Cameron Hudson’s view
As the Trump administration continues its blitzkrieg on the post-Cold War international order, Africa is bearing a high price. A 90-day aid freeze and the dismantlement of USAID are already impacting health outcomes and emergency responses. Preliminary estimates suggest that nearly 6 million Africans could be pushed back into poverty by next year.
But development is only one leg of the stool Washington relies on to engage the continent, with diplomacy and defense being the other pillars of the “3Ds.” Of these, diplomacy has traditionally been seen as the weakest. It is the least well-funded, insufficiently staffed, and — after attacks on US diplomatic outposts from Nairobi to Benghazi — the most risk-averse. American diplomats typically now stay sequestered behind the high walls of our fortress embassies on the outskirts of teeming African capitals.
In a moment of extreme cost-cutting and DOGE-driven efficiency gains, it is the defense pillar of US-Africa engagement that is now reported to be on the chopping block, with suggestions that the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) could soon be subsumed by the larger European Command. Inaugurated by the Bush administration in 2008 as both acknowledgement of President George W. Bush’s expansive view of America’s global interests but also of Africa’s rising relevance to US strategic concerns, these perspectives are now being tested by a retrenching Trump team.
However, unlike the six other regional combatant commands the US Defense Department maintains, AFRICOM was designed “not to wage war, but prevent it,” according to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which in part explains why the command controls no military assets of its own. Instead of a focus on warfighting, AFRICOM was endowed with a unique structure intended to both allay concerns from Africans fearing neo-colonial conquest and better enable the various elements of American “smart power.” One of the Command’s senior-most deputies was a civilian State Department official and the now-defunct USAID was also given a senior role. According to a past AFRICOM commander, this “whole of government approach is in our DNA at AFRICOM.”
But if this approach was supposed to strengthen and enable Africa’s security, rather than to extend a US security umbrella, AFRICOM’s presence has done more than build relationships of trust and partner capacity. It has helped keep at bay America’s adversaries and prevented them from securing enduring military partnerships that threaten US strategic interests. But that may quickly slip away without AFRICOM, creating a vacuum that could see China establish a long-desired naval presence in the Atlantic or Russia obtain a warm water port to threaten Red Sea trade routes.
Instead, the cost of our military consolidation is likely to be the loss of influence that is already rapidly eroding all around us. As global adversaries aggressively expand their security footprints across the continent, Washington will be seen as not just running away, but disinterested in the world’s fastest growing population. This is a recipe for leaving “America Last” in the global race to gain allies and influence in Africa.
Cameron Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. He previously served on the staff of the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.