-two countries have at least nominally signed up for Beijing’s massive infrastructure financing program, which is involved in developing ports in Djibouti and Algeria, rail lines in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, and dams and solar power farms in Sudan, among other projects.
In 2018, President Trump signed a bill creating the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., which merged key private capital functions of USAID. It essentially doubled Washington’s fund for insuring private foreign investments by American companies to the tune of about $60 billion. The Trump administration also created the Prosper Africa initiative within USAID to increase two-way trade deals.
Questions now swirl around how much the Biden administration has maintained the momentum.
In January, Mr. Biden dispatched Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on a 10-day visit to Africa to promote economic connectivity with the United States.
The Treasury secretary made headlines in Zambia by calling on China to forgive billions of dollars in what U.S. critics say are predatory loans to the resource-rich nation. Little public discussion was given to Washington’s work with private American companies to replace Chinese-government-backed firms that dominate Zambia’s vast cobalt and copper markets. Analysts say these markets are essential to the mass production of batteries and other green technologies.
Ms. Yellen’s trip was one of several high-level visits that Mr. Biden says will culminate with his own trip to the continent.
Vice President Kamala Harris toured Zambia, Tanzania and Ghana last month. She noted that 19 is the median age of Africa’s more than 1.4 billion people and reminded reporters that soon, “1 in 4 people on this Earth will be on this continent.”
Ms. Harris announced more than $1 billion in public and private aid for women’s economic empowerment. The Associated Press said the funds are expected to come from nonprofit foundations, private companies and the U.S. government to expand access to digital services, provide job training and support entrepreneurs.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was in Kenya, Mozambique and Ghana in January, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled last month to Ethiopia and Niger. State Department officials said Mr. Blinken’s trip focused on various issues, including “climate and a just energy transition.”
The surge of high-level American visits to Africa is “pretty well unprecedented,” Tibor Nagy, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, recently told Politico. “And say it or not, of course this is about China.”
African leaders welcome Washington’s and Beijing’s competition for business, but some are wary of being sucked into an increasingly hostile, zero-sum competition between the globe’s two economic superpowers.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema pointedly told Ms. Harris that it would be “completely wrong” to hold his country’s interests hostage to the rivalry between the U.S. and China.
“When I’m in Washington, I’m not against Beijing. When I’m in Beijing, I’m not against Washington,” he said. “None of these relationships are about working against someone or a group of countries.”
Calling out China
Critics say the administration should call out China’s more mercantilist approach to the continent, where a single-minded focus on money hurts in other ways.
“Rather than focus on climate change as a broad concept, Biden could help Africans in an immediate way by focusing attention on China’s rape of the environment, offering remedies to help clean up Beijing’s mess, and then helping match American businesses more respectful of the countries in which they operate,” Michael Rubin, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote recently for 19fortyfive.com.
Pentagon officials warn of Beijing’s efforts to challenge U.S. interests and allies in Africa with expanding military activities and other aggressive moves. The White House, however, was reluctant to mention China at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December.
The president headlined the historic three-day gathering of 49 African leaders by pledging $55 billion in economic, health and security support over three years. He declared that the U.S. is “all-in” on Africa’s future.
Administration officials said the goal was to “listen to and meet African aspirations” while focusing on “revitalizing democracies and strengthening the free and open international order.” Regarding China’s courting of African countries, one senior official said the summit was “not about other countries and their engagement” on the continent.
Some analysts have praised the administration’s soft rhetoric.
“In contrast with the Trump administration’s approach to the region, which largely saw the continent as a ‘great power’ battleground between Russia, China, and the United States, the Biden approach is considerably more balanced and recognizes that Africans live increasingly globalized lives,” Prosper Africa coordinator Witney Schneidman and Brookings Institution senior fellow Landry Signe wrote for Brookings last year.
Mr. Sany also praised the administration’s decision to play down the rivalry with China. “It shows they are listening to Africans, and Africans don’t want to be forced to make a choice between the U.S. and China,” he said. “Africans will tell you, ‘We paid the price for the Cold War. We know what it looks like, and we don’t want another Cold War.’”
“It matters, and Africans are appreciating it. I can say that based on my conversations with African leaders,” he said. “But we all know that as Americans, we should be asking, ‘What are we doing on the continent?’”
‘We have to be more agile’
Mr. Sany said “Africa is home to vast reserves of strategic minerals and critical minerals that are necessary for the energy transition of the future.”
“We saw how Russia controlled European natural gas and reserves and how that control really affected Europe and U.S. allies in the world,” he said. “Imagine a situation where China controls the strategic and the critical mineral reserves in Africa, and all of a sudden you have a war in Taiwan, and China is sitting on those reserves in Africa. You can imagine the leverage China will have, right?”
America’s long-term challenge, he said, is to promote more sustainable engagement than “the Chinese model, which is extractive.”
“[The Chinese] come and take the resources — the cobalt and the lithium — they take them to China. With the Belt and Road Initiative, the railroads lead to ports. That’s how they do it,” he said. “The American model is different. It’s that we want to extract, but do so while making sure that value is created locally so that it can benefit local populations. This is a very different model.”
The problem? The U.S. approach does not yield quick returns.
“We have to be more agile, more nimble and effective in order to compete with China,” Mr. Sany said.
Washington, he said, must move quickly to “streamline” instruments that successive administrations have established to channel investment into Africa, including the Trump-era International Development Finance Corp. and Prosper Africa initiative, and the George W. Bush-era Millennium Challenge Corp.
Those instruments … have to be streamlined or more robustly resourced with staffing power so they have what is needed to work more effectively and quickly,” Mr. Sany said, and Washington should be focused on “beefing up our embassies across Africa with multiple commercial attaches.”
“We need people at the embassies who understand not only development, but business — what it is to put together private-public partnerships, how to advise governments on how to prepare the deals so the deals can actually happen and work. You have to make sure that American businesses are supported when they want to invest on the continent so you have to have people who can advise American businesses and host governments so they can nail the deals. If you don’t have those people in the embassies, you can’t nail those deals.”
“Right now, I don’t see those movements. I hear positive rhetoric and I see good intentions, but so far we are still at the beginning stage of the paradigm shift away from aid-focused policy and toward robust economic engagement that African nations seek.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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