Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog

The world is brimming with crises. Leaders across the globe are burning the midnight oil, trying to find acceptable solutions to seemingly intractable strategic dilemmas, from the ongoing bloodshed in the historic lands of Kievan Rus to the unsettled prospects for a lasting peace in the Middle East to the dangerous sabre-rattling between Tokyo and Beijing. Equally onerous, but less familiar to many in the West, are the international mare’s nests emanating from the continent of Africa.

Before highlighting some of the most urgent of these, it is prudent to pose the question “why should we care about what happens in Africa?” Let’s start with demographics. Approximately 1.55 billion people currently inhabit the “Mother Continent” with that number expected to rise to 2.4 billion by 2050, which would be more than the combined populations of Europe and the entire Western Hemisphere, and account for more than a quarter of humanity.  

Furthermore, Africa holds critical reserves of both natural resources and rare earth minerals, a fact not lost on Trump 2.0. According to the United Nations Environment Program, the continent is home to roughly 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves, including cobalt, chromium, diamonds, gold, platinum, uranium, and rare earth minerals. This geological bank account, managed correctly, will afford the nations of Africa increased economic power as well as political influence, which they will potentially use to shape the coming strategic competition for predominance between the Global West, heretofore led by Washington, and the Global East, centered on Beijing. 

At present, however, Africa offers a complex tableau of instability and violence. Starting in the east of the continent, Ethiopia is once again beating the war drums, threatening to settle festering disputes with its renegade state of Tigray as well as with neighboring Eritrea. Regarding the latter, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, longs to enhance his country’s regional power status by reclaiming an outlet to the sea—possibly the Eritrean port of Assab. A resumption of armed conflict between the two Horn of Africa nations also risks spilling over into Sudan.

Turning to the continent’s greatest contemporary tragedy, the civil war in Sudan grinds on mercilessly with estimates of upwards of 150,000 people killed since the onset of combat between the government forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023. While the bloody clash is essentially about power, there are also significant natural spoils at stake, including gold, iron, oil, copper, and uranium reserves. It is important to note that both sides enjoy international support with the United Arab Emirates purportedly supplying the RSF with military kit to include lethal drones while several middling powers—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—back the government forces. The Trump administration has shown some interest of late in pressing the combatants to the negotiating table but the country is at present dangerously divided, serving as the eastern bookend of an exceedingly unstable Sahel region.

In the west of Africa, Nigeria has become a recent flashpoint for the White House and Capitol Hill. The country, by population far and away the largest on the continent with nearly 240 million citizens, is a societal smorgasbord of competing ethnic, economic, religious, and linguistic interests. Victimized by an increase in Islamic terrorist activity due to systemic counterterrorism failures by coup-plagued Sahel states to the north and east—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, Abuja finds itself the target of intense criticism by the Trump administration. The violence in Nigeria, however, is heterogeneous, including pastoralists versus farmers, secessionist rebels versus the government, and organized gangs and Islamic extremists attacking innocent civilians. The origins of the bloodshed stem from deep-seated ethnic, economic, social, and religious quarrels that will not be solved by pinpoint airstrikes. 

The last stop on our continental tribulation tour is in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa where the repercussions of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda still bear sanguinary fruit. The next generation of the Hutu and Tutsi combatants continue to wage war for control of land and natural resources in the border regions between Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC). To its credit, the U.S. administration has brokered a peace agreement between Kigali and Kinshasa, signed on December 4, 2025. In celebration of the signing, President Trump stated, “”And we’re going to take out the rare earth, take out some of the assets, and pay. Everybody’s going to make a lot of money.”

Whether the Rwanda/DROC peace will hold so that everybody can make a lot of money remains to be seen. Rest assured, however, that this long neglected continent will demand more attention by the current and future denizens of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as demography, natural resources, and increased political power drive Africa’s inexorable rise on the global stage.

Note: This article was published on 9 December by the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and on 12 December by the Brattleboro Reformer.