A U.S. Strategy to Indirectly Mitigate Chinese Influence in East Africa by Mid-Century
By Lieutenant Colonel Jason Farmer, U.S. Army
Editor's Note: Lieutenant Colonel Farmer's thesis won the FAO Association writing award at the National War College. The Journal is pleased to bring you this outstanding scholarship.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
Introduction
This U.S. strategy is focused on addressing great-power competition with China in the East-Africa sub-region and nested within the broader U.S.-China strategy to manage and shape the world-order shift from a unipolar to a multipolar context. The Liberal International Order (LIO) that the U.S. created over seven decades ago has allowed nations to rise and prosper. Today, however, both rising great powers, such as China, and emerging smaller regional powers, such as those in East Africa, increasingly want to pursue their national interests on their terms and the U.S. must adapt to shape relations for a new era within each region to preserve the broader interests of .the U.S. and the LIO into the future.
As the U.S. has recently and rightly highlighted in the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), China is challenging “American power, influence, and interests,” and “attempting to erode American security and prosperity” globally, while endeavoring to re-shape the world with its competing authoritarian model. Compared to any other region of the world, this strategic reality is uniquely evident in East Africa, where China has effectively maneuvered to gain influence by deploying a new paradigm that combines pushing a Chinese development model and projecting military power. The problem is that China’s actions in East Africa are threatening U.S. regional influence. While the U.S. is still primarily perceived as the security partner of choice, China has already become the economic partner of choice in East Africa. If the U.S. does not adjust its strategy in the region, it will cede influence to China as the overarching partner of choice and validate China’s new paradigm to expand influence.
This strategy will present a long-term indirect approach to mitigate Chinese influence in East Africa by more effectively engaging the region and outmaneuvering China to position the U.S. as the leading partner of choice by mid-century. This strategy will present its strategic logic by analyzing the strategic situation, describing the political aim and approach, detailing the objective-instrument packages, laying out the sequencing and orchestration, considering the costs, risks, viability tests, and counterarguments, and highlighting the strategic leadership challenges.
Strategic-Situation: East Africa - A Paradigm for China’s Economic and Military Expansion
International Context
The current ongoing shift toward a global multipolar context frames the challenges and interests of emerging regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa, with U.S-China competition in a different way from the previous bi-polar dynamics of the Cold War. Today’s global competition should be dissimilar from the past because the U.S. has never engaged in great-power competition with a country that is also one of its most significant trading partners. Fundamentally, as John Ikenberry explains, rising states understand the need to use the system to rise, but are seeking accommodation in “the way roles and responsibilities are allocated in the system.” From this perspective, China desires increasing influence and leadership in the multipolar world, and Sub-Saharan Africa wants security, development, prosperity, and respect. Addressing the Chinese threat to U.S. influence in East Africa requires understanding the strategic context of both China and East Africa.
China
China aims to replace America as a global leader by 2049, following the achievement of its “Hundred-Year-Marathon” strategy – which began during the Communist Revolution of 1949 – in order to right the wrongs of history and put China back in a central position of dominance following its century of humiliation. These intentions are rooted in its long 5,000-year dynastic history, which beckon it to reestablish its regional hegemony and claim deference from neighboring countries under a Chinese harmonizing order. Elizabeth Economy notes that China views the global leadership of the U.S. as “merely a historical aberration” with China “simply reclaiming its proper place.” Within the last decade, President Xi Jinping, in his 2013 visionary speech, clearly unveiled and confirmed China’s dream and political aim for 2049, by referencing retired Chinese Colonel Liu Mingfu’s book, The China Dream, which stated: "it has been China’s dream for a century to become the world’s leading nation.”
China’s rise has not gone unnoticed over the last four decades, but U.S. assumptions about its ability to engage and pull China into the global order as a responsible stakeholder have proven faulty. Beginning with its opening to the world in the late 1970s, China achieved an astonishing economic ascent by capitalizing on the first wave of modern globalization. Nonetheless, instead of the benefits of market capitalism enticing China as a responsible actor and inviting liberalization within the nation – as the U.S. had hoped – China has used its growth to entrench the resolve of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and unveil its true intentions. Today, China is expected to surpass America’s economy within the next ten years and possibly triple its size by 2050, which will enable it to wield influence to pursue its political and strategic ambitions in increasing measure.
Like the U.S. determined over 70 years ago while creating the LIO to protect U.S. national interests, China also understands that it requires access to global markets, raw materials, and forward defense basing to protect its national interests and compete with the current hegemon (the U.S.). Although China grew at a rate of over ten percent for over three decades, it has now become the largest consumer and producer of energy in the world, requiring increasing access to markets and raw materials to sustain its economy, which has slowed to 6.1 percent. One of China’s primary means for gaining access to resources, exerting influence, and laying the foundation for regional deference is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which Xi unveiled in 2013. According to a 2020 International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) report, the BRI now covers almost 125 countries. It will impact over two-thirds of the global population with its projected expenditure of US$1 trillion and its leveraging of US$ 8 trillion in other financing sources over the next decade (see Figure 1). Unfortunately, as Ambassador Nikki Haley notes, the BRI has also been found to use often “corrupt financing arrangements that burden foreign governments with debt they cannot afford to repay.”
Figure 1: Map –The Belt and Road Initiative
China’s expanding influence also brings with it concerns over the export of its model, which comprises authoritarian leadership and repressive values. It has become clear that Xi aims to preserve CCP rule at any cost. As a result, the CCP has rolled out repressive internal policies to weed out CCP opposition, maintain surveillance on the population with over 200 million cameras, and assess people's trustworthiness through the social credit system. It has also guaranteed private-business allegiance to the government by emplacing CCP committees inside more than two-thirds of private enterprises, and mitigated outside influence by expelling foreign organizations and controlling the internet. Furthermore, China has detained over one million Muslims – mostly ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs – in the northern Xinjiang region in “re-education” camps, where they are held against their will until they renounce their faith and proclaim allegiance to the CCP. Human Rights Watch states that the CCP views human rights as an “existential threat,” and is using its “economic clout to silence critics" abroad and execute "the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since that system began.”
Sub-Saharan Africa
As the second-largest continent in the world with a total population of 1.3 billion people (17% of the global population), Africa represents a confluence of extraordinary challenges and opportunities. A current overview of the state of Sub-Saharan Africa reveals one of the most conflict-ridden, least developed, least free, and least economically competitive regions on the globe. Within the last 15 years, Africa contained over 50 percent of the world’s most-failed states. Since the wave of independence that swept across Africa in the 1960s, the continent has struggled to establish strong states with good governance due to geographic and demographic factors, colonial inheritances, and post-independence patterns of political behavior rooted in clientelism, neopatrimonialism, and weak-state survival strategies. Alina Rocha Menocal explains that these “fragile states” are “characterized by a fundamental lack of effective political processes that can bring state capacities and social expectations into equilibrium.”
The problem of weak governance, systemic corruption, and socio-ethnic strife has further led to conflict on the continent. Since the turn of the century, half of the world's peacekeeping operations, along with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and the terrorist threats in the Sahel are on the African continent. All of these African conflicts are intra-state versus inter-state. They pose a real security threat to the region because the affected states are incapable of resolving their internal security problems, the United Nations (UN) troops have limited capacity to solve the more formidable political and economic challenges, and regional neighbors are affected by the spillover of the security threat across porous borders.
It is from this baseline of fragile states, weak governance, and internal conflict that the economic and demographic challenges overlay to provide the U.S. the most significant reason not to lose sight of engagement with Africa and cede influence to China over the next thirty years. Economically, while Africa is rising with some of the fastest-growing economies in the world, these numbers do not represent growth throughout society. As the UN has noted, over 40 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's population still lives in extreme poverty on less than US$1.25 per day. With 70 percent of the “bottom billion” residing on the continent, Paul Collier explains that sub-Saharan Africa is “the core of the problem” and will matter more to the modern world as global “interdependence will become increasingly vulnerable to these large islands of chaos.”
The demographic growth projection further compounds the development challenges for the continent. Currently, Africa is experiencing an enormous youth bulge, with the median age on the continent being 19.4 years. Most significantly, the UN 2017 World Population Prospect reports that the world will grow by 2.2 billion people by 2050 and that over half of that estimated growth (1.3 billion) will happen in Africa. Given this exponential growth, Howard French warns that following climate change the “most common concern around the world” will be “the future of employment in Africa” because “how Africa's population evolves, and how the continent's economies develop, will affect nearly everything people near and far assume about their lives today.”
China in East Africa
East Africa is of particular interest because it overlays all of the drivers of Sub-Saharan-Africa’s challenges and insecurities (noted above) with China’s paradigm for engagement toward the continent. Historically, it is also a region that has proven of lesser priority for the U.S. government and provides an opportunity for the Chinese strategy. East Africa is home to the most significant regional population on the continent (433 million), some of the fastest-growing economies (Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya), some of the most desperate economies (Burundi and Somalia), and three of the most challenging conflicts in the region (Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan). Over the last 60 years, China engaged in the region for ideological, economic, political, and security reasons. In the last two decades, however, China has dramatically increased its engagement with the continent following its first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) hosted in Beijing in October 2000, which unleashed unprecedented investment, aid, and trade. In 2009, China surpassed America as the continent's principal trading partner.
Within the last decade, the strategic reality of China’s new paradigm has become evident in East Africa, where China’s BRI, Maritime Silk Road, and first foreign military base have converged to project Chinese economic and military power to protect Chinese interests, which require access and influence in Africa and the Mediterranean. Economically, China has imported oil from Sudan and South Sudan, provided some of its most substantial loans to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan, and targeted Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya with some of its most significant BRI megaprojects (see Figure 2 and 3). Militarily, China – as the only Permanent Five (P5) member in the UN top ten TCCs – has sent UN peacekeepers to South Sudan, increased security cooperation across the region, conducted counter-piracy in the Gulf of Aden, and established its first expeditionary military base in Djibouti (see Figure 3), which Chinese military officials have admitted could be a template for more global defense basing.
The BRI’s influence is of particular interest, as a 2018 study found that African governments would receive an average 86 percent increase in official Chinese development assistance when they voted with China an additional 10 percent of the time at the United Nations. China's authoritarian model has also had an impact on mentoring Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda in regulating media and internet access and restricting political opposition. Interestingly, China’s non-interference policy has made its transactions quite pragmatic and although it has offered the region up to 50,000 university scholarships in China each year, it is not clear China is interested in genuinely helping East Africa address its underlying drivers of insecurity.
Figure 2: Chinese Megaprojects (Global)
Figure 3: Chinese Megaprojects (Ethiopia) and Chinese First Foreign Military Base (Djibouti)
Domestic Context
Although the U.S. has had a mostly bipartisan, bureaucratically-driven, and consistent foreign policy toward Africa for more than 40 years, the continent has not attracted priority attention from national leadership or substantial interest from U.S. investors. Before the 1990s, the U.S. viewed Africa through a cold-war lens, and since then, the U.S. has focused on democratization, development, and counter-terrorism. Policymakers have not commonly made Africa a critical part of U.S. foreign policy initiatives, and the U.S. public has remained unaware of more recent developments on the continent. Since establishing the Department of Defense (DoD) U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM) in 2007, the U.S. has successfully elevated its defense engagement across the continent to build relationships and capacity and establish itself as the security partner of choice in the region. Economically, however, although the U.S. Government has invested over US$ 100 billion in African health systems over the last two decades, the U.S. private sector has been reticent to invest due to the real and perceived challenges of doing business in nations that lack infrastructure, laws, and regulatory frameworks to protect investments. It was not until the 2014 U.S.-Africa Leader Summit that the U.S. genuinely began expanding its attention to U.S. private-sector opportunities on the continent.
Furthermore, while the White House released its 2018 Africa Strategy, intending to advance prosperity, security, and stability on the continent, it suffered from placing too much emphasis on competing with “China” rather than focusing on “Africa” and highlighting the value of engagement with the continent itself. The most promising economic means to emerge from the Africa Strategy, however, is the Prosper Africa initiative, which will serve as a critical means to expand two-way trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa. Domestically, because the U.S. government cannot merely direct the private sector, the challenge remains to build awareness and interest for business and investment opportunities in Africa, while partnering with African nations to improve the business environment.
Assumptions: This strategy relies on the following seven key assumptions.
1. China will continue to pursue and expand influence in Africa by using East Africa as its foothold and paradigm for the region.
2. China will likely further export the combined authoritarian, economic, and military paradigm to other regions, if effective in East Africa.
3. China is not genuinely interested in working with Africa on its root drivers of insecurity, which presents an opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate a positive alternative model.
4. China will become increasingly aggressive if the U.S. competes or conflicts too directly in the region, but the U.S. could reduce strategic tension by taking an indirect approach and focusing on Africa.
5. Africans do not want the continent treated as another cold-war-style battleground, and they do not want to choose sides. (Kenya has already validated this assumption.)
6. There are some general things African nations find frustrating about working with China, such as corrupt and unsafe business practices, poor quality, and the lack of respect in the relationship.
7. The U.S. could garner the domestic support needed to achieve this strategy, and African nations would welcome increased mature partnerships with the U.S.
Interest and Problem: U.S. influence is the interest at stake. The problem is that China’s actions in East Africa are threatening U.S. regional influence. This situation is a threat because U.S. inaction will eventually enable China to become the dominant influence in this emerging region and erode the U.S. ability to shape an environment consistent with U.S. and LIO interests in the region.
Political Aim, Objectives, and Approach
Political Aim: The political aim of this strategy is a stable and developing East Africa where the U.S. has mitigated China’s threatening influence to become the leading partner of choice in the region while renegotiating and accommodating for China’s rise by 2049.
Objectives: This strategy has three primary objectives.
1. To change the strategic narrative.
2. To solidify the U.S. as East Africa’s security partner of choice.
3. To enable the U.S. to become East Africa’s economic partner of choice.
Approach and Guiding Policy: The U.S. will achieve these ends by taking a long-term, 30-year, indirect approach coinciding with China's goal for 2049, nested within the broader U.S.-China Strategy to renegotiate the international system, and focusing U.S. instruments of national power over the three decades of the approach on competition, shaping, and accommodation. The guiding policy will be to compete with China until it acts more responsibly in East Africa and the accommodated world order. The most critical element of this approach will be the U.S. commitment to rapidly shift and maintain an indirect mode of action, which will mean adapting the Africa Strategy from its current China-centric approach to an Africa-centric approach. The U.S. will not accomplish its aim for increased influence if African nations perceive that the U.S. is merely engaged in Africa to counter China. By veiling its ultimate intentions toward China, the U.S. will increase U.S. influence to mitigate China’s, partner with a rising Africa, and position the U.S. to benefit from the African market and workforce emerging over the next 30 years.
Objective-Instrument Packages: The Ways/Means to Mitigate Chinese Influence
The three objectives associated with the 30-year approach and guiding policy are ranked in priority order and supported by sub-objectives or actions, which will delineate the means and ways to achieve the desired ends. The three objectives are efforts empowered by the information, military, and economic instruments, each coupled with the diplomatic instrument.
Objective 1: Change the Strategic Narrative
The goal of the first objective is to fundamentally alter the perceived narrative of U.S. engagement in Africa and great-power competition with China. The first objective will be achieved by primarily using the information and diplomatic instruments both directly and indirectly to shape and persuade the domestic and international audience of the U.S.’ intentions and actions with Africa through three actions.
1.1) Change the Domestic Narrative about Africa. Although the U.S. public has long perceived Africa as a continent full of poverty, corruption, disease, and conflict, the U.S. should put on a full-spectrum initiative to inform U.S. citizens and businesses of the opportunities for investment, profit, travel, and engagement with the African continent as an emerging market. This information initiative will involve more effort on the part of national-level leadership, government agencies, media, business, academia, and civil society to dispel stereotypical fears and to highlight – via public addresses, legacy, and social media platforms – the substantive work being carried out by the Department of State (DoS), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Defense (DoD), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), and the private sector, as well as the opportunities and investment sectors emerging out of various nations across Africa with a focus on East Africa. National and local-state government should encourage U.S. media companies like CNN, Fox, MSNCB, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others to increasingly cover African stories relevant to the nation and diaspora communities. As the demand signal grows for African coverage, the U.S. should encourage technology giants such as Google, Facebook, and Apple to allow more African content to appear in the top search results within their search-engine platforms.
1.2) Change the Domestic and Global Narrative about Great Power Competition. The U.S. should nest this action within the broader U.S.-China strategy and shift the national and international dialogue from the U.S. as a victim competing with a rising power to the narrative of a responsible world leader engaging and shaping a global system to accommodate the interests of nations in an increasingly multipolar world. Within this action, the U.S. should acknowledge China’s development efforts and highlight its responsibility to the world. The U.S. should also avoid over-elevating low-level competition annoyances and focus on highlighting only the Chinese actions that genuinely threaten U.S. interests in the region, such as direct security threats to the U.S. base in Djibouti or corrupt business practices. This action will fundamentally reframe U.S. global engagement as constructive rather than narrowly focused on great-power competition in each region. It will also increasingly require national-level leadership, outward-facing policy documents, the whole-of-government, media, international organizations, and international allies and partners to echo this message.
1.3) Change Regional Narrative in East Africa. The U.S.-China information effort in East Africa should shift to a non-advertised, indirect, Africa-centric approach. The U.S. executive and judicial branches of government (namely the White House, DoS, and Congress) should fill and maintain all critical diplomatic positions in East Africa and increase regular U.S. Senior Leader visits to the region. The U.S. should also pursue official dialogues with the African Union (AU), the East African Community (EAC), and the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) on how the U.S. can better partner with the region to achieve Africa’s Agenda 2063 goals and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, the U.S. should encourage more significant contributions and coverage of local stories in each East-African nation through DoS Public Diplomacy and U.S. media companies posted in the region, like CNBC Africa and others. Finally, the U.S. should support upstart pay-TV services, like Kwesé, which is attempting to bring back premium U.S. content like ESPN to the continent.
Critical to this objective will be the re-establishment of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) – or the creation of a new agency with similar means – to facilitate the orchestration of the information instrument, along with the U.S. government synchronization of supporting diplomatic, economic, and military actions in the region to demonstrate the U.S. resolve to make East Africa a priority.
Objective 2: Solidify the U.S. as East Africa’s Security Partner of Choice
The goal of the second objective is to ensure the U.S. retains and strengthens its current position as the security partner of choice in the region. The second objective will be achieved by primarily using the military and diplomatic instruments directly, indirectly, and multilaterally to enable force capability and capacity building through two actions.
2.1) Increase Partnership with Africa against Violent Extremist Organizations (VEO). The U.S. should halt the drawdown of U.S. troops partnering with forces in the region in support of counter-terrorism (CT) efforts, so that the U.S. can retain its foothold as the security partner of choice. The region understands that development is not entirely achievable without security because VEOs disrupt regional stability and degrade the opportunity for economic growth and prosperity. The U.S. commitment to support a secure and stable environment for development will directly demonstrate the U.S. pledge to shared economic and security interests with the region. To this end, U.S. DoD, DoS, and USAID should reaffirm the commitment to the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) Troop Contributing Countries (TCC) to include Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia that the U.S. will continue to partner with regional, national, and international (with the United Nations, European Union, France, and the United Kingdom) security efforts by providing training, equipment, assistance, advising, and community-level engagement.
2.2) Enhance USAFRICOM’s Resourcing to Implement Its Campaign Plan. USAFRICOM’s 2019 Posture Statement to Congress demonstrated a complete realignment of the theater campaign strategy to nest within the 2017 NSS and 2018 NDS to address great-power competition and security threats through a partner-centric approach. USAFRICOM should maintain its Senior-Leader Engagements, Senior-Service-Chiefs Summits, Exercise series, and Defense, Diplomacy, and Development (3D) conferences in order to foster multilateral, multinational, and interagency collaboration. Regrettably, USAFRICOM has historically been an economy-of-force theater of operations with a limited budget and no directly assigned forces to carry out the numerous security-cooperation missions across the continent. With this in mind, the U.S. Army should make the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) permanently available to USAFRICOM following its first deployment to the region in early 2020, so that it has a committed force to advise, assist, train, equip, and build enduring relationships and partner capacity in the region.
As Africa is a continent with some of the most significant development needs and USAFRICOM has endeavored to provide military support to diplomacy and development efforts, the U.S. should further increase funding, resourcing, personnel allocations for Security Cooperation, and latitude for DoD to increase professionalization and institution-building programs. There should be a particular emphasis on strengthening initiatives such as International Military Education and Training (IMET) and the Africa Military Education Program (AMEP) along with more Civil Affairs and medical engagements that could operate in collaboration with or in support of USAID efforts. Furthermore, DoD should continue to increase partner capacity to enable East-African militaries to respond to their emerging threats by expanding the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (APRRP) and Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA). DoD should also partner with the AU to build a reliable strategic-lift capability for the continent and support its goal of "silencing the guns."
Critical to this objective will be the prioritization of resources and forces to engage in East Africa with the understanding that it will be acceptable to be the security partner of choice with a nation, even if that nation views China as its economic partner of choice in the near- to mid-term.
Objective 3: Enable the U.S. to become East Africa’s Economic Partner of Choice
The goal of the third objective is to put the U.S. on a path to become the economic partner of choice in the region. The second objective will be achieved by primarily using the economic and diplomatic instruments directly, indirectly, unilaterally, and multilaterally through three actions.
3.1) Assist with East Africa’s Development Goals. In order to be a preferred partner in African development, the U.S. should not only push U.S. initiatives but come alongside and support African-led endeavors and priorities. The U.S. should use a whole-of-government approach primarily through DoS, DoD, USAID, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the U.S. Department of Treasury (USDT), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC), the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to support the AU with some of its Agenda 2063 “Flagship Projects.” Key projects the U.S. should consider supporting are the formulation and establishment of an African commodities strategy, the full implementation of the African continental free trade area (AfCFTA), the African passport and free movement of people, a single African air transport market (SAATM), an annual African economic forum, African financial institutions, a pan-African e-network, an Africa outer space strategy, an African virtual and e-university, and cybersecurity. Where possible, the U.S. should encourage the U.S. private sector and NGOs to assist the region with these initiatives, so that East Africa sees full U.S. intent to partner and invest.
3.2) Increase U.S. Investment and Trade in East Africa. The U.S. should fully support and implement the U.S. Prosper-Africa initiative launched in 2019, as it provides the framework and mechanism for the U.S. Government (USG) to offer support for both American and African companies investing on the continent. As the U.S. government cannot force U.S. companies to invest, however, the DFC, the DoC, and organizations such as the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) should create initiatives to enhance exposure for U.S. companies to African investment opportunities. The U.S. should create a special division within the Prosper-Africa structure to develop the means to improve advertisement and build awareness of the investment opportunities, while also embedding Prosper-Africa teams inside each U.S. Embassy to augment or replace the current Embassy “Deal Teams” and connect businesses to the opportunities on the ground. The DoC, USDT, and DoJ should also promote services to African-partner nations to support improving regulatory frameworks and business rights so that the African business environment is more welcoming and appealing to U.S. businesses.
Furthermore, as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) sets to expire in 2025, the U.S. International Trade Administration (ITA) should begin looking at further opportunities to pursue Free-Trade Agreements (FTA), like the one recently offered to Kenya. As the U.S. considers existing markets to scale up such as energy, aviation, financing, banking, and infrastructure, it should also look at U.S. comparative advantages in technology and innovation, which could be both profitable in regards to emerging markets – like 5G and finance technology (Fintech) – as well as offer more secure solutions to the continent compared to China’s Huawei technologies. Ultimately, investment in both job-creating ventures and the technological foundation of the continent could lead to strategic market penetration that produces increased trust in U.S. business by the time the region has 2.2 billion possible consumers in 2050.
3.3) Enable Human Capacity Development and Job Creation in the Region. A hallmark of U.S. engagement on the continent over the last few decades has been the U.S. commitment to a people-centric approach to support health and education initiatives that would build human capacity and enable the continent to thrive. Although these initiatives have not always received significant publicity or attention, USAID, DoS, DoD, and organizations such as the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) must continue to prioritize and invest in human capacity development through health and education. This investment is the best way to empower the continent with the opportunity to rise and prosper as it reaffirms U.S. values and commitment to partner with what African nations want themselves. It is also an essential aspect of offering a positive alternative to China’s model, which is not as focused on investing in Africans. In this vein, DoS should roll out Assistant Secretary Tibor Nagy’s University Partnership initiative and scale up the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), which is one of the most critical means to invest in Africa's future. The U.S. should double the available Mandela Washington Fellowship scholarships from 1000 to 2000 each year and increase the number of micro-grants distributed to the most promising entrepreneurs. Regarding job creation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in cooperation with USAID, DFC, and BMGH should also significantly increase and prioritize efforts to partner with African nations in scaling up their agri-business and value-added sectors in order to maximize the possibility of providing large-scale tangible employment opportunities for the anticipated growing population over the next 30 years.
Critical to this objective will be the U.S. ability to leverage comparative advantages in technology, innovation, and enduring values, which will set the U.S. apart from China as not only an investor for profit but a mutually beneficial partnership.
Sequencing and Orchestration
This strategy focuses on a 30-year, U.S.-China, indirect, Africa-centric approach. The three objectives above are listed in priority order and designed to scale up over the life of the strategy in order to compete with China and set the conditions for the U.S. to be the partner of choice by mid-century.
In the short-term (1-5 years), the U.S. should increase recurring and positive coverage of East Africa, initiate legislation to reestablish the USIA, and ensure all critical diplomatic posts remain filled in the region. The U.S. should halt the drawdown of U.S. troops in Africa, maintain a commitment to assist partners in combating VEOs, permanently assign the 1SFAB to USAFRICOM in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and increase personnel in the U.S. Embassy Offices of Security Cooperation (OSC). The U.S. should also conduct a formal review of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process and timeline in order to recommend much-needed adjustments to enable the U.S. Defense Industry and bureaucracy to be more competitive and responsive in the region. To lay the foundation for future investment, the U.S. should work closely with the EAC and each nation in East Africa to improve the laws and regulatory frameworks needed to make business environments more inviting and secure. Furthermore, the U.S. should create the Prosper Africa division to spearhead private-sector outreach and specifically explore critical investments in 5G, fintech, agri-business, and value-added ventures in the commodities value chains. Finally, the U.S. should hold discussions with the AU and member states on how to partner with the region to meet its Agenda 2063 goals.
In the mid-term (5-10 years), the U.S. should implement the information campaign to shift the narrative domestically and internationally, increase U.S. Senior Leader and high-profile visits to the region, and diplomatically encourage allies to echo and support the effort. The U.S. should increase the budgets for Defense Institution Building (DIB) and programs to improve the region’s Professional Military Education (PME) systems, while also funding additional rapid-response and capacity-building partnership initiatives with all nations in East Africa with a focus on AMISOM and UN TCCs. The U.S. should roll out the comprehensive and upscaled DoS University Partnership and YALI programs to serve as the “go-to” partner for empowering Africa’s youth. The U.S. should then implement national-level awareness-building campaigns to attract U.S. companies to business opportunities and connect them with the embedded Prosper-Africa teams in the Embassies. Finally, the U.S. should aim to solidify the foothold investments in technology infrastructure, agri-business, and value-added ventures in the commodities value chains (specifically with resources supporting the electric car and space industries), and officially commit support for certain aspects of the AU Agenda 2063.
In the long-term (10-30 years), the U.S. should implement an enduring information campaign to provide domestic and international audiences awareness of the ever-increasing opportunities and developments on the continent along with highlighting the U.S. initiatives and partnerships. The U.S. should partner with the AU and Ethiopia to establish an African-led, U.S.-supported, strategic-lift capability based in Addis Ababa to enable AU rapid response to emerging security threats on the continent. The U.S. should scale up its investments in technology innovation, agri-business, and value-added ventures to help support the region with the surge in needed jobs for the masses of growing youth populations. Finally, the U.S. should gradually accommodate and coordinate with China in the overall development efforts in the region over these 20 years, so that there is more cooperation by mid-century.
Key stakeholders include the U.S. domestic population, African partner nations, U.S. European and Asian allies, and China. The strategy anticipates a positive response from the U.S. domestic population, African partners, and European and Asian allies by the end of the first decade, as the shift in mindset and priorities will take time to reinforce. China's response will likely be very competitive or even confrontational in the first 5 to 10 years because the U.S. will be interfering with China’s assumed economic primacy in the region. The U.S. can mitigate this response by downplaying competition with China, recognizing China as a valid actor in development, and remaining Africa-centric.
Costs, Risks, Viability Tests, and Counterarguments
Costs: The benefits of this strategy outweigh its costs, as the intent is to mitigate a Chinese paradigm for expansion of influence. The highest strategic costs are resource prioritization, economical, time, and political. While the cost in American lives is low, the need to prioritize military presence and partnership in the region will require balancing with other global security interests in order to solidify America as the security partner of choice in the near- to mid-term. The cost in economic treasure and investment will be increased for the region in order to penetrate the African market and demonstrate U.S. prioritization, but will not be unreasonable compared to other efforts globally. Over the next decade, this strategy will also require a significant amount of time to shift the narrative, along with the investment of political capital to lead the effort domestically and internationally.
Risks: The most significant risk to the strategy would be the reliance on assumptions about U.S. national-level prioritization, U.S. domestic support, and African partner receptiveness. Critically, it can be challenging to maintain long-term strategies across administrations in light of the U.S. election cycle. If this strategy does not receive national-level prioritization, it risks improper resourcing and faulty implementation in the near- to mid-term. This insufficient prioritization will derail the imperative shift needed with the domestic and African population narrative, which is at the foundation of the strategy. In order to avoid endangering the strategy, the U.S. president elected in November 2020 must be in full support of this strategic initiative and work to make this a bipartisan commitment from the outset.
The most significant risks from the strategy would be the strategic tradeoffs made to prioritize East Africa and the possibility of Chinese escalating corrupt and malign competition measures in the near- to mid-term. Despite the risk in strategic tradeoffs, the U.S. will need to judiciously prioritize certain aspects of the East Africa strategy in the near- to mid-term given its importance to great-power competition, while increasing flexibility and adaptability in the long-term. Once China realizes the U.S. is targeting East Africa, it is likely it will push back through gray-zone activities in this or other regions. To mitigate this risk, the U.S. should be prepared to respond with counter-gray-zone activities, while simultaneously acknowledging China as a legitimate development actor and calling China to greater responsibility on the world stage.
Viability Tests: The strategy passes all of the coherence tests; however, faulty assumptions about U.S. private sector willingness to engage could invalidate the strategy.
The strategy suitability rating is high. As this strategy is nested within the overall U.S.-China strategy and addresses a unique aspect of great-power competition with China (namely East Africa being the only region with China’s combined economic and military power-projection paradigm), it is well suited to serve U.S. interests to mitigate Chinese influence.
The strategy feasibility rating is between medium and high. As great-power competition with China is a top national security priority, this strategy could receive bipartisan support for the allocation of the reasonable means needed to achieve the political aim.
The strategy desirability rating is high. Given the implications of the Chinese paradigm and the projected population growth in the region by mid-century, the value of mitigating Chinese influence and positively posturing the U.S. to benefit largely outweigh the costs and long-term approach of the strategy.
The strategy acceptability rating is medium to high. Overall, the idea of countering China’s influence will appeal to U.S. values, the domestic mood in general, and political leaders’ goals. The challenge, however, lies in building the requisite awareness of the Chinese threat in East Africa, as the region has not historically garnered great attention or prioritization. This strategy will also require some means creation, which could initially slow the pace of the short-term actions until the strategy has gained broad bipartisan support.
The strategy sustainability rating is medium to high. As this is a long-term strategy, it will require sustained political will, resourcing, and public support across administrations. Given the historical track record of U.S. policy toward Africa, it is reasonable to envisage maintained domestic and Congressional support for the strategy, once the U.S. establishes it as a core tenant of U.S. policy toward China in Africa.
The U.S. will know it has achieved success as East African partners increasingly turn to the U.S. for security, development, and business solutions over China while being increasingly vocal about appreciating U.S. values in the partnerships. If the U.S. is wrong, then China will continue to erode U.S. influence in the region, and East African partners will more frequently turn to China for economic and security matters.
Counterarguments: There are two counterarguments to this strategy that merit consideration.
First, one could posit that East Africa does not currently rank high enough in strategic importance to merit this level of policy attention and that ceding influence to China in this region would not significantly impact the U.S.. There could be some validity to this line of thinking in the near-term as the situation in East Africa does not yet pose a direct threat to the U.S. homeland. In the long-term, however, the compounding impact of Chinese influence spreading through the rest of the continent combined with China's lack of interest in helping the region genuinely address underlying drivers of insecurity will create a dynamic difficult for the U.S. to influence and respond to by mid-century if the U.S. no longer has a trusted seat at the table. Additionally, China will likely export its paradigm to collocate military basing in support of protecting its economic interests globally. China may do this regardless of U.S. intervention, but it is undoubtedly likely to do it much sooner if left uncontested. Furthermore, the costs of crisis-response measures in 2050 will be far higher than moderate incremental investments in East Africa over the next three decades.
Second, one could propose an alternate strategy that takes a more direct and confrontational approach. This type of approach would send a powerful and clear message that the U.S. will not stand for China's paradigm and actions in East Africa; however, it would also raise the risks economically and militarily in a way that would prove a disservice to U.S. interests and resources. Economically, it is already clear that the U.S. cannot outspend China in the region, so China could respond by further increasing its investments and engagement to make it very difficult for the U.S. to catch up. Militarily, China could feel cornered or emboldened to escalate to the use of force against U.S. interests in the region. The worst-case scenario would be for a confrontation between the U.S. and China in East Africa to further escalate to an undesired war between the two countries. Although the escalation to armed conflict is unlikely, it is not worth the risk of a direct and confrontational approach in the only region that has China's first foreign military base.
Strategic Leadership Challenges
This approach will require national-level leadership commitment across administrations but will serve to communicate the U.S.’ enduring aim to lead, shape, and renegotiate an increasingly multipolar world order acceptable for the U.S., China, Africa, and the world. Domestically, garnering U.S. congressional, and public support for the strategy will be one of the most significant challenges due to the historical lack of interest and awareness in the region. This strategy will require very engaged and deliberate strategic leadership from the U.S. president elected in November 2020 in order to cast the long-term vision for the strategy and build bipartisan support to incorporate resourcing into enduring U.S. China-Africa policy. The strategy will also require the president, other U.S. government senior leaders, and U.S. private sector CEOs to advance the early stages of the strategic narrative and build awareness of the investment opportunities in East Africa.
Internationally, the U.S. will have to mend some relationships with allies before asking for support on the China-East Africa strategy. The critical challenge will be bolstering trust in U.S. leadership within the global commons and inspiring allies to partner with the U.S. in shaping the mutually beneficial future of the international order in an increasingly multipolar context. The president, vice president, department secretaries, ambassadors, and other senior officials will need to conduct numerous bi-lateral meetings with allied nations to demonstrate U.S. commitment to the common cause, welcome allied support, and make a case for the U.S. China-East Africa strategy.
Regionally, before embarking on the strategy to become the partner of choice in the region, the U.S. president elected in November 2020 will need to play a significant role in shifting the narrative to showing personal and U.S. interest in East Africa. During the first two years of the next administration, the president should consider East Africa as one of his international trips following the obligatory state visits to allied nations following the election. The strategy will then require the full involvement of department secretaries, ambassadors, the USAFRICOM Commander, and other senior officials and private sector leaders to demonstrate the real U.S. intent and commitment to increased economic and security engagement with each country in East Africa. This effort will require diligence to shift the strategic message to one of increased interest in East Africa and not just competition with China.
The U.S. has made it clear in the last two years that great-power competition with China will inform U.S. engagement around the globe. In East Africa, the U.S. can mitigate Chinese influence over the next 30 years through an indirect Africa-centric approach. By tailoring the strategy to the region and emphasizing U.S. comparative advantages rather than attempting to compete toe-to-toe with China or by re-casting a cold-war-like atmosphere on the continent, the U.S. can become the economic and military partner of choice by mid-century.
About the Author
Lieutenant Colonel Farmer was commissioned in Infantry Branch Army from ROTC, Wheaton College in 2001. He attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course, Airborne School, and Ranger School and deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq in support of infantry and special forces commands. He transitioned as a Foreign Area Officer in 2010; his FAO assignments include serving as an International Military Affairs Desk Officer in the Security Cooperation Directorate at U.S. Army Africa (USARAF) from 2012 to 2014 and most recently as the Senior Defense Official and Defense Attaché (SDO/DATT) to the Republic of Rwanda from May 2016 to June 2019. He now serves as Functional Area 48/59 Career Manager, Army Senior Leader Development (SLD) /Colonel Management Office (COMO.