The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy is a document that says far more in what it sidesteps than what it spells out. Nowhere is this clearer than in its treatment of Africa, a half-page coda in a 33-page blueprint that otherwise reimagines the global order through a hyper-sovereigntist, economically protectionist, and resolutely transactional worldview. What emerges is an America that views Africa less as a diplomatic partner or developmental priority, but more as a geo-economic pitstop in a reshuffled global supply chain, primarily valuable for what lies beneath its soil rather than the people above it.
The omission is not subtle. In a year when Africa hosts 1.4 billion people, accounts for 30% of global reserves of key minerals, and will represent 25% of humanity by 2050, the continent occupies less than two percent of the NSS text. It is no clerical oversight; it is a worldview.
America’s “new” strategy articulates Africa almost exclusively as a site of resource competition with China. After all, the U.S. is “completely” import-dependent for 12 critical minerals and more than 50% dependent for another 28, while Africa remains home to vast cobalt, lithium, copper, manganese, and rare-earth deposits. In Washington’s frame, this makes Africa less a continent of growing markets, urbanizing populations, upwardly mobile economies, deepening regional integration, and more a procurement challenge in an accelerating commodities race.
The framing also reveals a quiet retreat from the governance-oriented engagement that defined U.S. policy for many decades. If, for instance, the 2000s were marked by PEPFAR, MCC compacts, and democracy literacy, the 2025 NSS signals a new orientation: extract what is needed, stabilize what might explode, bypass the politics, and avoid ideological debates. In effect, the United States will now accept African leaders “as they are,” a line that reads less as a call for realism and more like the formal abandonment of democratic conditionality.
Rather than a rhetorical shift, the NSS text is a marked departure from the “norm” by openly enshrining a policy of cooperating with authoritarian regimes without even gesturing toward long-term reform. Stability is treated as an input to supply chains, not a social good. Where previous administrations attempted — however imperfectly — to balance security cooperation with governance commitments, the document discards that balancing act entirely.
The practical consequences are already visible. The NSS pledges support for the Lobito Corridor, a minerals route designed to bypass Chinese infrastructure in southern Africa, but it offers no parallel investment in local industry, regional value addition, or energy access. It also promises involvement in Sudan’s and eastern Congo’s conflicts only to ensure that mining operations stop being disrupted. It calls for reorienting the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) toward “reciprocal trade agreements,” narrowing what had been a flagship development tool into a mechanism for commercial extraction.
Even the numbers reveal the misalignment between Washington’s current priorities and Africa’s more complex economic momentum. U.S. financial flows to Africa surged to $5.28 billion in 2023 before collapsing to negative $2.0 billion in 2024, while China maintained positive flows in the same period. China-Africa trade reached $296 billion in 2024, nearly triple US–Africa trade levels. Beijing also redirected exports toward African markets when global trade wars intensified, widening its footprint just as Washington’s policy document was preparing to just about sideline the continent. Under these conditions, the NSS risks hardening the perception that the United States is absent when it matters but assertive only when minerals enter the conversation.
Washington’s error, therefore, is no mere omission. It is also one of strategic myopia. Treating Africa as a supply node rather than a political and economic partner misunderstands how global influence is accumulated. China did not dominate African markets because of its ideology, but because it invested early, financed infrastructure that African states needed, and stayed in the room when crises unfolded. Meanwhile, the NSS treats Africa’s political ruptures as secondary concerns unless they threaten mineral corridors or open the door wider for Beijing.
Sudan is the clearest example. Despite calling the country “the most violent place on earth,” the NSS provides no operational plan for ending a war that has displaced millions. Worse, Washington shows no willingness to sue for even a ceasefire agreement, because the strategy’s new ethos insists on accepting regional actors “as they are.” By choosing not to use its still palpable heft, Washington signals that its stated concern for stability stops where uncomfortable diplomacy begins.
The deeper issue is that the NSS misunderstands where Africa is headed. The continent is becoming more integrated through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), more assertive in global forums, and more confident in setting the terms of external partnerships. A half-page policy cannot meaningfully guide engagement with a region that will define global labor supply, urban growth, and energy transition markets over the next 30 years. The U.S. risks trading long-term influence for short-term resource acquisition, which is precisely how great powers lose footholds in competitive regions.
If Washington’s view of Africa is narrow, its posture is also aggressively disinterested. Less benign neglect, Washington is now deliberately de-prioritizing Africa, feigning interest or framing engagement only when it intersects with the US–China rivalry. Even counterterrorism, long the mainstay of U.S. engagement, is now framed as a means to protect commercial assets rather than address conditions that fuel violent extremism. Militarized responses remain, but the developmental scaffolding that once gave them legitimacy has been ripped out.
There is an irony here.
A strategy that seeks to avoid “forever global burdens” risks creating new ones by ignoring the very governance failures, social inequities, and state fractures that breed instability. If the U.S. refuses to invest in institutional resilience and social development, it will eventually confront crises downstream — migration surges, conflict spillovers, and humanitarian emergencies — that cost far more to manage than early engagement would have cost to prevent.
Yet the NSS unintentionally creates space for Africa to shape a more independent future. By stepping back from nation-building and democracy promotion, Washington may accelerate the emergence of an Africa less dependent on external partners and more committed to internal problem-solving. The danger for the U.S. is that an Africa moving toward strategic autonomy may not choose Washington as its primary partner.
In the end, the NSS dismissively frames Africa as terrain over which great powers maneuver. It is not a strategy, but a blind spot with a title page. For Washington, the cost of this myopia will only grow. In a global economy where influence is built through long-term presence, credible partnerships, and deep institutional ties, transactionalism is not strength — it is drift. Africa will not wait for America to decide what it is worth. But Washington should consider what it stands to lose by pretending the continent matters only when its minerals do.