President Biden’s decision this summer to abandon his reelection campaign, resigning himself to only one term in office, did more than just rewrite the script of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. He has accelerated to the top of his agenda questions about what his legacy will be and how he will be remembered. In Africa, there is no clear answer.
What Biden’s legacy is most likely to be measured against are his own sentiments and aspirations for Africa as expressed in his 2022 Africa Strategy. This document laid out for the first time a modern, strategic, and comprehensive vision of Africa—not one defined by charity or geopolitics. The central thrust of this quadrennial undertaking was that by 2050, Africa will be the most populous region in the world, home to minerals needed to power a modern world and economy and with enough voting weight in global institutions to give the continent a consequential voice in global decisionmaking. These facts, Biden contends, mean that the United States can no longer relegate Africa to second-tier status. Instead, the strategy argues forcefully, and convincingly, that wherever decisions are being made with global impact, African voices need to be heard.
That sounds good, but the challenge with such an ambitious approach has always been in the implementation—and here, the Biden administration has fallen short of its own rhetoric. After all, Africa’s problem isn’t that the United States didn’t see it as a continent of the future; it’s that the United States only ever sees it as a continent of the future. Unless and until what happens in Africa affects the United States’ present-day national security interests, the promise of Biden’s strategy will remain just that: a promise.
But in the rush to define an Africa legacy in the waning months of the Biden administration, three issues have emerged upon which much of that legacy will rest, some by design and others by circumstance: Biden’s personal engagement with Africa; his efforts to raise Africa’s voice in global institutions; and the administration’s response to the war in Sudan, the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis.
Upping Africa Engagement
At Biden’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December 2022, the president made the bold assertion that he was “all in on Africa”; a made-for-TV sound bite that he has repeated, but which many Africans view as largely empty rhetoric nearly two years later. Promising to “accelerate high-level exchanges” with Africa, a parade of cabinet and subcabinet level officials traveled to the continent in the last 22 months, crisscrossing nearly half the continent’s 54 countries. But a “whole of government approach” to Africa where presidential involvement is largely absent misses the point and, on this score, Biden has fared poorly.
In his nearly four years in office, President Biden has hosted fewer than a handful of Africans for Oval Office visits. He makes phone calls to African leaders with similar frequency. Only South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, who visited in the absence of attending Biden’s Africa summit; Angolan president João Lourenço, who visited less than a year before President Biden traveled to Angola this month; and Kenyan president William Ruto, who enjoyed a state visit this past spring only after President Biden canceled a promised visit to Africa, have had individual Oval Office meetings. More galling for Africans was the lack of one-on-one meetings between President Biden and African heads of state at his leaders summit, some of whom complained about “crossing the ocean to come [to Washington]” only to be “loaded into buses like school kids” and then not being offered a private photograph or handshake with the president—a diplomatic courtesy extended to them in other bilateral summits with China and Russia.
But the most damaging aspect of Biden’s program of increased engagement with Africa was entirely self-inflicted. After repeatedly promising African leaders that he would travel to the continent, in the wake of the Gaza conflict last year, the White House quietly canceled the visit, to little fanfare and with even less explanation. But in the wake of his withdrawal from the presidential race, Biden now has the time to correct this sleight and has announced a hastily organized trip to Angola from October 13 to 15. But in the waning days of an administration that has insufficiently matched its rhetoric with reality, his visit feels more like a box-checking exercise for an ally that has already received more than its fair share of high-level U.S. attention.
Ironically, the administration’s choice of Angola does more to expose an Africa policy that has fallen short of its own strategy’s ambition and shows that U.S. thinking is still fundamentally rooted in twentieth-century (or even nineteenth-century) thinking, rather than in transformational twenty-first-century partnerships the administration has promised. After all, presidential visits to Africa typically aim to do one of several things: celebrate an achievement, assess progress, or lay out a new vision. Think of President George W. Bush dancing jubilantly with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia as he celebrated the country’s progress coming out of a brutal civil war his administration worked so hard to end. Or Barack Obama’s trip to Accra, Ghana, where he signaled a recommitment to the United States’ democratic values in Africa.
In Angola, the reality is that the United States’ most significant achievement has been shifting this former Cold War battleground from the Chinese and Russian communist sphere into a U.S. zone of influence—primarily by lavishing praise and largesse on a government that Freedom House describes as one that “systematically represses political dissent.” And while administration officials do well to avoid speaking publicly in Cold War frameworks, in private, a tally is being kept.
While in Angola, Biden is unlikely to focus much on trends toward political opening, which Freedom House again notes have “been reversed” under President João Lourenço. Instead, he will assess progress on the unfinished Lobito Corridor, a $1 billion renovation project of a rail line that, according to the administration’s Fact Sheet, will “better integrate DRC, Zambia, and Angola into regional and global markets; develop green energy supply chains; and, spur investment in agriculture, telecoms, and additional sectors in underdeveloped regions of Angola.” But more importantly and, conspicuously, absent from the Biden administration’s talking points is that Lobito ensures U.S. access to Congolese critical minerals that might otherwise be bound for China—for sure a strategic imperative. But ironically, this “generationally significant investment” that the administration sees as its legacy-defining project in Africa takes a page directly from China’s own Belt and Road Initiative playbook, which Biden himself has derided as leaving its partners “dead in the noose.” But it is hard to see either of these facts underlying the visit—extracting minerals or degrading Chinese influence—as proud examples of the kind of twenty-first-century, values-based partnership that Biden’s Africa strategy claims to be pursuing.
Reform of Global Institutions
The second pledge President Biden has made in response to Africa’s repeated pleas is a genuine effort to reform the functioning of global governance institutions, mainly at the UN Security Council and the governing boards of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These institutions, most African leaders contend, are relics of a post–World War II era that over the course of 70 years has “proven inadequate” in addressing Global South needs, according to Kenya’s President William Ruto. For example, recent data shows that Mexico, a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and an upper-middle-income country, received more IMF lending last year than all of Africa combined. Biden has fared slightly better at the World Bank, nominating an Indian-born, American businessman as its bank’s president, who many see as more sympathetic to reforming the institution to better serve Global South needs.
Speaking at his U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, Biden argued, “Africa belongs at the table—in every room where global challenges are being discussed and in every institution where discussions are taking place. That’s why I announced in September at the [2022] United Nations General Assembly, that the United States fully supports reforming the U.N. Security Council to include permanent representation for Africa.” Despite making no discernible progress to bring about that reform since he agreed to it two years ago, Biden doubled down this year at the UN General Assembly, calling for Africa to receive not one, but two permanent UN Security Council seats. But with such little time left in his administration, it’s a proposal that has little chance of being meaningfully advanced.
From Africa’s perspective, that is likely just fine, as the response to Biden’s proposal has been dismissed by many African leaders and their publics for not conferring on those new members the right to the veto. One recent South African editorial noted that “the US non-proposal would relegate the African continent’s 1.4 billion people to the category of permanent second-class citizens without any significant decision-making power on a UNSC that allocates 60% of its agenda to issues relating to Africa.”
In defense of this second-class status, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas Greenfield argued unconvincingly that “None of the permanent members want to give up their veto power, including us. We think if we expand that veto power across the board, it will only make the council more dysfunctional.” Perhaps; but in making this argument, Biden’s team has missed its own point about giving Africans “a seat at the table.” If that seat doesn’t come with the same rights and privileges that great powers reserve for themselves, then what is being offered is only surface-level change, not the kind of genuine reform his strategy promises. But like with so many other parts of Biden’s approach to Africa, the rhetoric appears more ambitious than the reality.
Ironically, where Washington has raised the greatest fanfare about reforming global institutions is at the G20, the organization founded in 2008 to coordinate international responses to global financial crises. Here, Washington likes to trumpet its push to confer permanent member status on the African Union at the G20, even though both China and India were already on record as supporting the proposal. But hereto, Washington’s hypocrisy has shined through in the eyes of Africans, as the G20 is now principally contending with the residual global impacts of G7 sanctions on Russia, which have raised commodity prices and driven painful inflation across the African continent.
Even when Africa is given a seat at the table, it turns out it’s the wrong table. That tendency has driven African countries to seek their own regional alliances, including through the first-ever expansion of the BRICS coalition, which now includes South Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia—countries that could well lead the rest of Africa into alliances with Washington’s competitors if genuine reforms at existing global institutions are not undertaken in earnest.
Responding to the Crisis in Sudan
Nowhere is the Biden team as anxious to make progress in the waning days of the administration as Sudan. And rightfully so, because the president’s successor is going to inherit the largest humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world today and possibly even a failed state on the Red Sea. With more than 10 million people currently displaced, 150,000 civilians dead, and more than 25 million requiring humanitarian assistance, multiple projections estimate that an additional 2 million people could be dead from famine and related health issues brought on by the war there by the time Biden leaves office. Despite higher profile and more strategic conflicts occurring simultaneously in Ukraine and the Middle East, Biden’s promises to Africa about elevating its importance on the global stage will ring even more hollow if he does not quickly take meaningful action to address this calamitous situation before he departs office.
The crisis in Sudan is a far cry from the fragile peace that Biden inherited when he came into office. For sure, Sudan was a fragile state, perilously navigating a fraught transition to civilian rule in 2021. But when violence predictably erupted 18 months ago, the administration was caught flat footed. Its early priority was the evacuation of U.S. embassy personnel from the besieged capital, Khartoum, as the city descended into a violence-filled chaos. It took nearly a year after the start of the war for Biden to appoint a special envoy to Sudan to try to cobble together a diplomatic response, something that had been done eight times before by three previous administrations when the stakes to the region and the threat to U.S. national security interests were not nearly as high as today.
But even with an envoy in place, Washington has resisted using the leverage it has to bring about an end to the fighting. Despite a sanctions regime in place, none of the leaders of either of the warring sides have been designated for the war crimes and crimes against humanity they continue to commit. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have remained mostly mute on the subject—especially compared to their predecessors. Biden spoke emphatically about stopping the weapons flow that is fueling the war at the UN General Assembly last month, but that plea came more than 15 months after the last time he referenced the conflict publicly, hardly a demonstration of consistent engagement with the world’s largest conflict.
More confusingly, however, on the day before his UN appeal, Biden received at the White House Mohamed Bin Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the country with the greatest responsibility for fueling the war through its not-so-covert weapons supply to the belligerent Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, which is responsible for the bulk of the atrocities in the war. In the statement following their meeting, the two leaders “stressed that there can be no military solution to the conflict” and “reinforced their shared commitment to de-escalate,” despite overwhelming evidence of the UAE’s destructive support to the RSF militia, prompting one New York Times columnist to suggest that “At some point American silence about the UAE role in Sudan’s crisis bleeds into complicity.”
That mixed message of condemning the war, but praising the war’s principal foreign backer, is perhaps a perfect distillation of the administration’s overall approach to Africa: soaring values-based rhetoric juxtaposed with a craven pursuit of national interest where Africa and African states are relegated to second (or third) place in favor of higher-priority pursuits elsewhere in the world. But it’s never too late to change that priority.
While neither side in Sudan’s conflict is fearful that its war-making could face real consequences, Biden can still use his remaining time in office to ensure that Sudan’s future is free of warlord or military rule. That means accelerating efforts to hold accountable the aggressors at the International Criminal Court; sanctioning the officials leading this war, along with their external backers; and declaring the RSF a foreign terrorist organization. Whatever turn this war takes, these organizations and their leadership should not be allowed to reinvent themselves as legitimate political leaders. If Biden cannot muster the power to end the war in Sudan and save millions of lives, he should help put Sudan on a better path for the next generation.
A Mixed Legacy
President Biden has articulated a vision for Africa in the world that Africans roundly agree with, but his record of making that vision a reality falls far short after nearly four years in office. For sure, such an ambitious vision was unlikely to be achieved in only one term in office, especially when the likelihood of a second term was present until just recently. Perhaps history will decide that putting down the markers that he did—reforming global institutions and elevating the issues that matter to Africa to be on par with the other global issues the United States prioritizes—is sufficient, but likely only if his successor carries the baton forward, which remains in doubt. Ultimately, it is less the Biden administration’s policies toward Africa that will be judged than the gap between those policies and the expectations the administration set. But the problem with unmet expectations is that they sting more than promises never made. This may be the most important lesson Biden’s successor can apply to Africa.
Cameron Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Source link : https://www.csis.org/analysis/bidens-legacy-africa
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Publish date : 2024-10-07 20:58:29
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