Africa Needs More American Involvement—Not Less

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing headwinds it hasn’t experienced in more than 30 years. Since 2020, the region has been buffeted by coups, conflicts, and crises, with nine military takeovers in the past five years, more than the total number of coups d’état in the region between 2010 and 2020. In 2023, the region had the highest number of state-based conflicts (28) in the world and accounted for nearly half of all internally displaced people (34.8 million) worldwide. Governments are trampling on democratic norms—manipulating election results in Zimbabwe (2023), jettisoning term limits in Togo (2024), and postponing elections in Senegal (2024). The junta in Mali kicked out United Nations peacekeepers last December. The one in Niger expelled U.S. forces in March. Russia subsequently expanded its footprint in both countries.

The current level of upheaval in Africa is staggering but not unprecedented. It recalls another period of turmoil and volatility on the continent in the early 1990s. Then, as now, the old international system was unraveling while a new world order remained unformed. Geopolitical shifts, such as the rejection of international norms and the rise of new major and middle powers, have rendered sub-Saharan Africa more susceptible to internal mischief and external manipulation.

But a painful moment of transition need not calcify into a permanent state. Under the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the United States invested heavily in African leadership and capacity, invigorated U.S. development and trade initiatives, and leveraged presidential engagement to counter the forces of disorder. These approaches ushered in years of positive outcomes for the United States and its African partners, including the end to six major conflicts by 2005 and significant improvements in education, health, and reducing poverty. It is possible to again help Africa get back on its feet and play an essential role in shaping global affairs—but only if policymakers in Washington resource and execute a sound strategy for doing so.

TURBULENT TIMES

The end of the Cold War was a mixed blessing for sub-Saharan Africa. On the positive side of the ledger, it ushered in multiparty democracy in many countries. Several African countries that had been led by authoritarian rulers backed by the Soviet Union or the United States became more responsive to their own publics. Incumbents lost at the ballot box in Benin in 1991, in the Republic of Congo in 1992, and in Burundi and the Central African Republic in 1993. In other places, the Cold War’s end radically changed the domestic calculus, compelling belligerents to sue for peace because the flow of weapons had been cut off or obliging autocratic rulers to open political space because the support of external powers had faded. In 1990, Namibia won its independence from South Africa. Two years later, a 14-year civil war in Mozambique came to an end. And in 1994, South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime dissolved into a vibrant multiracial democracy led by Nelson Mandela.

But behind this highlight reel was a far more turbulent reality. As Russia and the United States backed away from their Cold War–era client states and as the International Monetary Fund started to impose austerity measures and conditions-based assistance on African nations, much of the region tipped into conflict and crisis. Long-standing regimes that had been propped up by foreign money and military support swiftly lost their strangleholds on power. Unable to dole out patronage or repress political opponents, these teetering governments suddenly faced violent rebellions and revolts.

In December 1989, the Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor launched an insurgency that sparked a 14-year civil war. Later, he backed guerrilla fighters in Sierra Leone, adding fuel to an 11-year civil war. In 1990, Somalia’s civil war intensified, leading to the collapse of the central government and de facto control by rival militias, often along clan lines. In 1994, ethnic Hutu extremists in Rwanda assassinated President Juvénal Habyarimana, triggering genocide against the Tutsi and mass killings of moderate Hutu and other groups. And in 1997, a rebel coalition in Zaire ousted President Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocratic and enfeebled regime, setting the stage for what came to be known as Africa’s World War; seven countries deployed troops to back proxies in a country the size of western Europe. This period, from the early 1990s to early 2000s, represented a nadir for the region, resulting in the deaths of six to seven million people. Although the circumstances underlying each conflict differed, the constant was that the end of decades of predatory and divisive rule bankrolled by external powers unleashed pent-up public anger and uncuffed rebel leaders determined to seize power at all costs.

During this period, the American government’s focus lay elsewhere. Washington had other priorities, such as evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990–91 and reunifying Germany. U.S. bilateral aid to Africa had reached a peak of $1.2 billion in 1992 but did not return to that level until 2011. Starting in 1993, the U.S. government stripped away resources and reassigned personnel from Africa. The State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs lost 70 positions and closed consulates or embassies in Cameroon, Comoros, Kenya, and Nigeria. The Central Intelligence Agency shuttered 15 stations in Africa, according to press reports. “There’s a profound lack of interest [in Africa] in this town and in the White House right now,” an anonymous U.S. policymaker told the newsletter Africa Confidential in 1991. “There’s a feeling that with the Cold War over, we don’t really need a policy.”

Although the cessation of U.S. efforts to use African states as Cold War proxies was a welcome development, the United States’ drawback from the continent greatly exacerbated its difficulties. Africa’s multiple and expanding conflicts proved highly resistant to diplomatic resolution. UN missions established in Angola and Rwanda in 1988 and 1993 had been configured to observe elections and monitor cease-fires, not respond to outbreaks of major fighting or genocide. Even on the limited occasions when the United States did step in, the results were tragic. President George H. W. Bush’s deployment of U.S. troops to Somalia in 1992 ended with the slaughter of 18 soldiers during the Black Hawk Down incident in October 1993. The same year, Clinton’s backing of the deployment of West African troops in Liberia failed to prevent a brutal massacre of 600 civilians at a camp for displaced people.

A CHANGE OF COURSE

In 1994, Clinton sent a heavily underlined copy of an Atlantic article by Robert Kaplan titled “The Coming Anarchy” to Donald Steinberg, his senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. “West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger,” Kaplan concluded in the article. Across the front page, Clinton had scribbled, “Is this true?”

Steinberg responded with a long memo, including a cover sheet with a passage from A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge asks, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of the things that may be, only?” Scrooge answers his own question: “If the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” Clinton marked the memo with a big exclamation point and returned it to Steinberg. The White House jumped into action, crafting a new approach to Africa. This included partnering with African governments to demobilize bloated African armies, clear land mines, and train an estimated 6,000 African peacekeepers, as well as increasing U.S. staffing and appointing special envoys to manage the increased workload. Notably, in his second term, Clinton traveled twice to the region and signed the landmark African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allowed U.S. companies and consumers to import thousands of products from African countries duty-free.

The George W. Bush administration took U.S. policy on Africa to new heights, thanks in part to the president’s personal interest in the region. His government supported more robust UN missions to Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan and significantly expanded security training and nonlethal assistance to 55,000 peacekeepers from 18 African countries. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Defense established the U.S. Africa Command, responsible for U.S. military activities in all of Africa except Egypt. The command has helped African countries respond to a variety of security and nonsecurity crises, including the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Bush’s contributions to African development and public health were even more impressive. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched in 2003, has helped more than 25 million individuals living with HIV/AIDS. From the despair and uncertainty of the early 1990s, the Clinton and Bush administrations constructed a new policy framework for the post–Cold War era. Based on building African capacity, increasing U.S. investment, and leveraging presidential engagement, it not only yielded positive results for American and African interests but also became the bedrock of Africa strategy for every successive U.S. administration.

ECHOES OF HISTORY

Today, U.S. strategy on Africa faces a similar test. As in the early 1990s, Africa’s outlook is not unremittingly grim. Since 2020, opposition parties have won national elections and taken power peacefully in ten countries. Smooth successions followed the deaths of leaders in Tanzania and Namibia in 2021 and 2024. The media and civil society continue to hold governments to account for corruption and abuse in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. In late June, young Kenyans protested a new tax law, forcing President William Ruto to withdraw his support following deadly clashes in front of the parliament building. After the shocks of COVID-19 and rampant inflation triggered by Russia’s war against Ukraine, sub-Saharan Africa’s economic picture is starting to brighten: average growth in the region is expected to hit 3.8 percent this year, slightly better than the global average.

Yet the breakdown of the international rules-based order is already inflicting real damage in sub-Saharan Africa as great powers turn their attention elsewhere—or backpedal on their commitments to norms as they jostle for influence in contested regions of the world. This damage is most evident in the recent spate of military takeovers. Africa has long been prone to coups—of 492 attempted or successful coups carried out around the world since 1950, it has seen more than any other region. After the Cold War ended, however, stronger global standards against military takeovers began to take hold: during the Cold War, only 30 percent of all coups received international condemnation from the West, but as a new consensus emerged, most coups were condemned by at least one Western government or multilateral institution in the late 1990s. Building on this trend, every coup between 2005 and 2009 was denounced by a Western power. Even Russia observed this norm for a spell, calling for the restoration of democratic rule following a 2003 coup in Guinea-Bissau and a 2008 coup in Mauritania.

This anti-coup norm is no longer operative today, making it easier for ambitious military leaders to overthrow civilian governments while facing little or no consequences. Vigorous responses by African regional bodies and by the United States, which is required by law to restrict its assistance to junta-led countries, have become the exception. Africa’s military rulers have had no shortage of external partners that leverage these illegal power grabs to secure influence and resources. Russia is the main culprit, using its political capital and mercenaries to gain favor with African military leaders in exchange for geopolitical influence and the right to exploit the continent’s minerals. The Malian military, for instance, shielded by its Russian backers, has repeatedly extended its hold on power and committed horrific abuses against the civilian population without concern for international censure. In Niger, the military junta that assumed power last year has cemented its control by exploiting global fissures, courting Russian military support, and reportedly negotiating with Iran over access to Nigerien uranium.

The rise of new foreign actors has also contributed to Africa’s volatility, enflaming regional tensions and prolonging civil wars. There has been a marked increase in new embassies, military agreements, and trade links between African countries and external partners over the past decade. The Gulf states’ and Turkey’s gains have been the most spectacular: since 2012, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates have each at least doubled the number of embassies they maintain in sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabia plans to increase its diplomatic posts from 28 to 40. While a closer trade relationship is usually a net positive, these new actors also have increasingly inserted themselves into African conflicts, including by transferring weapons and facilitating gold smuggling. Iran, Turkey, and the UAE have supplied drones to Ethiopian security forces to turn the tide in Addis Ababa’s war against ethnic Tigrayans. Iran and the UAE are arming opposing sides in the Sudanese civil war, which has already displaced ten million people, claimed more than 150,000 lives, and spurred fears of another genocide in Darfur.

There has not been a new peacekeeping mission to Africa since 2014.

As in the early 1990s, the global struggle to define the future of the international system is driving disorder in Africa. With Western powers focused on addressing the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, they are not directing enough attention and resources to meet the current challenges facing sub-Saharan Africa. To be sure, the Biden administration has made important strides. It staged the 2022 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which resulted in pledges to spend $55 billion on landmark infrastructure, clean energy, and digital connectivity projects; it hosted the Kenyan president this spring in the first state visit by an African leader in 16 years, which led to an upgrade in Kenya’s status as a major non-NATO ally. But these efforts fall short of meeting the region’s needs and have necessitated difficult tradeoffs. President Joe Biden did not fulfill his pledge to travel to Africa in 2023, and the White House withdrew a $200 million supplemental request to help counter the destabilizing activities of malign Russian actors in African countries.

In another echo of the 1990s, the policy toolkit for the region has lost its potency. The UN Security Council has become paralyzed. In 2013, it spent some 50 percent of its time discussing African crises; in 2023, African issues constituted only 38 percent of council discussions, UN documents show. Moreover, there has not been a new peacekeeping mission to Africa since 2014. U.S. sanctions have become easier to evade because the individuals targeted conduct business in nondollar denominations. Third-party countries, especially in the Gulf, have refrained from acting against sanctioned entities, such as companies based in the UAE with links to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

At the same time, the United States can no longer rely on its traditional partners in Europe or Africa to help it respond to emerging crises in the region. Since Brexit, the United Kingdom has been distracted with domestic politics, and France’s brand has become increasingly toxic in swaths of French-speaking Africa because of Paris’s political, economic, and security ties to unpopular African leaders. Kenya still consistently deploys troops and dispatches diplomatic envoys to neighboring conflict zones. But Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa, the region’s powerhouses, are too overwhelmed by their own internal security and political crises to step up.

REIMAGINING OLD APPROACHES

The Biden administration’s U.S. strategy toward sub-Saharan Africa, which I took the lead in drafting while serving at the National Security Council as a special adviser from October 2021 to June 2022 and then as the senior director for African affairs until late February of this year, seeks to reimagine old approaches that are insufficient to meet the challenges of a more contested and competitive world. Thus far, Washington’s efforts—based on establishing real partnerships, elevating African voices, and pioneering new approaches—have had an uneven track record. Judging from history, it will take time to build and stress-test new tools to address the region’s complex and evolving challenges. It is vital for the United States to replicate the ingenuity that steered the U.S.-African relationship through the last period of global transition.

As the world’s youngest and fast-growing region, sub-Saharan Africa is playing a decisive role in determining the balance of global opinion on every issue that matters. The current U.S. strategy acknowledges that Africans want to pick their own partners and that Washington should not press Africans to choose between the United States and its adversaries in a simplistic us-versus-them fashion. It calls for constructive dialogue, privileging consultation and engagement especially on areas of disagreement. To address Africa and the broader international community’s challenges, the strategy recognizes that African leaders are prepared to work with the United States but also with China and regional powers in Europe, the Gulf, East Asia, and South Asia. At every step of the way, Africa should be in the lead. That conviction led Biden to press for a permanent seat for Africa at the UN Security Council, the inclusion of the African Union in the G-20, and the expansion of African voices in the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral development banks.

But the region’s challenges demand sustained interest from the highest levels of U.S. government, as well as more innovation and investment. The United States will have to better support Africa’s capacity to prevent, mediate, and resolve conflicts. U.S. training, expertise, and convening power are essential, as is an increase in staffing on Africa and the allocation of new resources. Issues in Africa need time and attention from the president, the U.S. Congress, and the American public. Some of the most important achievements in U.S.-African history, from the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s to curbing the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s, have benefited from presidential decisions, congressional action, and public agitation for change.

Washington’s efforts in Africa have had an uneven track record.

Furthermore, a new U.S. strategy necessitates new tools. Some promising nontraditional efforts are already underway. In Gabon, the United States has restored some assistance to incentivize further progress toward a democratic transition. In Somalia, where the terrorist group al Shabab remains a threat, Washington is working closely with Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, and the United Kingdom to advance shared security goals. In eastern Congo, the U.S. director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has helped broker temporary cease-fires between the parties to the conflict. In late December, the United States joined its fellow UN Security Council members in a resolution to fund up to 75 percent of African regional peacekeeping operations. The United States is also financing a transportation corridor connecting the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia with global markets through Angola.

Washington must build on this momentum. Unlike in the 1990s, it cannot go at it alone. It needs to work more closely with India, Japan, and South Korea on economic issues and with eastern European partners on security challenges in the Sahel. The U.S. government must pursue direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversations with the Gulf states about arming combatants in regional conflicts. Washington must also engage African leaders such as Angola, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa—whose new coalition government may result in more centrist policies—on global and regional challenges, and it must continue to help Nigeria regain its capacity to lead the continent.

Persistent, widespread unrest in Africa is not a foregone conclusion. For U.S. policymakers, the lesson of post–Cold War chaos in the early 1990s is simple: the region’s challenges require high-level attention, sufficient resources, and creativity. Washington must execute its new vision and implement new policies, programs, and partnerships. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Sudan, where suffering is extreme and consistently overlooked as other hot spots around the world claim attention. A successful effort in Sudan could be a test case for a new approach in an era of global disorder. After all, if the course be departed from, the ends will change.