A Foot in the Door but Needing More

President Donald Trump and his administration have pursued a more pragmatic, transactional approach in Africa since taking office in 2025. The message is clear: America First means prioritizing US business and security interests, such as counterterrorism, countering China, and critical minerals—not democracy or humanitarian concerns. This approach has led to several short-term wins, especially in building relationships with African autocrats, but overlooks a glaring long-term problem: To ensure that the nascent influence the administration has generated leads to lasting partnerships, it must create conditions for private US investment to thrive, and doing that requires supporting better and more inclusive governance in Africa.

Despite these longer-term challenges, the early returns on the president’s priorities have been promising. The administration has set the foundation for a wide-ranging partnership with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as part of conflict mediation efforts in the eastern DRC. US officials have similarly made inroads with the military regimes in Sahelian West Africa, which are battling some of the strongest al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates in the world. Elsewhere on the continent, American diplomatic and military officials have engaged Russian-aligned strongmen in the Central African Republic (CAR), Libya, and Madagascar—hopefully the first step in lessening these leaders’ alignment with US adversaries.

Across Africa, defense partnerships remain America’s most effective tool for getting a foot in the door with the continent’s autocratic governments, which are often less interested in American values than they are in US military capabilities. In Mali, strengthened defense ties have led to real-world cooperation, like the US providing essential intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support for counterterror operations in the country. Beyond Mali, the United States has signed several defense cooperation agreements with the DRC and is exploring opportunities to train the country’s forces—an initiative that is also being explored in the nearby CAR. Even in heavily fractured countries, US officials are being pragmatic. For example, top US military officials have led US efforts to grow ties with both of Libya’s rival armed factions and push these factions toward reunification. Outside of the Department of War, Erik Prince, informal adviser to President Trump and private military contractor, has been heavily involved in US outreach to autocratic governments in the DRC and Madagascar.

These defense ties are creating conditions for greater economic engagement, especially regarding critical minerals. The Congolese offer of “minerals for security” set the foundation for Congolese-US cooperation under the Washington Accords, which has led to bilateral agreements on US critical mineral access and growing American business interest in the DRC’s copper, cobalt, and lithium. Beyond this bilateral cooperation, US mediation has also produced a regional economic framework, which aims to attract billions of US dollars in critical mineral supply chains in the DRC and Rwanda. This influx would support regional projects in energy, infrastructure, transportation, trade, mining, tourism, public health, and more.

The defense-then-business formula is playing out across the continent: In Madagascar, US officials have advocated that the Malagasy junta resume work at the Toliara Project—a $700 million US-backed mineral deposit that holds titanium, zirconium, rare earths, and radioactive minerals. In Mali, a US company signed an agreement in late 2025 with the country’s state-owned mining company to resume production at an $11 billion gold mine, and the Malian government is courting further US investment into critical mineral deposits in early 2026. The story is similar in the CAR, where the United States signed a memorandum of understanding for greater economic cooperation in January 2026 that aims to secure investments along the country’s southern mining belt, which is home to deep reserves of cobalt, coltan, gold, lithium, and rare earths.

Beyond economic opportunities, the Trump administration’s willingness to engage these authoritarian countries has often contained or degraded Russian or Chinese influence. Over the years, China has come to dominate the DRC’s mining sector. But the new DRC-US framework commits the DRC to rebalance its commercial relationships and redirect mineral exports west toward the Atlantic Ocean via a US-funded railway corridor. Similarly, the CAR and eastern Libya have been major Russian hubs in Africa for the better part of a decade, creating challenges for US operations in those regions. US inroads in the Sahel threaten to undermine one of Russia’s newer footholds, and US engagement in Madagascar could stymie Russia’s hopes that the new junta will help it gain a long-sought-after position in the Indian Ocean.

This reality means that the United States will need to continue to comprehensively outcompete its rivals and other prospective partners through sustained engagement, especially economic investment.

Despite these early successes, the administration will need to ensure that the influence it has generated translates to lasting, strategic partnerships. These authoritarian partners are not naive. They are balancing their options, not simply switching sides. This reality means that the United States will need to continue to comprehensively outcompete its rivals and other prospective partners through sustained engagement, especially economic investment.

The defense space is increasingly competitive, and the United States is far from the only player in the game. The Kremlin offers a “regime security package,” which is attractive for its authoritarian allies. Turkey sells cheap drones to these regimes without any strings attached. The Gulf states are also becoming increasingly prominent arms providers and security partners. All of these create complexity for US engagement, which can come with structure and conditions that regional autocrats prefer to avoid. Furthermore, the West has seen firsthand how quickly partnerships premised on military ties can fall by the wayside. From 2022 to 2024, the Sahelian juntas turned to Russia after they kicked out over 15,000 Western and UN forces that had been fighting Salafi-jihadi insurgents in the region for more than a decade. The fickle nature of relationships in the region is not a challenge unique to the US, as similar factors complicate Russian engagement in Africa, but American strategy should not fall prey to the trap of focusing on security alone.

In fact, the limits on defense partnerships make economic engagement all the more critical. The Sahelian countries, the DRC, and the CAR are some of the poorest on earth, and rampant insecurity and economic mismanagement have only slowed development. Farther north, more than a decade of war has left Libya’s valuable oil and resource deposits underdeveloped. In Madagascar, grievances over corruption and stagnant economic progress, not insecurity, sparked the protests that toppled the country’s democratic government.

The United States will be unable to unlock its full economic potential and keep pace with other economic heavyweights without supporting governance that aims to deliver gains for its people and partners, not just maintain control.

While security cooperation is the United States’ best entry point with these autocrats, and economic development is an ideal means of furthering regional relationships, supporting better governance is the final key to building long-term stability with these partners. The United States will be unable to unlock its full economic potential and keep pace with other economic heavyweights without supporting governance that aims to deliver gains for its people and partners, not just maintain control. The drawbacks of poor governance have long deterred greater US investment across Africa, and the United States will need to mitigate these challenges if it hopes to compete with countries like China or the Gulf states. An example of challenges is already evident in the DRC, where permitting disputes and bureaucratic delays have slowed mining cooperation. In the CAR and the Sahel, widespread insecurity continues to pose a severe obstacle for US investors. Unlike some other regions of the world, US military officials and experts agree that the root challenge in these cases is not military capacity, but governance challenges.

More representative governance is also key to long-term US influence. For starters, more democratic-leaning countries show a greater willingness to work with the United States for various reasons, including our ability to outcompete China and Russia in providing the best-quality deals, not just those that enrich a country’s autocratic leadership. Autocratic governments also lead to dissatisfied citizens, who may be driven to topple their government and reset any existing deals. An example of how autocratic tendencies imperil US influence in the region is playing out in the DRC right now, where the Congolese president has targeted political opposition groups alongside Congolese civil society, banking on US cooperation to shore up his regime security. These actions are drumming up local opposition to the US-DRC deal and making his regime—and thus the US-DRC partnership—vulnerable to future shifts in power. In Madagascar, the ruling junta came to power on the back of youth-fueled protests over poor governance, but the youth groups have since accused the country’s new leaders of marginalizing them once again.

If the administration wants to unlock the full potential of the influence it has created, it should gradually move beyond a purely transactional relationship.

In this area, US policy toward Africa is lagging behind its potential. Trump has no interest in addressing these governance matters, introducing a contradiction in the administration’s strategy. US officials have correctly avoided public moralizing, virtue signaling, and lecturing, and the administration has cultivated the influence it currently enjoys by “meeting countries on their own terms.” But this should be a starting point, not an end goal. If the administration wants to unlock the full potential of the influence it has created, it should gradually move beyond a purely transactional relationship.

Publicly, American diplomacy can remain tactful. But the United States should calibrate its approach to meet countries where they are and then privately encourage more effective and representative governance, rather than abandoning such efforts entirely. When US officials and business leaders discuss these issues with African partners, they should not patronize but instead speak frankly as partners and coequals and note that governance issues are mutual concerns, as they are a legitimate obstacle to the win-win business partnerships on the table. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to a continent of 54 countries, which is why it will be critical for the administration to empower diplomatic staff to identify and engage with these issues on a country-by-country basis.

The Trump approach to Africa has energized US-Africa policy and cultivated US influence where it was previously lacking, but these transactional partnerships are still fragile, limited, and at risk in an increasingly competitive international system. To create lasting partnerships, the administration cannot rely on a solely transactional outlook and should use the leverage it has generated to support more democratic governance. This does not mean a return to the failed strategy of the past, when moral grandstanding and ultimatums came first. Instead, the administration should continue its successful public messaging around sensitive issues while privately framing these challenges for what they are—an area of mutual interest to unlock US economic investment in these African countries.

Liam Karr is the Africa Team Lead for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.