In September of 2023, a memorandum of understanding was signed in Brussels between a colorful cast of state actors – the United States, European Commission, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Zambia, Republic of Angola and The Africa Finance Corporation and Development bank. The agreement itself was equally colorful and expansive – a commitment by all actors involved to pool funding in order to develop 800 miles of infrastructure from the heart of the African continent all the way to the Atlantic coast.
This would make the rich mines of Zambia and southern Congo, containing critical deposits of Coltan, Copper, and Cobalt, closer to the American and European markets than ever before. For U.S. president Joe Biden, the “Lobito Corridor” project was a masterstroke, bolstering American presence and prestige while positioning itself as an alternative to Chinese investment and supposedly reinforcing the free trade order critical to the American economy. However, a year and a half later, Donald Trump would be elected, and bring in a new era of political isolationism, characterized by a deep skepticism of foreign investment.
It’s been 11 months since Trump’s inauguration and, contrary to the beliefs of most, president Trump has doubled down on the Lobito Corridor, promising even more investment into southern and central Africa. This development leaves us to ask: Why would the “America first” president continue this project, especially with its deep ties to Biden’s legacy? Furthermore, were Biden’s intentions with the Lobito Corridor truly in the spirit of free trade?
In previous decades, foreign entanglements, whether they be by military alliance, intervention or economic integration, were primarily driven by two interests, one economic and the other strategic. The economic interest is a desire to center American capital and economic assets within the global free trade order, allowing access to raw and finished materials while allowing industries with competitive advantage to scale globally. This had primarily been achieved through the lowering of tariffs via the GATT and WTO, in addition to sponsoring transnational integration via NAFTA, the European Union and Mercosur. The strategic interest was driven by the assumed role of the United States as a “global policeman”, especially in the wake of the war on terror. Both goals saw the directed attention of the White House to Asia, South America and Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa, on the periphery of the war on terror and long a playground for British and American capital, presented little in the way of emerging threats or opportunities for exploitation. Aid represented an opportunity for prestige as a leader of the free and developed world, fostering good will with a potential consumer market for finished goods and services.
Lobito, at the tail end of Biden’s presidency, represents a new anxiety taking hold within policymaking circles in Washington. Rather than aid to impoverished communities, Lobito is a strategic calculation, with a coalition of trusted allies and a clear return on those investments. It’s no secret that the kinds of minerals that lie in the hinterlands beyond Lobito are rapidly reaching astronomical levels of demand, with some even projecting that demand will triple by 2035. AI, Electric vehicles, military hardware, and other advanced electronics need these materials for their manufacture, and the Euro-American market requires a secure channel to access these goods amidst pressure from Chinese and Russian investments in their respective African partners. In a neoliberal world order, access to these materials would have been a fait accompli, with the most favored nation policy enforced by the WTO ensuring that no country had a serious trade advantage over the other. We are no longer subject to that world order. A frozen appellate court, anxiety towards globalization from COVID 19 and a renewed era of great power rivalry (namely between the United States, China, Russia, EU and India) have led lawmakers in the United States towards a fundamental, nonpartisan shift in their strategic thinking.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations see weakness in a reliance on the free trade order. Whereas the United States enjoyed the 1990-2010s as the sole economic hegemon on the world stage, its strategic rivals can and have undermined it within its own systems, as we have seen with the most recent trade war with China. Similarly, Russian oil has proven to be the achilles heel of European economic integration, with shortages in energy proving to be a crisis for Eastern European members of the EU. Larger economies, like China and India, have also begun carving out their own spheres of influence, in Africa and elsewhere. I believe that lawmakers in Washington have recognized the need for more direct partnerships with the African continent, modeled after Chinese exploits a decade earlier. Lobito represents a new era of American foreign investment, one that recognizes a rapidly polarizing world amidst looming shortages of materials, critical to any modern economy. U.S.- African foreign policy has transcended the left-right divide, into a game of realpolitik that may soon be reflected in other parts of America’s global sphere of influence.
Projects like Lobito have become a silent triumph of the second Trump Administration, projecting American capital further than ever before in order to exploit the unstable and vulnerable conditions of sub-saharan Africa. At the same time that Donald Trump renewed his interest in the corridor, former CEO of blackwater Erik Prince negotiated a deal for American assistance in the Democratic Republic of Congo, amidst an American-negotiated ceasefire between Rwandan and Congolese forces. In East Africa, Kenya has gained new prominence as an enthusiastic counterbalance to Chinese maneuvers in Tanzania, the Maldives and Mozambique. Between 2022 and 2024, $55 billion have been invested in Africa by the United States, and more is likely to follow. Unlike previous decades, where government-led FDI represented an expression of prestige and the assumption of the role of “leader of the free world”, current investments come with a much more cynical tone. Rather than being the leader of the free world, the United States is attempting to partition the world into its own sphere of influence.