Reimagining US Strategy in Africa

Why chasing China’s moves on the continent guarantees failure and how Washington can think asymmetrically instead.

Africa is more than a theater for great power competition. It’s strategic hub of global connectivity and a pole in its own right.

For decades, American policymakers have fallen into the same traps when thinking about Africa. They default to binary framing where China is bad and America is good. They slip into paternalism, assuming Africa needs help rather than partnership. And they resort to vague platitudes about needing to "compete" without defining what winning actually looks like.

These habits represent more than outdated thinking; they now carry serious strategic risks. They blind us to Africa's growing power, flatten the complexity of Chinese engagement, and leave America operating on autopilot in a region where the rules have fundamentally changed.

When Niger’s military government announced on national television that it was ending the US military presence, the move highlighted deeper flaws in American assumptions about African agency, the nature of Chinese influence, and the limits of US leverage.

If the United States wants to regain strategic initiative in Africa, we need to do more than spend more money, show up more often, or counter harder. We need to ask fundamentally better questions that challenge our assumptions, force clarity about our goals, and recognize African states as strategic actors in their own right.

This week’s deep dive is built around nine such questions, organized into three categories that get to the heart of effective strategy development:

Meta-Strategic Clarity: What game are we actually playing?
Strategic Design: What would real strategy look like in practice?
Africa-Centered Thinking: Are we listening to what African leaders actually want?

One of my goals when I started writing Xinanigans was to demonstrate strategic thinking in action. So today’s post is not a finished blueprint or probably the type of policy piece you’re used to reading. It's an attempt to build strategy in public by asking the questions that American policymakers have been avoiding. My goal is not to provide all the answers, but to demonstrate what rigorous critical thinking actually requires in order to create a better Africa strategy and, more broadly, address competition with China.

Part I: Meta-Strategic Clarity

What game are we actually playing?

Before designing any strategy, we need clarity about the fundamentals. What exactly is America defending in Africa? What kind of actor is China really? And what role does Africa play in the global order? Getting these questions wrong guarantees strategic failure.

Question 1: What is the US actually defending in Africa?

This should be the easiest question to answer. It's also the one American officials struggle with most. Are we defending open markets? Democratic norms? Access to critical minerals? Regional stability? Or are we simply trying to block Chinese influence?

These distinctions matter more than most policymakers realize. If we're defending democratic governance, that suggests one set of partners and priorities. If we're defending access to cobalt and lithium, that suggests completely different relationships and trade-offs.

The current approach tries to defend everything simultaneously, which means we end up defending nothing effectively. When American officials talk about supporting "good governance" in countries where we desperately need mineral access, African leaders hear mixed messages about what we actually prioritize.

Real strategic clarity requires making hard choices about what we're willing to trade off and what we consider non-negotiable. Without that clarity, we can't evaluate risks, allocate resources, or choose partners effectively.

Question 2: What kind of actor is China in Africa really?

American discourse about China in Africa suffers from a persistent problem: it treats Beijing as a single, coherent strategic threat. But Chinese behavior across the continent reveals a much more complex picture.

Sometimes China acts as a civilizational exporter, embedding its governance models and surveillance systems in African infrastructure. In other cases, it behaves more like a market opportunist, filling voids left by Western disengagement without much ideological agenda. And in still other situations, it operates as a system reprogrammer, actively reshaping international norms and institutions toward a post-Western global order.

These different roles require completely different responses. Market opportunism can be countered with better economic offerings. Civilizational export requires supporting alternative governance models. System reprogramming demands institutional and normative competition.

Treating these as identical threats leads to strategic incoherence. We end up applying economic tools to ideological challenges, or bringing normative arguments to transactional relationships. The task for Washington isn’t to mirror Beijing’s moves one-for-one, but to parse them clearly enough to design tailored, asymmetric responses that exploit US advantages rather than chasing China’s shadow.

Question 3: What is Africa's role in the global order?

Most American analysis treats Africa as either a theater for great power competition or a source of global problems requiring management. Both framings miss the fundamental shift happening across the continent.

Well beyond a stage where global powers compete, Africa is becoming a strategic lever in its own right. The continent has the demographic growth, natural resources, digital infrastructure, and political dynamism to influence global power structures directly.

By 2050, one in four people on Earth will be African. The continent controls the majority of several critical minerals essential to the global economy. African votes increasingly matter in international institutions. And African innovation in mobile banking, renewable energy, and agricultural technology is being exported globally.

Recognizing Africa as a "third pole" in international relations - neither Western nor Chinese, but pursuing its own interests - changes everything about how we should approach the continent. It means stopping the search for African countries that will choose sides in a new Cold War, and starting the work of building partnerships with countries that have their own strategic agendas. Recognizing Africa as a strategic pole is only the first step; the next is asking what real US strategy would actually look like in practice.

Part II: Strategic Design Imperatives

What would real strategy actually look like?

Meta-strategic clarity is necessary but not sufficient. Real strategy requires making concrete choices about where to compete, how to build influence, and what success actually looks like. These next three questions force us to move from analysis to action.

Question 4: What are the "interfaces" America must secure, defend, or compete for?

The next phase of global competition won't be fought over territory or traditional military assets. It will be fought over what we might call "interfaces," or the digital infrastructure, financial systems, educational platforms, and communication networks that determine how societies function.

China understands this better than America does. Beijing has aggressively moved into educational interfaces through Confucius Institutes, digital interfaces through TikTok and telecom infrastructure, and financial interfaces through digital payment systems and development lending. African innovations themselves prove the power of interfaces: Kenya’s M-Pesa mobile payments system transformed financial life long before Chinese platforms arrived, while Rwanda’s smart city initiatives show how choices in digital infrastructure can lock in governance models for decades.

These interfaces matter because they create dependencies that operate below the level of traditional sovereignty. When African students learn Chinese history, when African youth consume Chinese social media, when African governments rely on Chinese digital ID systems, the path toward Chinese-aligned governance becomes embedded in daily life.

America needs to identify which interfaces are most critical to defend, which offer the best opportunities to compete, and which we should enable African countries to control themselves. The goal is not to replace Chinese dependency with American dependency, but to ensure that African societies have genuine choices about how their fundamental systems operate.

Question 5: How does Chinese influence become irreversible, and how do we prevent that without overreacting?

Irreversibility isn't about military occupation or formal treaties. It's about creating switching costs that make alternatives prohibitively expensive. When African countries become dependent on Chinese digital ID systems, telecoms infrastructure, or surveillance networks, the path back to open systems becomes economically and politically difficult.

The same logic applies in the material domain: China’s dominance in financing and refining DRC cobalt has created a de facto lock-in. Even if new suppliers emerge, the sunk costs of existing contracts and processing infrastructure make diversification slow and costly.

But preventing irreversibility doesn't require forcing immediate extraction from Chinese systems. That approach often backfires by making America look like a coercive actor. Instead, it requires offering genuine alternatives that provide better value propositions over time.

This might mean co-financing infrastructure projects that give African countries genuine choices between vendors. It could involve supporting local capacity building that reduces dependency on any single external partner. Or it might require creating regional integration projects that increase African countries' bargaining power with all external partners.

The key is patience and attractiveness rather than pressure and ultimatums. Chinese influence becomes irreversible when alternatives disappear, not when Chinese systems become perfect.

Question 6: How do you compete with actors whose tools aren't armies, but apps, supply chains, and summit diplomacy?

Traditional deterrence models assume that competitors use similar tools such as military forces, alliance structures, and economic sanctions. But China's primary competitive advantages in Africa aren't military. They're technological (5G networks, digital payment systems), economic (infrastructure financing, commodity purchasing), and diplomatic (non-interference principles, South-South solidarity).

This requires completely rethinking how America exercises influence. Instead of deterring Chinese actions, we need to make American alternatives more attractive. Instead of threatening consequences, we need to demonstrate superior value propositions. The answer isn’t to copy China’s playbook with American branding, but to understand its tactics deeply enough to design asymmetric advantages that play to US strengths, e.g., credibility, innovation, and long-term partnership.

This shift demands new metrics for success. We can't measure progress by counting Chinese projects canceled or Chinese influence reduced. We need to measure American influence gained, African capacity built, and mutual benefits created.

Rather than dominance or containment, the true objective is what we might call "resilient pluralism." A system where no single external actor can unilaterally control the fundamental interfaces that African societies depend on, and where African countries have genuine choices about their international partnerships. If design is about creating options, the next step is ensuring those options align with what African leaders actually value and demand.

Part III: Africa-Centered Thinking

Are we actually listening to what African leaders want?

The hardest questions are often the simplest ones. Despite decades of engagement, American policymakers still struggle to understand how African leaders define their own interests, which countries are shaping continental narratives, and what sovereignty means in an era of global interdependence.

Question 7: How do African leaders define strategic value and who is actually listening?

American officials often assume that African countries value the same things America offers: democratic governance, rule of law, transparency in international agreements. These aren't wrong, but they're incomplete.

Many African leaders prioritize speed of implementation, respect for sovereignty, and non-interference in domestic affairs. China often scores well on these criteria by offering infrastructure financing with minimal political conditions and completing projects faster than Western alternatives.

But African priorities aren't static, and they're not uniform across the continent. Leaders in established democracies like Ghana or Botswana might prioritize governance support and institutional strengthening. Leaders in post-conflict countries like the DRC might prioritize immediate security assistance and economic development. Leaders in rapidly growing economies like Rwanda might prioritize technology transfer and market access.

America's competitive advantage lies in understanding these different priority sets and crafting offerings that match them. This requires much deeper country-specific knowledge than we currently possess, and much more flexibility in how we structure partnerships.

Question 8: Which African countries are shaping continental narratives and which are just responding to them?

Not all African countries have equal influence in shaping how the continent thinks about sovereignty, development, and international partnerships. Nigeria's economic weight, South Africa's institutional leadership, Kenya's technological innovation, and Ethiopia's diplomatic influence make them narrative exporters rather than just narrative consumers.

Take Kenya as an example of how technological leadership translates into continental influence. Kenya's M-Pesa mobile money system revolutionized domestic finance by becoming the model that dozens of other African countries adopted. When Kenyan officials talk about "leapfrogging" traditional banking infrastructure through digital innovation, that narrative spreads across East and Central Africa. Kenya's approach to fintech regulation, digital identity systems, and startup ecosystems increasingly sets the standard for the region.

This matters for American strategy because policy successes in narrative-shaping countries carry multiplier effects. A successful partnership model with Kenya demonstrates to other African countries what American engagement can offer, while policy failures in influential countries like Nigeria or South Africa carry higher reputational costs across the continent.

As Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo put it at the 2018 US-Africa Business Forum: "We don't want to be in anybody's backyard. We want to relate to the world on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit." Ghana's position became a rallying cry for African autonomy that other leaders have echoed in different contexts.

Recognizing which states shape continental opinion allows Washington to invest diplomatic capital where it matters most and to design partnership models that can scale. But narrative influence also creates responsibility: countries that shape continental thinking face pressure to maintain consistency in their international partnerships, creating both opportunities for sustained engagement and higher costs for policy failures.

Question 9: What does sovereignty mean in an era of digital dependencies?

African countries are asserting sovereignty in new ways that don't always align with Western models of democratic governance. This creates both opportunities and challenges for American engagement.

The opportunity lies in supporting African-defined models of sovereignty that aren't dependent on either Chinese or American systems. Rwanda's President Paul Kagame captured this sentiment when he told the 2021 Africa CEO Forum: "We want to be masters of our own destiny, not junior partners in someone else's vision." This perspective increasingly drives African Union policies on everything from continental free trade to digital governance standards.

The challenge becomes distinguishing between legitimate assertions of sovereignty and authoritarian restrictions on civil society. When the African Union calls for "digital sovereignty" in its 2020 Digital Transformation Strategy, it's seeking genuine independence from external control over critical digital infrastructure. But when individual governments use similar language to justify internet shutdowns or social media restrictions, the sovereignty frame becomes cover for domestic repression.

Navigating this requires a much more nuanced understanding of domestic African politics than American officials typically possess. It also requires accepting that African countries might choose governance models that don't perfectly align with American preferences but still serve American interests in a competitive international environment.

Building Strategy in Public: What These Questions Reveal

Working through these nine questions reveals several patterns that should shape how America approaches Africa policy going forward.

First, the competition frame is strategically counterproductive. Every question that starts with "How do we compete with China" leads to reactive, defensive policies that put America at a disadvantage. Questions that start with "What do African partners want" or "How can we create mutual value" lead to proactive strategies that play to American strengths.

Second, regional approaches are intellectually lazy. Africa contains 54 countries with radically different histories, political systems, economic structures, and strategic priorities. Effective policy requires understanding these differences and crafting country-specific approaches rather than continental strategies.

Third, partnership requires recognizing mutual dependencies. America needs African critical minerals, climate cooperation, and diplomatic support as much as African countries need American investment, technology, and market access. Policies built on this recognition are more sustainable than those built on assumptions of American generosity or African dependence.

Fourth, time horizons matter more than we acknowledge. African development challenges require decade-long commitments, but American electoral cycles create pressure for quick wins. Successful Africa policy requires building continuity mechanisms that can survive political transitions.

The Path Forward: From Questions to Action

These questions don't provide a complete strategy, but they do suggest a fundamentally different approach to Africa engagement, one based on partnership rather than patronage, country-specific understanding rather than regional generalizations, and mutual benefit rather than zero-sum competition.

The operational implications are significant.

Institutional reform: Current Africa policy suffers from bureaucratic fragmentation, with different agencies pursuing conflicting objectives. Effective implementation requires senior-level coordination with authority across departments.

Resource allocation: America cannot be everywhere at once. Strategic success requires identifying 8-10 priority partnerships based on mutual interests, strategic importance, and partnership potential, rather than trying to maintain superficial engagement across 54 countries. For example, prioritizing the DRC (critical minerals), Nigeria (West African leadership), Kenya (East African innovation), Ghana (democratic governance models), and South Africa (continental influence) would yield outsized returns compared to spreading resources thin across the entire continent.

Metric reformation: Success should be measured by outcomes African partners value - economic growth, institutional capacity, technological advancement - rather than traditional aid metrics like dollars spent or programs launched.

Temporal realism: American engagement needs continuity mechanisms that can survive electoral transitions. PEPFAR provides an instructive model here, launched under George W. Bush, expanded under Obama, maintained under Trump’s first term, and continued under Biden because it was structured with bipartisan authorization and measurable outcomes. Yet it has come under strain during Trump’s second term, a reminder that even the best programs need insulation from shifting domestic debates.

The choice facing American policymakers isn't whether to engage with Africa; it's whether to engage effectively. Current approaches based on great power competition and regional generalizations have produced a string of failures from Niger to the broader Sahel.

The alternative requires abandoning comfortable assumptions in favor of policies that acknowledge the increasingly complex reality of global power distribution. African countries control resources essential to American prosperity, carbon sinks crucial to global climate stability, and demographic dynamism that will shape the next century of global politics.

Africa unequivocally matters to American interests; the continent's demographics, resources, and growing influence make that old debate obsolete. The real question is whether America can think clearly enough about Africa to matter in return.

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Got a strategic question or idea worth exploring?

I welcome sharp questions, under-examined angles, and future-post suggestions. Email me directly: inquiries@xinanigans.com