Then Blinken saw disaster unfold. The shocking result left Ivory Coast on the brink of being eliminated from the continental competition after a crushing 4-0 loss to their regional rivals.
Like the host nation’s national team, Blinken is looking to reverse the scoreline. The Biden administration is grappling with vexing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and facing an escalating election cycle that threatens to suck much of the oxygen out of Washington, while also showing it remains committed to the partnership in West Africa. It is said that
“We came here for a very simple reason: to protect the future, the people and the prosperity of the United States and Africa,” Blinken said in Abidjan on Tuesday after meeting with Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara and departing for meetings. “Because they are more interconnected and intertwined than ever before.” In Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
Clouds of geopolitical competition lurk behind Blinken’s upbeat rhetoric. The stadium where Blinken sat in Abidjan was built by China, a global economic giant that has expanded its influence across Africa. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi visited Ivory Coast a week earlier and praised the “win-win” relationship between China and Ivory Coast. Further afield in West Africa, Russia has opportunistically approached military regimes plotting coups that have toppled once-nascent democracies in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. The region’s troubled “coup belt” is home to a concentration of states that the U.S. and other Western officials once hoped would become bulwarks of democracy.
Wagner, a Kremlin-aligned mercenary group, is on the front lines of a brutal counterinsurgency against a motley collection of Islamists and other armed groups, deployed across many countries in the arid Sahel region. China’s major arms suppliers are expanding their operations in West Africa, while the Chinese government is contributing to a series of vast oil pipeline projects linking the Sahel region to the Atlantic Ocean.
Meanwhile, anti-Western military regimes in Mali and Niger are forcing the United States and France to reduce their security presences. Blinken last visited the region in March, visiting Niger and its Western ally, then-President Mohamed Bazoum. In the months that followed, Bazoum was ousted by the military junta and his supporters denounced Washington and Paris and held rallies waving Russian flags. Mr Bazoum remains under arrest.
The changing security environment has been at the forefront of Mr. Blinken’s deliberations, with the United States implementing a $300 million program and a $45 million program aimed at strengthening regional coastal states in Africa’s Atlantic coast, including Benin, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo. It touts the dollar’s security assistance. In Ivory Coast, Islamist forces are advancing into the north of the country. Later this year, Ghana will host a series of US-led military exercises involving special forces and commandos from regional forces.
U.S. officials downplayed the competitive aspects of the current mission. “Senior diplomats accompanying Blinken say the trip is about concrete opportunities for economic cooperation, not pushing back against China or Russia,” said Michael, a colleague traveling with Blinken. Birnbaum reported.
“They point out that many African countries have already rejected offers of assistance from Russia from military contractors,” he added. “China, on the other hand, has been less active in new infrastructure projects, and most of the projects it started several years ago have been completed, but China’s influence in the region is an inevitable feature, and Blinken said: The meeting was held at the first stop in Cape Verde, a country off the west coast of Africa, at a government palace also built by Beijing. ”
The Biden administration also wants to shift the narrative about its role in the region, emphasizing priorities beyond counterinsurgency. “We’re good at security assistance and we’re good at tracking terrorists,” Molly Fee, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told reporters before Blinken’s departure. “But if we ignore factors like governance, economic development and climate change, we won’t really get any lasting solutions.”
Blinken’s trip to Africa will be his fourth since becoming President Biden. Last September, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin became the first US defense secretary to visit Angola, the final destination of Mr Blinken’s trip. Vice President Harris and First Lady Jill Biden visited the continent in person.
The United States wants to promote a massive rail project to transport minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to ports in Angola, and from there transport these vital resources to Europe and North America. “The corridor will help the United States keep pace with China, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in Angola,” the New York Times noted.
Analysts argue that for all its distractions, the United States still provides Africans with more intangibles than the shiny infrastructure provided by the Chinese government.. “Democracy is something that African people hold very dear. It’s something that China and Russia don’t have,” Oge Onubogu, director of the Wilson Center’s Africa program, told colleagues. “For the United States, I think our hearts are in the right place, but we have to be able to invest the time and resources to demonstrate that the relationship and partnership is for the long term.”
But in world politics, there may be a fine line between the invisible and the ephemeral. President Biden’s apparent decision not to visit the African continent this term, despite promises to do so, overshadows the tremendous efforts made by Blinken and many other Cabinet members.
Cameron Hudson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told CNN: “There is no number of cabinet-level visits that can replace one presidential visit.”