President Trump’s “Carrot and Stick” Approach to Africa

African leaders and their publics have learned not to expect a lot of focus from U.S. leaders. And President Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign policy has left many Africans with even lower expectations of what his approach towards the continent might look like. So far, a focus on securing U.S. access to critical minerals, countering terrorist threats, and challenging China’s increasing economic hegemony have emerged as the three areas where the new administration has articulated an early sense of focus.

The announced mini summit to be held this week at the White House of five West African nations, Liberia, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Gabon, will hopefully shed new light on what the U.S. administration sees as Africa’s potential and how it hopes to approach it.

In the first six months of the administration, three lines of effort have stood out.

The first is the administration’s effort to reach a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to some of the world’s largest reserves of critical and rare earth minerals. From the first trip to Africa by an administration official, it was clear that a peace deal for the region was as much about obtaining access to the DRC’s minerals as it was about solving one of the continent’s perennial conflicts. A ceasefire deal signed last week in Washington includes an undefined promise of minerals for the United States through a separately negotiated regional economic integration plan that will also include U.S. investment guarantees for the development of shared infrastructure.

Second, despite a pledge to end Washington’s “forever wars,” within his first 10 days in office, Trump began dramatically increasing the scale and scope of counterterror drone strikes in Somalia, a country the United States began striking in 2007 as part of President George W. Bush’s Global War on Terrorism. Since January, and without a strategy in place, Trump’s team has more than doubled the number of drone strikes against Somali targets, 43, than the Biden administration had in its last year in office, and is fast approaching the total number, 51, from Biden’s full term of office. However, a similar focus on Sahelian terror networks, whose attacks far exceed those in Somalia, has been missing, suggesting that the administration’s counterterrorism focus extends only to those areas it sees as strategic, like the Red Sea.

Third, with the dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the administration appears to have adopted a “burn the boats” mentality in pursuit of a “trade, not aid” model to Africa in a way that previous U.S. administrations, since the Clinton administration, have discussed but never aggressively pursued. Intentionally or not, this approach has the power to reset Washington’s overall relationship with Africa in ways that are both disruptive but also contradictory.

But eroding China’s massive head start in African investments may be harder than just doing deals. For one, Africa’s risk profile is higher than many U.S. investors are willing to tolerate, and remains informed by most mainstream media accounts that tend to devote far more coverage to Africa’s wars, coups, and diseases than to its economic growth, expanding population, or strategic potential.

Trump officials, however, argue that their de-emphasizing of once-core U.S. values like human rights and democracy, not to mention suspending investigations under the Foreign Corruption Practices Act, will help to lower Africa’s risk profile and make U.S. investors more interested in the continent, thus creating a partnership of equals that result in win-win outcomes.

However, squaring these foreign policy and commercial ambitions with the president’s overwhelming domestic priorities is becoming increasingly difficult to do and impossible for African leaders and their publics to accept. First, as part of the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, a recent executive order has targeted 10 African countries, more than any other region, with a full or partial travel ban. An additional action expected in the next few weeks could exclude citizens from an additional 26 African countries from entering the United States—fully two-thirds of the continent.

Nigeria’s foreign minister, whose country is rumored to be added to the banned list, last month warned that Washington could lose out on exploiting his country’s rare earth minerals, saying, “We would like to do deals with the U.S., but visa restrictions are non-tariff barriers to deals. We will do deals . . . the only question is with whom.” Similarly, at a U.S.-Africa business summit in Angola, where U.S. government loans have helped launch the $1.7 billion Lobito Corridor railway project bringing critical minerals from central Africa to the Atlantic coast, the country’s president admonished officials to “regard Africa as a credible partner, one that has lots to offer.”

Short of an explicit travel ban, Africans as a group already face the highest rates of visa denials by the United States in the world. In 2024, Africans seeking business visas to enter the United States were rejected at a rate of 52 percent; the next highest rate from Asia is nearly half that at 27 percent. African students fare no better. Students from the continent face the highest visa denial rates, with 54 percent refused entry to attend U.S. universities, in contrast to 36 percent of Asian students and only 9 percent of European students. And even the kind of goodwill exchanges that U.S. soft power is built on are being upended. Last month, half of Senegal’s national women’s basketball team was denied visas to come to a U.S. training camp, prompting the country’s prime minister to cancel the entire trip for the women to train “in a sovereign and conducive setting” in Senegal.

These denials belie Washington’s messaging that it seeks a partnership of equals with Africa. At the same time, the United States’ principal competitor in Africa, China, is taking a starkly different approach by creating “an educational superhighway” to funnel Africa’s most talented to Chinese universities and institutions with generous scholarships and accommodating visa processes. It can be estimated that Washington denies as many African student visas as Beijing approves, about 90,000 each year, according to the most recent data.

But visas are not the only way the United States is ceding its soft power advantage to China. Washington’s premier trade promotion program with Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which for 25 years has allowed African goods duty-free access to the U.S. market, is set to expire in September with barely a mention from the Trump administration or Congress. Indeed, many analysts marked the functional demise of AGOA on “Liberation Day” last April when Trump’s global tariff regime imposed an average tariff of 15 percent on African countries, with some like Lesotho and Madagascar experiencing rates as high as 50 percent and 47 percent, respectively.

Since then, Beijing announced that it is extending its own zero-tariff access to its internal market to all 53 African nations with which it has diplomatic relations as part of a bid to double down on two-way trade. In only the first five months of this year, Chinese exports to Africa, $134 billion, dwarf the U.S. total for all of 2024 at $32 billion.

If the Trump administration is sincere about making the United States more “safe, secure, and prosperous,” it needs a more nuanced approach to Africa that doesn’t alienate the people and the markets that it is seeking to engage. This is especially true if the United States hopes to compete with China, which long ago recognized Africa’s commercial and strategic potential and is now using the United States’ own soft-power playbook against it. But doing so requires the president to somehow square his domestic priorities with his foreign policy agenda. That is a tradeoff that he has so far not been prepared to make.

Cameron Hudson is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.