When the United States speaks clearly about how it sees the world, we should pay attention, not because America is always right, but because its assumptions have a habit of shaping power, markets, and security far beyond its borders. The latest U.S. National Security Strategy does exactly that. It is direct, hierarchical, and unapologetic about prioritisation. Regions are ranked. Interests are weighed. Old illusions are discarded. The document makes little effort to pretend that everything matters equally, everywhere, all the time. As the European Parliamentary Research Service notes, this is not a routine policy update but a fundamental reorientation of how the United States understands its role in the world. And in this newly reordered world, Africa is finally seen, but still held at arm’s length. The strategy marks a clear departure from decades of aid-heavy, values-driven engagement with the continent. Instead, it adopts the language of trade, investment, and selective partnership. For many African leaders, this shift should sound refreshing, long overdue, even. Aid has often arrived with moral lectures, bureaucratic burdens, and limited transformation. Investment, by contrast, carries the promise of respect and mutual interest. But this warmer tone highlights a harder truth. Africa is being repositioned not as a strategic partner shaping the future, but as a supporting actor in someone else’s contest. For Rwanda, and for Africa more broadly, this distinction matters. As the EU analysis makes plain, the 2025 strategy reshuffles the global hierarchy of U.S. priorities. The Western Hemisphere is elevated to first place as a privileged sphere of interest. Asia remains central to economic and security calculations. Europe, though sharply criticised, is still treated as strategically and culturally vital. Africa, by contrast, remains last, its position unchanged. This ranking is not symbolic. It signals where the United States is prepared to invest long-term political capital, security guarantees, and strategic imagination. Africa appears largely as a functional space: a source of energy and critical minerals, a site for investment opportunities, and a zone of conflicts to be managed and contained. In my opinion, it is not that Africa is ignored. Rather, it is noticed only on terms that limit its potential. Africa is recognised as important, but not as essential. The continent is valued primarily for what it can provide, resources and access, rather than for what it might become. The strategy offers no serious vision for African industrialisation, no ambition to integrate African economies into global technology ecosystems, and little indication of a desire to elevate African states from rule-takers to rule-makers. As the EU analysis observes, engagement is explicitly selective, and long-term commitments are discouraged. The message is implicit but unmistakable: Africa matters insofar as it contributes to others’ resilience. In principle, the strategy’s rejection of an aid-centric relationship is a positive development. Aid has too often distorted incentives, weakened institutions, and entrenched dependency. For years, African leaders and thinkers have argued that what the continent needs is investment, not charity. But investment, like aid, is never neutral. What the strategy offers Africa is a narrowly defined form of investment, focused largely on energy, critical minerals, and infrastructure tied to extraction. These sectors are undeniably important, especially in a world where supply chains have become strategic assets. But they are also sectors that generate revenue far more easily than they generate broad-based capability. By contrast, Asia is offered technology partnerships, supply-chain co-design, collaboration on artificial intelligence, and access to capital markets. Europe is offered industrial renewal, deep trade integration, and political partnership. Africa, meanwhile, is offered access to American capital largely to extract value, not to build ecosystems. It is clear, Africa is not invited into meaningful participation in global technology governance or rule-setting. Without deliberate safeguards and African assertiveness, this risks reproducing an old pattern in new language: growth without transformation, income without power, participation without influence. Rwanda’s position within this framework is particularly revealing. By many measures, Rwanda is precisely the kind of partner this strategy favours. It is disciplined, centralised, security-capable, and pragmatic. Its role in regional mediation, peacekeeping, and stability, especially in the Great Lakes region, aligns well with a U.S. approach that seeks influence without deep military entanglement or long-term security guarantees. Yet Rwanda also exposes the limits of this strategy. Without vast mineral reserves or major energy exports, Rwanda risks being valued more as a facilitator than as a beneficiary, a reliable node in a regional system, useful for coordination and stability, but with limited access to the largest flows of capital and technology. Unless Rwanda actively negotiates beyond an extractive and security-focused lens, it could find itself strategically useful but economically constrained. For Rwanda, as for many African countries, the lesson is clear, and hard. Simply staying in step with others is not enough. Africa must act with purpose and claim its own space. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the strategy lies not in what it says, but in what it leaves out. Africa is not offered a continent-wide economic compact. It is not positioned as a co-shaper of the rules governing trade, finance, or emerging technologies. There is no African equivalent to the Indo-Pacific vision, no political or economic bargain that reflects the continent’s demographic weight, market potential, or long-term global significance. This absence signals a deeper assumption: that Africa’s future will matter, but will not decisively shape the world order. On security, the strategy is cautious to the point of detachment. Terrorism will be countered. Conflicts may be mediated. But there is little appetite for sustained engagement or long-term guarantees. Stability is encouraged, but largely left to African states to finance, enforce, and maintain. The result is a dangerous equilibrium, one of chronic, low-grade insecurity that never quite triggers global urgency, yet never fully disappears. If implemented as written, the strategy will shape incentives across the continent. African states will be pushed to compete for bilateral favour rather than deepen continental integration. Extractive sectors will be prioritised over manufacturing and innovation. Governance will increasingly be securitised, often at the expense of social or commercial contracts. Great-power rivalry will be navigated tactically rather than strategically. For some governments, this approach may feel convenient, acknowledged, offered partnerships, promised investments. Yet for Africa’s long-term development, it is precarious. Being useful within someone else’s priorities is not the same as shaping your own future. At its core, the strategy seems to ask Africa a simple question: what can you offer the United States and the world, beyond natural resources and a history of aid dependence? Africa must respond with a deeper one: what kind of Africa does this partnership help us become? In my view, the danger is not exclusion, but incorporation on terms that constrain ambition and narrow possibility. Rwanda, and Africa more broadly, must insist that trade delivers transformation, that investment builds capability, and that partnership includes voice. Otherwise, the continent will once again be present in the global order, needed, but never fully prioritised. In a world reordered by power and priority, that may be the most consequential omission of all. The writer is a management consultant and strategist.
