Despite its interest in securing mineral supplies, the Trump administration has decided that soft power on the continent is a waste of time and money.
When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa sat down for a meeting with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week, he was likely hoping to strengthen their relationship and boost trade between the two countries. Instead, Trump embarrassed the veteran politician in front of the world’s media with a video that used out-of-context and inaccurate information to suggest that a genocide of White Afrikaner farmers is taking place in South Africa, along with seizures of their land.
The genocide claim has been widely debunked, including by Afrikaner rights groups that decry murders of local farmers. (As if to head off the accusation, Ramaphosa brought two White South African professional golfers and the country’s White agriculture minister to the meeting with Trump, saying, “If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here.”) But that reality hasn’t stopped the US from using the charges as justification to cease almost all aid to South Africa and boycott Group of 20 meetings being held in the country.
The May 21 sit-down was a far cry from Dec. 3, 2024, when then-President Joe Biden visited the Angolan capital of Luanda to celebrate the US’s pivotal role in reviving a 122-year-old railway. The $2.3 billion project aims to expedite the delivery of critical minerals from parts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Angolan port of Lobito — securing an American foothold in the exploitation of some of the world’s biggest deposits of copper and cobalt and signifying US re-engagement with the continent after well over a decade of indifference opened the door to China.
In the space of just six months, and one presidential inauguration later, that rapprochement lies in tatters.
The Trump administration maintains that it’s interested in Africa — specifically in mineral supplies — and talks of bespoke deals with both Congo and Rwanda even as the Lobito project forges ahead. But its actions have set back those aims and harmed its ambition of weakening China’s status as partner of choice for the continent.
In the space of four months, Trump and his appointees have abruptly canceled billions of dollars of health aid for the continent, threatening to reignite an HIV pandemic that had been brought under control. Humanitarian assistance has been slashed, prompting the United Nations World Food Programme to tell staff that it’s “significantly cutting the number of people we can feed.” The organization’s two biggest appeals are in Sudan, where war has left half the population facing extreme hunger, and Congo.
The US also reneged on a pledge to provide $555 million in development finance to Africa’s main multilateral lender, the African Development Bank, and withdrew a $1 billion commitment to a landmark climate finance agreement in South Africa. A broad free-trade agreement in place for 25 years has been effectively scrapped by Trump’s tariffs, including a 50% levy on the nation of Lesotho, which the US president belittled in his state of the union address as a “country nobody has ever heard of.”
All of this, a policy described by the International Crisis Group as “malign neglect,” has been done in the name of aligning foreign aid with US interests. But Trump has effectively decided that so-called soft power, long seen as a way of building alliances between the US and developing nations, is a waste of time and money.
“Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in his Jan. 15 Senate confirmation hearing. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”
What remains to be seen is whether soft power and dealmaking are as mutually exclusive as the US’s Africa pivot makes them out to be. Across the continent, Trump’s aid cuts and reneged pledges have created a climate of uncertainty and ill will toward the US. Analysts say that Africa may chafe at being reduced to a source of critical minerals — resentment that could come back to haunt the United States if it isn’t the only potential partner.
Binaifer Nowrojee, president of Open Society Foundations, told me in March that she saw “an inhumanity” in the way the cuts were executed. Bill Gates went further in an interview with the Financial Times, saying Trump ally Elon Musk has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children by pushing for massive aid cuts.
“What the US is saying very boldly is this is going to be a transactional world,” Nowrojee said. “Even if you are somebody who’s on the poverty line with HIV-AIDS, the question is still the same: What can you do for us?”
The turmoil and abrupt policy changes risk undermining the US’s goal of furthering its interests in the region, and are also creating opportunities for China and an array of other powers competing for the continent’s treasure trove of minerals. That’s a race that the world’s biggest economy was already losing.
There’s little expectation that the $40 billion hole in global aid budgets left by the closure of the US Agency for International Development will be completely filled by other donors. But other nations have already been stepping up targeted assistance in a bid to build influence on the continent.
In February, China and South Korea sent $4 million to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the pan-African public health agency, after the US slashed its funding commitment by $115 million. This month, China followed up with a donation of HIV rapid-testing kits for Zambia, one of the world’s biggest copper producers, and pledged further assistance in the future. In April, an Abu Dhabi-based philanthropy, the Mohamed bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity, fronted a new $600 million initiative for maternal and newborn health care on the continent.
On the sidelines of a February G-20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Johannesburg — which Rubio pointedly boycotted — the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, sought to ease frosty relations with host South Africa, saying any differences between them were in the past. (Points of tension included South Africa’s failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its slow pace of addressing work-permit issues for EU companies operating in the nation.) Less than a month later, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Cape Town and held a long-delayed EU-South Africa summit with Ramaphosa.
The past two months also saw announcements of Chinese commitments in Kenya rail and road networks, and the extension of a $652 million loan by the Export-Import Bank of China for construction of a key Nigerian road.
The US has long tried to get out ahead of China’s overtures on the continent, which include $182 billion of loans to African nations between 2000 and 2023, data collated by Boston University shows. According to talking points distributed to journalists by the US State Department, China has saddled Africa with unsustainable debt and hasn’t made good on its economic promises.
Debt to China has played a role in Africa’s three post-pandemic sovereign defaults — Zambia, Ghana and Ethiopia — and China has been slower than most other creditors to agree to debt restructuring. But those data points belie perceptions on the ground. Much of Africa’s infrastructure has been built with money from China, which accounts for about 13% of the continent’s external borrowings. The US doesn’t feature on a list of major creditors. And while the State Department says that China’s attempts to control African critical minerals poses a threat, in reality US officials realize that they’ve taken an interest in the continent far too late and will struggle to gain a foothold.
Pressure from the administration is having some results for the US private sector: On May 20, Bloomberg reported that South Africa planned to offer Musk an exemption from Black-ownership laws, which would allow him to operate his Starlink internet service in the country. But there’s a limit to what the US can achieve diplomatically with mere promises. Rubio last month prodded Congo and Rwanda toward drafting a peace agreement, saying it would open the door to future investment. But he provided few details, and there’s widespread skepticism it will resolve a complex conflict that’s dragged on for three decades.
As far as commerce is concerned, there is a mountain to climb. While cheap Chinese goods no doubt hinder local manufacturing, they help drive positive perceptions of the Asian nation among African youth, according to biennial surveys by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation. China has held a regular economic and political summits with most African countries since 2000, and in 2011 supplanted the US as sub-Saharan Africa’s main trade partner — a position America held for decades. Last year, China did $213 billion of trade with the region. At just under $53 billion, the US lagged behind the United Arab Emirates and India.
If history is anything to go by, Trump is unlikely to turn the relationship around. In his first term, Trump had the least interaction with African presidents of any of the past 12 US presidents, meeting only the leaders of Kenya and Nigeria, according to a study by Judd Devermont, senior director for African Affairs under Biden. During that period, Trump referred to Namibia as “Nambia” and used an expletive to describe African nations.
More recently, US officials were conspicuously absent in Tanzania at the January launch of the World Bank-backed Mission 300 program, a drive worth as much as $85 billion to bring electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030, including through private investment. The event was meant to showcase what Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah described as “the biggest and most important global development project happening anywhere in the world” — and the world’s largest economy wasn’t there.
Private investment is significant — US companies say they account for a tenth of South Africa’s economic output — but that investment isn’t enough to offset the impact of US policy changes, and is less nimble than the state-driven approach offered by China. An African president once told me that in order to win US investment, his country had to meet around 30 conditions. The chief executive of one Kenyan bank told me a deal with a US company collapsed after the American firm’s risk department deemed the African country too unsafe for its executives to travel there to sign the agreement.
Now even Africans hoping for a change of heart from the current US administration are looking elsewhere. South African agricultural lobby groups are urging their government to secure more access to Middle Eastern and Asian markets.
Zambia’s Samuel Maimbo, who’s running for president of the African Development Bank, says the US funding cuts are a “wake-up call” for the continent to diversify its sources of development financing. If the US pivot is permanent, Maimbo says, “we’ll take a different path.” His competitor, Mauritania’s Sidi Ould Tah, says there’s plenty of money available in Gulf Cooperation Council nations to help fund African nations’ development.
The US has for the first time “actively made a decision to disengage,” said Martyn Davies, a visiting professor at IE Business School in Spain who studies investment in Africa. “It’s no longer theoretical.”
For well over a decade the US has trailed China in the contest to secure critical mineral supply chains and broader trade in Africa, an arena where there’s increasing competition from other powers. Now it seems to have taken itself out of the race.