LUANDA, Angola — African leaders are torn in their dealings with the Trump administration, seeking to balance their desperate need for investment with deep frustrations over the U.S. president's rhetoric and actions toward the continent.

That was the prevailing sentiment in Luanda, Angola, last week among the 3,000 attendees and 12 heads of state at the 17th annual U.S.-Africa Business Summit, hosted by the Corporate Council on Africa, an association of U.S. businesses.

The record attendance and promotion plastered across the city — with billboards hyping the summit from the airport to the city’s popular waterfront promenade — pointed to the bright side in U.S.-African economic ties, linking the world’s fastest-growing continent with its largest source of capital.

“Bring us those deals,” Troy Fitrell, senior official for the Bureau of African Affairs, said to reporters at the conference, summing up the administration’s message at the conference.

The mutual excitement over dealmaking at the summit was tempered by frustrations with the Trump administration’s immigration and trade policies, which threaten to undermine closer private-sector ties with the United States.

“We cannot accept visa bans, we cannot accept unfortunate tariffs with nothing to do with rules and regulations with the World Trade Organization,” African Union Commission Chair Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the former foreign minister of Djibouti, said to loud applause in the opening session of the conference.

Angola, which hosted the summit, has long been a focus of U.S. investment and Washington’s attention. The port city of Lobito is the entry and exit point of a transcontinental railway bringing minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia to the Atlantic coast.

The Biden administration promised a $600 million loan to develop the so-called Lobito Corridor, but that money has yet to materialize, and it’s unclear whether President Trump will follow through with the planned support. Still, Trump officials joined the Angolan government and multinational business executives in promoting their visions for expanded economic opportunities afforded by the rail line.

Trump during his second term has increasingly sought to use America’s economic leverage as both a carrot and stick in its attempts to influence African countries: promising profitable partnerships if conflicts come to an end, while rattling the saber of harsh tariffs if countries don’t yield to U.S. pressure.

Trump on Friday hosted the foreign ministers of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the initial signing of a peace agreement — after Congo saw an opportunity........

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