Overcoming the underwhelming history of America's Africa Policy

Africa Foreign Policy - Part 3

This is the third of three posts on African foreign policy under multipolarity. The first post outlines what ought to guide African foreign policy in a changing world; the second looks at how China ought to approach its Africa Policy; while this post examines potential opportunities to improve US (and Western) Africa Policy.

I: Sticky bad habits

More often than not, America’s Africa Policy betrays the persistence of sticky bad habits founded on 18th century ideas about Africa and Africans. The result has been decades of missed opportunities. For example, consider the glaring missed opportunity to leverage America’s large Black population to build strong relations with African states. Outside of Europe, no other region of the world has more built-in people-to-people connections through its diaspora that could be the basis of strong strategic alliances (America’s abhorrent history of chattel slavery and its aftermath matters, of course, but its effect on US Africa Policy was not determin…