Africa is not high up the Trump Administration’s priority list. In fact, it is explicitly at the bottom. It appears only on the very last page of the 2025 National Security Strategy, and this position was underlined by a Trump appointee in an email to State Department staff: ‘To put it bluntly, Africa is a peripheral – not a core – theatre for US interests that demands strategic economy.’ The newly-appointed Assistant Secretary for Africa, Frank Garcia, took a similar line in his confirmation hearings.
But the United States is not – yet – peripheral to Africa. Its policies matter, as we see currently in the response to the Ebola pandemic in central Africa and in the scramble for Africa’s critical minerals. So it is worth looking at what exactly the Trump Administration is doing, or not doing, in Africa, and why.
In a new briefing just published in African Affairs on The Second Trump Administration’s Policy on Africa, I explain in detail what is driving both Trump’s neglect and the Administration’s actions.
The first Trump Administration recognised Africa as a place of contestation with China for global influence, and both administrative inertia and Congressional obstruction meant that African policy did not really change that much. This time is different: the Administration has been bulldozed, or ‘put through the wood-chipper’ in the case of USAID; Congress is supine with a majority of Trump loyalists (for now); and China barely registers except in the competition for critical minerals that are as crucial for American technology companies as for the Chinese.
The Administration’s African policy, like Trump’s entire foreign policy, is dictated by his ‘America First’ domestic political priorities and his personal whims. Top of the list are keeping foreign migrants out, especially Africans; eliminating all trace of ‘woke’ policies that favoured Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI); ‘balancing’ trade by penalising any country that ran a trade surplus with the US in the hope of restoring American manufacturing prowess; securing supplies of critical minerals for the US tech industry; and boosting the profits of American (and the President’s own) businesses.
What this has meant for Africa is drastic and immediate cuts in US aid, especially in the health, education and governance sectors; the imposition of seemingly random but painful tariffs, including for islands inhabited only by penguins; draconian restrictions on visas for Africans, with total visa bans placed on many countries (as the Somali referee for the World Cup discovered) and $15,000 visa bonds being required for most other visitors; and the exclusion of all African refugees, except white South Africans (mainly Afrikaners) who are offered ‘asylum’ from the alleged ‘genocide’ they are suffering in South Africa.
Of course, as a ‘President of Peace’, Trump claims to have already ‘solved’ two ‘raging conflicts’ in Africa – that between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Kivus, and between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and the Nile waters. The DRC deal, brokered by his personal envoy (and father-in-law to his daughter Tiffany) Massad Boulos, came with the added benefit of deals to increase US involvement in the mining sector and support for the Lobito Corridor transport project – the only part of President Biden’s African policy that has attracted Trump’s support. But the situation on the ground in eastern DRC has scarcely changed – except that the withdrawal of US support has hindered efforts to deal with the latest Ebola epidemic.
A Critical Minerals Ministerial meeting hosted by Vice-President J.D. Vance in Washington DC in February 2026 included five African countries – Angola, the DRC, Guinea, Morocco and Zambia – all keen to attract increased US investment, but not at any price.
With the cancelling of much US aid and its withdrawal from over 60 UN agencies, including the WHO, US pharmaceutical companies suddenly found themselves at a disadvantage in Africa. The Administration responded by offering African governments ‘America First’ health programmes which restored some of the aid that had been cut, but in return for free use by US companies of the host countries’ health data and – in Zambia’s case – privileged access to its copper exports. Zambia, Ghana and Zimbabwe refused such terms as a breach of sovereignty, and Kenya’s initial acceptance has been blocked in Kenyan courts for similar reasons.
Relations with individual African countries have been patchy. Following the advice of evangelical Christian groups in the US, the Administration has taken action (‘guns-a-blazing’ as Trump put it) to deal with alleged Muslim aggression against Christian communities in Nigeria and Tanzania. Nigeria appears to have navigated the risk of US hostility with some skill, mobilising its diaspora and Christian contacts in the US to get military benefit rather than damage from this interest.
South Africa, however, has suffered a period of extreme tension (despite its wealth of critical minerals), exacerbated by its leading role in the case against Israel for genocide in Gaza, its friendship with China, Russia and Iran, and by Elon Musk’s long-time grudge against the country. The US and South Africa have now exchanged new ambassadors and started talking, but it will take time to mend fences.
Other African governments are managing the erratic nature of current American policy by currying favour, keeping their heads down, and/or seeking to triangulate – building up relations with other powers including China, Russia, Turkey, the Gulf states and the European Union, to keep their options open in the new multipolar world. Angola has done this most successfully.
Some describe the new Trump Administration’s foreign policy as more ‘transactional’. But for Africans it looks more ‘extractive’ – give us what we want, or you will suffer. Yet to describe it as ‘imperialist’ or ‘hegemonic’ or even ‘realist’ belies the fact that it does not seem to be delivering much of what the US seeks, and is most clearly showing that US influence on the continent is waning. That may be Trump’s lasting legacy.
Nicholas Westcott is Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, former Director of the Royal African Society and a former British diplomat.
