The Trump administration boasts that it has upended the United States’ relationship with Africa. In its view, the U.S. government has historically promoted a liberal agenda on the continent through aid, democracy promotion, and human rights advocacy; President Donald Trump has pivoted to a proudly transactional approach that favors U.S. security and economic interests. As Nick Checker, the senior State Department official responsible for African affairs, declared in a speech on March 19, “The United States is resetting its relationship with Africa based on mutually beneficial partnerships rather than aid, dependency, and spreading divisive ideology. . . . It’s a radical but necessary corrective to the reckless pursuit of liberal hegemony over the last 30 years.”

Critics and supporters alike have bought the Trump administration’s claim. “Trump’s ‘America First’ approach is reshaping how the United States engages with Africa,” a Tony Blair Institute report declared in February 2025. “Under the new administration, U.S.-Africa relations will be explicitly pursued within the context of U.S. interests.” In December, The Guardian concluded that Washington’s Africa strategy indeed constituted a “consequential pivot” in which “human rights and democracy promotion have been de-emphasized.”

But the truth is that the difference between Trump’s approach and that of previous U.S. administrations is a matter of degree, not kind. Trump’s wholesale demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development, restrictions on African visa seekers, punitive tariffs, courting of autocrats, and freewheeling, quid-pro-quo dealmaking are more nakedly transactional than the policies his predecessors pursued. But alongside public health interventions and democracy promotion, Washington has long pursued arrangements with African authoritarians and sought more informal kinds of deals on the continent than it pursued elsewhere. For many decades, U.S. Africa policy has been disjointed. And over the past 20 years, it has become even more so, as recent African migrants to the United States have become more influential in policymaking and have pushed for a country-by-country, rather than a continent-wide, approach.

Trump—who is feuding with South Africa and intervening in Nigeria for ideological reasons while taking a transactional approach in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—is continuing this trend. Indeed, in some respects, Trump’s haphazard global foreign policy resembles Washington’s traditional approach to Africa—so much so that what was once a distinct Africa strategy appears to have become the American approach to everywhere.

That historic U.S. approach has long confounded analysts. Most accounts of U.S.-African relations presume that African countries are essentially powerless, ripe for manipulation and exploitation by larger powers. But if that is so, why have U.S. policies often failed to achieve their objectives even as they benefit African elites? For instance, since 2007, the United States has supported Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni largely on the premise that Uganda would take a leading role in dismantling al-Shabab, the militant group, in Somalia—a key objective of the U.S. “war on terror.” Two decades later, al-Shabab remains lethal and deeply entrenched in Somalia. Uganda’s military, meanwhile, has benefited from billions of dollars in American support, and Museveni has faced minimal criticism from Washington even as he has rolled back his country’s democratic progress and ruthlessly crushed his opponents.

A new book by Sobukwe Odinga, an international relations and African American studies scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers an answer: African leaders have frequently and successfully pushed the United States to implement policies that go against both its proclaimed values and its interests. And Black Americans—primarily the descendants of enslaved people, not recent immigrants from Africa—have had an unusually large and personal influence........

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