The New Scramble for Africa
Levan Ramishvili
The competition for influence will shape the continent’s future. Will the U.S. join?
By
Walter Russell MeadWe need to talk about Africa. With major wars raging in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, increased Chinese and Russian activity, jihadi terrorists gaining ground in many places, and American foreign aid on the chopping block, the failed U.S. policy in Africa is past due for some new thinking.
To think clearly about Africa, we have to discard some accumulated nonsense and illusions that get in the way. To begin, we must drop the myth, endlessly promoted by the NGO-industrial complex of consultants and activists, that the struggle between democracy and dictatorship defines the continent’s politics. If only this were true. In reality, democracy has essentially collapsed in much of Africa. According to Freedom House, only 8% of Africans live in countries that can be called “free.” There are no signs that this trend is going to reverse.
The idea that economic potential makes Africa a continent of the future that we neglect at our peril is deeply misguided. Africa has grown economically, and that growth will continue. Should Africa ever realize its potential, Americans will pay it more attention. But until that happens, Africa’s hypothetical future riches will command little attention from the American public. As it is, Africa’s economic importance to the rest of the world revolves around its mineral resources and commodity production. That was true 100 years ago and will likely be true for some time.
What are the real issues we need to consider? The first is the power vacuum. In 1884-85, 13 European nations and the U.S. met in Berlin to set up rules to govern what contemporaries called the “scramble for Africa.” Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s brought formal independence to most of Africa, but European influence (supplemented in places by American power) remained dominant for decades.
That era ended during the Biden years with Russia’s overthrow of what was left of the French sphere of influence, but weak African governments for the most part still rely on outsiders. We are now watching another scramble for Africa. China, Japan and India are all looking to carve out zones of economic influence. In places such as the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and Libya, countries such as Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are increasingly meddling in conflicts, overthrowing governments, or supporting local political movements. The U.S. abstained from the first scramble for Africa. Should it do the same in the sequel? The U.S. could be drawn into the game whether it wants to or not by concerns about jihadist violence or interest in rare-earth minerals in places like Congo.
Weak African states face increasingly existential challenges. The question is less whether particular countries are democratic or not, and more whether they have governments that can actually work. Congo has never really controlled all of its own territory, and in many other places daily life goes on without much presence of national authority. In Ethiopia and Sudan, the power of central authorities is challenged by regional and tribal rebellions. In other places, “tribalism”—which would be called “nationalism” elsewhere—is gaining traction as the artificial postcolonial states enter their sixth or seventh decade of comprehensive failure.
The international scramble for influence and internecine ethnic conflicts often play into the other big African story: the contest between Christianity and Islam. Since the end of the colonial era, Christianity has spread across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Now the two religions confront each other in an arc from western Africa down to Mozambique. In some places relations are cooperative and even cordial. In others, religious differences add fuel to existing ethnic and economic conflicts. Where jihadist groups have weaponized Islam in a quest for power, actual wars of religion are possible.
Americans have real interests in Africa, including access to critical minerals, containing radical Islam, checking the ambitions of geopolitical rivals, promoting global health and simply expressing humanitarian solidarity. What happens in Africa matters.
At the same time, many traditional U.S. policy instruments don’t work well in Africa. Neither economic-development efforts nor democracy promotion have had the desired results. Armies trained and supplied by the U.S. have turned against Washington in some countries. The NGO-industrial complex that feasted on American development aid has fallen prey in too many cases to fashionable wokeism and is often therefore no longer a useful tool of state policy.
Giving foreign aid to failing states served the U.S. reasonably well during the Cold War. We will need to do better in the times that are coming.