The New Strategic Importance of Africa

Abstract

Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States, Africa seemed destined to remain at best peripheral to the strategic landscape as most Americans perceived it. Promising a realist-oriented foreign policy while campaigning for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush responded negatively to a question from PBS’s Jim Lehrer about whether Africa was a significant factor in his geopolitical calculus: “At some point in time the president’s got to clearly define what the national strategic interests are, and while Africa may be important, it doesn’t fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them.”1 After 9/11, however, reversing course and deeming Africa as an increasingly important “second front” in the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) through whose optic many of them now viewed the world, U.S. policymakers from the president down began building entirely new framework for engaging the continent through overlapping networks of ties that will have profound political, economic, and military implications for years to come.