‘If it’s just symbolic, it's going to be a disaster’: Biden’s Africa summit challenge

President Joe Biden has a tough task ahead of him when he convenes African leaders in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday: woo them away from China.

The 49 leaders invited to the second-ever U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit have gotten years of infrastructure investment and sweetheart trade deals from China, while U.S. policy toward Africa has been far less ambitious and akin to what some critics call benign neglect.

Biden’s challenge will be to convince African leaders that his administration is ready to deliver robust diplomatic and economic engagement on the continent. And that he’ll commit the necessary resources to rival China as Africa’s superpower of choice.

Many African leaders feel like they’ve already been fooled once — when President Barack Obama used the first such summit in 2014 to signal growing commitment to the continent. Instead, Obama cut funding to combat AIDs in Africa and reduced foreign aid to the region.

China, meanwhile, has become sub-Saharan Africa’s No. 1 trading partner through imports of everything from textiles to smartphones while purchasing massive volumes of African agricultural products and commodities including copper and oil. And Beijing has built roads and ports across Africa over the past two decades, while regularly increasing its foreign aid to the continent.

And Chinese foreign ministers have made Africa their first foreign destination of each new calendar year since 1991.

On top of that, China has more potential friends in Africa than the U.S. because its diplomatic outreach has embraced countries regardless of their respect for democracy or human rights.

“Africa has always been at the bottom of the U.S. foreign policy priority list … [and] this is equally true for the Biden administration,” said David Shinn, former ambassador to Ethiopia with extensive diplomatic experience across Africa. The U.S. will “pound on the table and say ‘You’ve got to clean up your act and engage in free and fair elections,’ while the Chinese just hold their nose and basically deal with the government in charge.”

Africa is important to the U.S. as a growing market for American products as well as a source of commodities including cobalt and lithium essential to the U.S.’ rapidly expanding electric vehicle industry. The U.S. also sees Africa as essential to its national security due to Islamic terrorist groups in the region, including Boko Haram in West Africa and Al-Shabaab in Horn of Africa.

Ahead of the summit, the Biden administration announced that the president will throw his support behind getting the African Union a permanent G-20 seat. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the move reflects the administration’s recognition of the need for “more African voices [in] international conversations” about the world’s most pressing issues.

That kind of recognition could also help the U.S. in international forums. At a time when America is seeking to counter growing Chinese influence in multilateral organizations, the administration has noted that Africa boasts “one of the largest regional voting groups in the United Nations.”

But Beijing may be ahead in the soft power arena, too. In September, African countries constituted almost half of the 28 states that supported a Chinese resolution to reject allegations of crimes against humanity in Xinjiang as “disinformation.”

China-Africa relations are “the bedrock of China’s foreign policy,” the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang, said at the Semafor Africa Summit on Monday.

One difficulty for Biden: He’ll have to convince African leaders to choose the U.S. over China … without mentioning China.

African leaders don’t want their countries to become “a playground for world powers using the continent for their Cold War initiatives against each other,” said Zeenat Adam, former director of the Horn of Africa section of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation.

Perhaps to that end, summit organizers insist the event has nothing to do with Beijing. The meeting is “not about other countries and their engagement” with Africa, a senior administration official said on the condition of anonymity in a press briefing on Thursday.

Not so, says Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who serves on the Africa subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The summit will show that the U.S. “offers a better, more sustainable economic model that treats our partners more fairly than Beijing treats theirs,” Van Hollen said. That model’s strength is its contrast with “China’s coercive brand of debt trap diplomacy,” he said. Beijing moved to silence such accusations by forgiving loans of 17 African country borrowers in August.

Still, there are a number of relationships to repair.

For many African leaders, the last U.S. president who delivered for Africa was George. W. Bush, whose PEPFAR program has saved millions of lives by distributing affordable drugs to treat HIV-AIDS. They were disappointed that Obama’s personal ties to the continent — his father was born in Kenya — didn’t translate into more attention. And the Trump administration alternately ignored and insulted Africa.

Biden’s negligible one-to-one diplomatic outreach with African leaders hasn’t encouraged a sense that things are changing. He’s held few calls with African leaders and instead of confirming formal bilateral sessions during the summit, organizers have instead “curated a number of substantive little moments” between Biden and visiting African leaders, the senior administration official said.

That puts pressure on Biden to deliver on his pledge in July that the summit will offer “new economic engagement” to African leaders skeptical of U.S. commitment to the region.

“If it’s just symbolic, it's going to be a disaster because nobody can do symbolism better than the Chinese,” said Tibor Nagy, former assistant secretary of State for African Affairs. That won’t happen, say organizers. “There are going to be major deliverables and initiatives,” the senior administration official said, without elaborating.

The U.S. rivalry with China in Africa mirrors their geostrategic competition in other parts of the world. It’s a race for diplomatic influence and access to markets and resources. But unlike in Asia or the Middle East, the U.S. has a significant disadvantage in Africa because Washington has done less to keep up with Beijing’s efforts in Africa than it has in other regions.

The Biden administration’s agenda for the summit includes initiatives to advance peace and security on the continent, improve food security and help African countries cope with the climate crisis.

Biden’s summit goal of advancing “peace and security” in Africa reflects U.S. geostrategic concerns about China’s growing military footprint in the region. The People’s Liberation Army established a military base in Djibouti in 2017, sparking U.S. Africa Command’s security concerns about its base just a few miles away. Then-Africom chief Gen. Stephen Townsend warned in March that China was eyeing Equatorial Guinea as the site of its second regional base. “We have to talk to our African partners about what we see as dangers of having that type of influence on their soil,” a senior Defense Department official told reporters Thursday. The official required anonymity as a condition of the briefing.

The Pentagon is also concerned about Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s dominance of the continent’s 4G networks. The FCC declared Huawei a “national security threat” in 2020.

Use of Huawei technology “may limit us information-sharing with certain African countries,” said the senior Defense Department official. But former U.S. diplomats blame Huawei’s popularity in Africa on a U.S. failure to provide affordable alternatives. “We were telling people not to buy Huawei, but then they would say, ‘OK, so what should we buy instead?’ And there was no way to match Huawei’s price or the financing terms,” said Nagy, the former assistant secretary of State for African Affairs.

African leaders will look to Biden to deliver on a promise to channel funds from a G7 infrastructure investment program to projects in Africa. That could include an extension of an Obama-era program expiring in 2025 that gave tariff-free status to certain African imports. Biden can also take steps to address Africa’s concerns about the regional impact of the climate crisis by honoring his pledge that the summit will advance U.S.-Africa climate cooperation.

African leaders would also welcome any U.S. move to expand educational scholarships for the continent’s youth. More than 60 percent of Africans are under the age of 25 and one-third of African youth face chronic unemployment. An expansion of Obama-era scholarship programs would counter Xi Jinping’s pledge in 2018 to provide “50,000 scholarships and 50,000 training opportunities” for young Africans.

Another challenge for Biden: adhering to his wider foreign policy objectives of “defending freedom … [and] upholding universal rights” without driving autocratic summit attendees deeper into China’s orbit. Biden is asking African leaders “to choose engagement with a country that asks no questions, versus a country that's constantly scolding, and threatening to withdraw aid or withdrawing aid or sanctioning,” said Louis Mazel, former director of the State Department’s Africa Bureau’s Office of Regional and Security Affairs.

That framing won’t pass the giggle test among many summit attendees. “Americans are still seen as neocolonialist powers,” said Adam, the former South African diplomat. “Not all countries believe that the Americans and Europeans should be the watchdogs of democracy and human rights.”

Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman contributed to this story.