The New US National Security Strategy

Opportunities for engagement could include negotiating settlements to ongoing conflicts (e.g., DRC-Rwanda, Sudan), and preventing new ones (e.g., Ethiopia-Eritrea-Somalia), as well as action to amend our approach to aid and investment...

A Thin Africa Policy Covers Familiar Territory

Michelle D. Gavin is the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Africa portion of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy is positioned as a dramatic shift from the past, but it ultimately echoes several priorities of past administrations. Conflict resolution, conflict prevention, and increasing U.S.-Africa trade and investment are not new focal points.

The text’s references to “select states” bear similarity to the “anchor states” concept of the George W. Bush administration, and the reference to opportunities in the power sector is not such a far cry from the Barack Obama administration’s effort to expand energy access. Some will find a glimmer of hope in the strategy's explicit reference to reforming the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a market access regime established under President Bill Clinton for African goods that has lapsed under the Trump administration.

But the three paragraphs this strategy devotes to the vast African continent also raise many unanswered questions. It has nothing to say about governance, while expressing a desire to work with “capable, reliable states.” Attractive investment climates cannot be established without effective governance, the rule of law, and functioning accountability mechanisms to curb corruption.

But these ideas do not appear to animate the administration’s search for “select partners.” While the strategy suggests the United States should be concerned about metastasizing violent extremism that has taken root in the Sahel and elsewhere, it has nothing at all to say about what to do about it. Overall, the scanty section is neither the dramatic pivot it claims to be, nor is it an illuminating window into planned U.S. strategy toward a continent that will soon boast one-quarter of all the people on the planet.

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