From Christmas strikes in Nigeria to peace deals and talks of trade, the US president’s diplomatic approach to the continent has been all over the place
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hen he convened the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to sign a peace deal in early December, Donald Trump promised an end to decades of fighting in the latter nation’s volatile east, and open up opportunities for businesses in all three countries “to make a lot of money”.
But Trump took a wildly different approach to conflict resolution weeks later, when he announced that the US military had carried out Christmas Day strikes on targets he said were linked to the Islamic State (IS) in north-west Nigeria. “I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” the president wrote in a social media post that warned of further attacks to come.
It was a clear encapsulation of the US president’s approach to sub-Saharan Africa in his second term, in which human rights and democracy promotion have been de-emphasized in favor of a stated focus on trade and ending wars – though how that squares with the nascent air campaign in Nigeria remains to be seen.
