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As the Trump administration prepares for a return to governing, it has made its top foreign policy priorities well known. Ending the war in Ukraine, reinvigorating the Abraham Accords, and pushing back on China’s expanding global influence will all surely get a lot of high-level attention. Africa, meanwhile, is unlikely to make it into that upper echelon of priorities. But that doesn’t mean the administration can ignore a continent of 1.4 billion people that is growing faster than any other region on earth.
Instead, it should create regional strategies and marshal the necessary political will and human resources to focus on the areas and issues that matter the most. These efforts should be led by a series of special envoys, directed by the assistant secretary for Africa with a reporting line to the secretary of state and the president, as required.
Many African regions will demand U.S. attention because they put at risk vital U.S. interests. Other areas will present opportunities to advance U.S. economic and security concerns. But with 54 countries, Africa remains a continent that all U.S. administrations struggle to get their arms around, let alone design strategies that apply evenly and effectively across vastly disparate geographies, economies, and governing capabilities. This was the case with President Biden’s 2022 Africa strategy, which attempted to rewrite the United States’ script with the entire continent but fell short in its implementation. Instead, with less ambitious rhetoric and moderately more organizational structure, the incoming Trump team can more effectively tackle existing challenges and create opportunities that demonstrate a sustained U.S. engagement in advancing U.S. interests and partner interests as part of deeper U.S.-Africa relations.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has a model that it can follow—its own. During his first term, President Trump leaned on a number of special envoys in Africa to animate and elevate U.S. diplomacy. Those envoys helped to articulate U.S. priorities in challenging areas like the Sahel and the Great Lakes, demonstrate to partners in Africa and allies outside the region the steady hand of U.S. engagement, and advocate to Washington’s interagency a set of policies to achieve U.S. objectives. And with only a week left to go before he takes office, Trump already seems to be returning to this model.
Recent personnel announcements include special envoy roles for the Middle East, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and while their duties remain undefined, their appointments suggest a prioritization by the president of these areas and hold out the promise of direct presidential engagement. Several regions across Africa cry out for this kind of attention.
The Sahel, the Great Lakes, and the Horn of Africa regions are all embroiled in local conflicts with regional and international implications. If left unchecked, they all threaten to create debilitating consequences for allies from Europe to the Arabian Peninsula, as well as threaten wider U.S. interests.
In the Sahel, violent extremist organizations today control, huge swaths of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, threatening the stability of every country they touch. The region itself has emerged as the epicenter of terrorist violence in the world today, according to the United Nations, with Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates seemingly expanding at will. And with military coups having expelled representative governments in all three countries, U.S., French, and UN forces have also all been expelled in favor of Russian private military contractors. The result has been a metastasizing terrorist threat with staggering humanitarian consequences. Moreover, this violent instability now risks overwhelming the fledgling democracies across neighboring coastal West Africa, where substantial U.S. expense and effort have already been dedicated to avoid these countries becoming a jumping-off point for instability to spread across the Atlantic to the U.S. homeland.
In central Africa’s Great Lakes region, the United States has traditionally used its good offices to promote peace in an area that has known a steady mix of interstate and intrastate violence since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That demand for U.S. political involvement is no less urgent today. The conflict between Rwanda and Congo over the latter’s support to M23 rebels and the former’s inability or unwillingness to reign in its own Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda rebels has made eastern Congo’s mineral-rich mining region unattractive for U.S. investors and risks a wider regional conflagration. The Biden administration dispatched its director of national intelligence Avril Haines to the region last year with the promise of shared battlefield intelligence to help defuse tensions on both sides. And President Biden himself convened regional heads of state last month during his trip to Angola to encourage a mediated solution. But piecemeal efforts have not created the conditions necessary to end the instability or draw in new U.S. mining dollars. What is needed is a full-time U.S. envoy.
In the Horn of Africa, the only place in Africa where the Biden administration saw fit to appoint a special envoy, the region is in need of one again. Beyond the devastating conflict engulfing Sudan that risks drawing in the neighboring states, Ethiopia’s fragile internal peace is fraying as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed conducts an expanding drone war against internal opponents. At the same time, Ahmed is taking no measures to hide his expansionist ambitions. Ethiopia’s recent recognition of Somalia’s Republic of Somaliland risks upsetting an even more fragile regional détente among Ethiopia’s neighbors and has prompted former foes Eritrea, Somalia, and Egypt to form a loose diplomatic alliance to check Abiy’s ambitions. With U.S. ambassadors in each of these countries already struggling to stay on top of simmering internal tensions within their respective posts, the cause for a regional special envoy shuttling between these states and coordinating across the Red Sea to dial down tensions has become essential.
Lastly, the Trump administration should continue to staff the position of a special envoy for Sudan, given the catastrophic humanitarian costs of the ongoing war there and the strategic implications associated with Sudan descending into failed state status. With more than 500 miles of Red Sea coastline, and Russian and Iranian military officials seeking a naval foothold there, Sudan’s further descent could imperil U.S. strategic interests across the Middle East and Africa if Washington does not stay engaged in seeking an immediate end to the conflict.
Beyond the problem cases, the Trump administration should also consider adding an envoy to add weight to Washington’s own policy priorities. Nowhere is that more important than in promoting U.S. trade and investment across the continent. With the renewal of Washington’s premier trade promotion tool with Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, hopefully coming later this year, Trump should consider adding to that policy instrument an envoy charged with seeking deals for U.S. investors, advocating for U.S. industry and helping African partners take advantage of U.S. trade promotion tools. Many deals, like the Biden administration’s flagship Lobito Corridor project, cut across multiple countries and industries, suggesting that an envoy could play a critical role in knitting deals together and would serve in a similar fashion to the informal role played by Biden’s current senior advisor for global infrastructure and energy security, Amos Hochstein.
But while these envoys have the potential to critically elevate and advance U.S. diplomacy and interests across the continent, they risk being largely performative if they are not also empowered with administration strategies that define our interests in each of these areas, along with a commitment of political and financial resources we earmark to achieve them. Congressional leaders have repeatedly criticized the Biden administration, for example, for appointing special envoys for Sudan and the Horn of Africa, while empowering neither with interagency-approved strategies that spell out U.S. interests and intentions. Rather than being pressured by Congress to produce these strategies, envoys should help lead the process of developing these strategies so that they too understand them and are committed to their success.
Increasingly, the challenges we face across Africa and the opportunities the United States wants to pursue are not defined by national boundaries. Terrorism, climate change, economic development, and supply chain security today cut across countries and regions in ways that the Westphalian model of nineteenth-century diplomatic missions is increasingly ill-equipped to manage. Instead, the Trump administration has the opportunity to purpose-build a diplomatic approach to a diverse continent that identifies and advances U.S. core interests and makes clear to U.S. partners and adversaries what matters most to Washington.
As the Trump administration considers a broader set of reforms to how our government works, which could include scaling back the size and remit of the United States’ career diplomatic corps, it has an opportunity to operationalize the dictum that “personnel is policy” with a series of intentional appointments that allow them to focus less on process and more on the outcomes they have defined as strategic priorities.
Cameron Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
