February 21, 2008
As President Bush wraps up his five-day trip to Africa this week, it is worth considering whether it will be the president's Africa initiatives that will stand out as his singular foreign policy success when Americans begin to contemplate his White House legacy. Through a combination of strong development and security policies across the continent, Bush has created a template for a consistent policy towards Africa that has been absent for decades.
Indeed, the “compassionate conservative” platform on which Mr. Bush ran in 2000 manifested itself more so across the continent of Africa than it has at home, and with much greater success. No surprise, then, the leaders of Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia welcomed the president with joyful receptions he'd be hard pressed to find in most corners of the world today.
Perhaps the most glaring example of Bush's positive policy impact on Africa, and the one trumpeted most over the past week, is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The White House says the program has doubled since the president took office in 2001, will double again by 2010 and has impacted 1.4 million people, mostly in Africa. Though observers dispute the actual percentage increases claimed by the White House, the president requested in his recent budget proposal $30 billion from Congress for the next five years, or six billion a year, in addition to $300 million for expansion of the President's Malaria Initiative.
The president also asked for $2.2 billion to jumpstart the Millennium Challenge Account (MCC), the slow-off-the-ground development program that rewards good governance, accountability and transparency with development dollars. Eight African countries, including Benin and Ghana, are currently receiving funds from the MCC, with Tanzania coming one step closer during the Bush visit. Rwanda may soon be eligible.
But Bush's Africa policy has gone beyond humanitarianism. Under his watch, the U.S. established in 2007 the first non-African diplomatic mission to the African Union, with a full-time ambassador and a small staff based at the AU's headquarters in Ethiopia. Its mission is to facilitate trade and diplomatic relations across the continent, from the implementation of trade hubs under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), to streamlining U.S. support for the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia and the United Nations - African Union hybrid force in Sudan. The U.S. mission to the AU also hosts an annex of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which fosters security partnerships and counters terrorist ideology in Africa.
At an AU summit in Accra, Ghana last July, the new Ambassador, Cindy Courville, said the mission was a testing ground for what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called “transformational diplomacy.” “It's a proactive state in building partnership, not a dependency,” she said in an extensive interview, stressing the continuity and consistency of engagement,” that has long eluded U.S. policy towards Africa. “It's a reality that Africa matters.”
This new approach to the region, which comes as China seeks to strengthen its presence in many parts of Africa, is not without its faults. Many in Africa and beyond remain critical of the U.S. for failing to act decisively to stop what officials have called “genocide” in Darfur, despite the president's pledge of an additional $100 million in support funds on Tuesday. Health and humanitarian workers continue to advocate for greater spending on fighting poverty and disease. Free-traders accuse the U.S. of protectionism and isolating African markets by failing to make concessions in the Doha trade round of World Trade Organization talks. And recent U.S. plans to centralize its three off-continent military commands currently responsible for Africa into one unit, known as Africom, took many African governments by surprise due to lack of consultation.
The command, to be led by General William Ward in conjunction with State Department officials, seeks to bridge U.S. security concerns – terrorism in the Horn of Africa, the protection of American oil investments in the Gulf of Guinea and conflicts in Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – with African health, security and development issues.
It has not been an easy sell. Ghana's President John Kufour, who served as the Chairman of the African Union for the past year, cautioned Africom's leadership to consult with regional leaders carefully as it prepares to set foot on the continent. Even the foreign minister of South Africa, one of the America's closest allies, spoke out strongly against the idea of a U.S. military presence in Africa, warning that it could cause “instability.”
Which brings us to the last stop on Bush's trip this week, Liberia, the West African country settled by former slaves from the U.S. in 1847. Liberia served as a U.S. outpost for spy radio towers during the Cold War, then slipped into two brutal civil wars during the 1990s, the second being instigated by warlord Charles Taylor who is now on trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Liberia's new, American-educated President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has praised the “soft power” element of Africom, and duly welcomed the U.S. to set up headquarters in Monrovia.
“Liberians can only hope that the United States will use Africom to raise the standards for engagement and help change the ‘way of doing business' in Africa,” she wrote in a recent op-ed.
If she's right, the positive foreign policy legacy of the Bush administration may lie not in the sands of the Middle East, but in the hills of Africa.
Robert Nolan is online editor at the Foreign Policy Association and producer of the Great Decisions Television Series on PBS. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Zimbabwe, his upcoming Headline Series will look at the challenges facing the the African Union today. He can be reached at rnolan@fpa.org