Trump hopes to buy rare earths from Africa even as he cuts aid
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Ned Temko Columnist
| London
Africa is becoming both a target and a test of President Donald Trump’s root-and-branch remake of America’s foreign policy.
The targeting has felt relentless to many African leaders: He gutted development aid on the day he returned to the White House; in April, he announced steep tariffs on their exports to the United States; and, just last week, he imposed a travel ban aimed primarily at African countries.
But why a test?
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has a history of being rude to, and about, African countries and their leaders. Will his appetite for the rare earths in Africa stay his tongue?
Because Africa still matters to key parts of Mr. Trump’s broader foreign policy agenda, such as the rivalry with China, as well as his drive to secure access to rare earth elements, used for everything from car batteries and consumer electronics to spacecraft and advanced weaponry.
China has a near-monopoly on their production, giving it key leverage in its tariff standoff with the Trump administration.
And Africa has large, untapped deposits, particularly of what’s often called “heavy rare earth” elements essential to advanced manufacturing processes.
Mr. Trump seems confident that the chill in political relations with Africa won’t encroach on his economic and strategic goals in individual countries. He’s reckoning that their economies need America a lot more than America needs them, and that ultimately he will be able to set the terms of engagement.
But the chill is real, and intensifying.
That is partly due to the practical effects of the policy shifts he has made, especially the closure of aid programs providing sanitation, food, HIV/AIDS treatment, and public health services to vulnerable populations.
But it’s also because of the dismissive tone he has adopted, and his messaging, which is popular with his base at home but deeply frustrating, and at times downright offensive, to African governments.
Nothing, perhaps, has grated more than last month’s Oval Office dressing-down of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Marshaling videos and newspaper clips, Mr. Trump falsely declared that white Afrikaner farmers were being systematically killed, in what he has called “genocide.”
This followed a decision to offer asylum to a group of Afrikaner farmers – the sole exception to his blanket suspension of all refugee arrivals.
The depth of the resentment caused was summed up by President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana, one of Washington’s closest African allies. He criticized Mr. Trump’s “untruths” and verbal “violence,” calling them a distraction from “real” crises, including the abrupt halt of development aid.
But on the model of an earlier Oval Office confrontation – with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with whom he has gone on to seal a natural-resource deal – Mr. Trump appears to believe that such resentment won’t prevent similar nuts-and-bolts negotiations in Africa.
An early example could be playing out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a sprawling state in the center of the continent, which has some of the world’s most valuable mineral deposits and whose army has been fighting insurgents backed by its eastern neighbor, Rwanda.
Congo, like other African states, has relied on international aid to alleviate poverty and to provide emergency supplies to the millions of people displaced by the fighting.
By far the largest source of aid has been Washington, giving nearly a billion dollars a year in humanitarian assistance before Mr. Trump slashed overseas aid.
Also, like most African countries, its largest foreign trade partner by far is China.
Congo is part of the Belt and Road, China’s trillion-dollar infrastructure-building campaign to extend its economic and political clout internationally.
Yet none of this has dampened Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for bringing U.S. influence to bear in trying to end the rebel incursion – in part because the fighting has affected a region that holds some of Congo’s main rare earth deposits.
U.S. diplomats have persuaded Congo and Rwanda to agree to a broad peace framework, with the aim of putting a deal in place by later this month.
In a parallel agreement, Congo would give U.S. companies priority investment access to its rare earth mining operations.
Given the worsening political atmosphere in U.S.-Africa ties, that would be a significant policy win for Mr. Trump.
It could also herald a similar approach elsewhere on the continent – a pick-and-choose strategy focusing on states deemed important to his foreign policy aims.
One possible example is the breakaway northwestern part of Somalia.
Somaliland is strategically located at the gateway to the Red Sea, where the U.S. has become concerned over growing Chinese influence next door in Djibouti.
While no country has recognized Somaliland – amid opposition to such a move across Africa – its recently elected president is holding out hope that Mr. Trump may do so.
How the administration might challenge Africa’s ever-closer economic ties to China, and whether it has the ambition to do so, will likely take longer to become clear.
An early sign could involve the African Growth and Opportunity Act, launched by the Bill Clinton administration, which gives about 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa tariff-free access to the U.S. market in return for free-market reforms and human rights commitments.
It’s due for renewal in September, and Mr. Trump may well let it expire.
Even if he keeps it, the deal seems almost certain to be reworked with very different conditions: less emphasis on human rights, and more on the kind of quid pro quo that may be in the pipeline in Congo.
Mr. Trump, as one U.S. official told African reporters recently, will want “a much stronger form of reciprocity.”
