The Bureaucratic Tax on Africa Policy

This pattern has continued to repeat itself. The United States has regularly subordinated its interests in Africa to advance objectives in another regions. Initially, it was in service of European priorities, but it gradually expanded to include Middle East and Indo-Pacific issues. By the time I became special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council, the trade-offs between Africa and the rest of the world had become constant and compounding. Each act of geographic deference functioned as a tax, removing more resources and reducing additional decision-making space. The cumulative effect was a U.S.-Africa policy stripped, trade-off by trade-off, of its vitality and effectiveness.

Washington’s Cold War handling of Guinea was hardly unique. In 1955, the State Department sent a memo to its posts about its policy toward sub-Saharan Africa:

Our ability to pursue a course of action with respect to the African area concerned will always be affected by the requirements of our policy towards the Metropolitan Powers. … [I]f a showdown occurs between the needs of our European policy and those of our African policy, we shall have to recognize the superior demands of our alliance system in Europe.

This deference to European interests and the relative bureaucratic weaknesses of the newly established Bureau of African Affairs severely hampered U.S. policy. One former ambassador wrote in his memoirs that the European Bureau was “dictating our African policy.” Examples abound: Washington slow-walked recognition of Zanzibar’s independence due to the United Kingdom and withheld support for self-determination in Angola, Mozambique, and other Lusophone colonies because U.S. basing rights in the Azores and Portugal’s standing as a NATO ally took precedence. In a foreword to a 2004 book on U.S. policy toward Portugal’s African colonies, former U.S. Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci acknowledged that U.S. policymakers “were torn between supporting African aspirations and protecting our strategic military equities in the Azores. In the end we did nothing, and the communists occupied the vacuum.”

By the early 1970s, the policy tension between African and European interests started to rear its head in relation to other regions. U.S. diplomats in Africa bemoaned the fact that they were instructed to waste precious time on the almost impossible task of persuading regional governments to withhold their recognition of Beijing in the 1960s and early 1970s. One U.S. diplomat recalled spending hours trying to persuade Taipei’s representative to postpone his departure from the Republic of Congo, while another recounted that he was under “great pressure to get the Togolese to vote for a two China policy … the only time that the Department ever showed any interest in Togo.”

Just before the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the “increasing alignment of African countries on the Arab side of the Middle East dispute interjects another issue on which Africans and the US do not agree.” This ultimately hijacked parts of U.S. policy toward the region: In 1974, U.S. officials suggested that Israel had become an impediment to productive discussions with Congress on Horn of Africa priorities, and even Secretary of State Henry Kissinger complained that the White House Office of Management and Budget was blocking him from transferring money earmarked for Israel to support his African agenda.

During the Biden administration, I experienced firsthand how these trade-offs with other regional priorities handcuffed U.S. policy in Africa. In my case, however, it wasn’t one region or two or three—it was everywhere all at once. It reached a crescendo in part because restoring U.S. leadership in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first Trump administration required directing resources to multiple regions. It also stemmed from the growing interest in Africa from U.S. allies and adversaries. As I wrote in the 2022 U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa: “The world is keenly aware of Africa’s importance, spurring countries to expand their political, economic, and security engagement with African states.” The administration’s competing priorities and balancing act with close allies left Africa policy, at times, hostage to European, Indo-Pacific, and Near East interests on the continent.

This policy predicament came into focus within our first year. After infuriating France with the AUKUS nuclear submarine agreement, U.S. leadership needed to console Paris with a concession somewhere else. The answer, of course, was in Africa. We were instructed to do more to help France in the Sahel, precipitating a series of policy meetings and a consultation in Paris led by our newly confirmed assistant secretary for African affairs. This went beyond the normal (and much criticized) U.S. willingness to either defer to France in its former colonies or outsource security responses to the French military—approaches that often have been to the detriment of U.S. interests. This was more transactional: Africa was served up as a sacrificial lamb.

The same mindset plagued the distribution of resources, especially when Indo-Pacific priorities were concerned. Even though Africa has comparatively limited funds and personnel, we often fought a losing battle to preserve what little we had. The Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, rerouted more than a dozen deputy defense attaché positions on the continent as part of a broader reallocation of resources to China. When a coup in Sudan in October 2021 required a suspension of $700 million earmarked to support the country’s democratic transition, some $200 million of the total was purloined for various Pacific island states. We were left with a small sum for Sudan and other issues in the region.

Ironically, despite what observers might have assumed, it still felt like pulling teeth to secure additional funding to counter Chinese threats in Africa. We met regular resistance from parts of the State and Defense departments to help us deter African states from entertaining the possibility of Chinese naval bases.

The most vexing problem, however, was our growing entanglement with the Near East. In an echo from that earlier era, our engagement with Israel and Gulf states often took precedent over U.S. interests in Africa. During the first Trump and Biden administrations, there was pressure to sign up more countries to the Abraham Accords with Israel, even when that required circumventing or complicating our existing bilateral policies toward those African actors. At one point, I was asked to reallocate funding from Africa to support a Near East priority.

What’s more, our close partnerships with certain Gulf states made it harder to engage in frank conversations about their destabilizing actions in the region. Amid reports of Emirati support for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, most U.S. private engagements and public statements trod lightly on the matter. And when we had a disagreement over the direction of a policy that affected Africa and Near East interests, we were arguing from a position of weakness.

None of this is to say we didn’t win some of the debates over proposed meetings or certain initiatives, but the burden of proof almost always fell on the Africa team. There was a persistent fear that we might upset partners in the Gulf or elsewhere if we opted for a policy that favored African priorities, even if we were discussing an engagement in Africa.

The impact of all these accommodations, of course, is a policy hemmed in by other priorities. It is entirely understandable that certain issues take precedent over Africa ones—indeed, they sometimes should. But the overall toll of these trade-offs is underappreciated. Since each trade-off happens in a vacuum, it obscures the overall impact until it is too late.

Moreover, this approach not only gradually weakens and hollows out U.S. policies, but it saps the country’s political standing on the continent. At least one East African leader pointedly asked several U.S. officials whether the United States even trusted its African partners to handle the Sudan portfolio given the U.S. deference to a Saudi-led peace process. A West African prime minister asked me why we weren’t doing more to address extremism in the Sahel, which he viewed as an existential threat on par with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A foreign minister repeatedly implored us to stop following French policies, which he deemed as toxic and counterproductive. The cost of being last in line—and viewed as peripheral—is real and detrimental.

There are no quick fixes to this challenge. Policy trade-offs are part of the process, and Africa’s relative importance to U.S. national security almost certainly will spur similar calculations in the future. What is necessary, however, is greater transparency, accountability, and balance in the U.S. approach. The cumulative policy taxes need to be tracked as a whole, not as individual transactions. Further, not everything that happens elsewhere outweighs U.S. interests in Africa. Sending precious resources to other parts of the world, for example, may have a modest upside there but pose a significant downside for African interests.

Said plainly, deference to U.S. allies and partners is not the same as advancing U.S. interests. It is often the exact opposite.