Let me be blunt: since the Wehrmacht’s surrender in Tunisia in 1943, the African continent has offered the United States almost nothing of major consequence to its national interest. Our engagement since has been a costly, sentimental fog of humanitarian gestures and posturing, achieving little while ignoring the realities of power.
Washington’s central failure is its refusal to see the continent as it is. There are two successful models for order that have worked over large portions of Africa. The first is the default of Muslim rule. This system, even at its most functional, offers a brutal and usually racist order that threatens to return to its foundations of slavery and massacre. It offers only occasional and temporary alignments with Western interests and is utterly incompatible with Western values.
The second real-world alternative is colonialism. This, at least, offers a framework for the values the United States claims to export—property rights, the rule of law, and functional infrastructure. However, America lacks both the will and the capability for such a project. Witness the blood-soaked two-century history of Liberia, nominally sovereign but in reality the United States’ only African colony. As John Stuart Mill, formerly a clerk of the East India Company, once wrote, the British Empire was “a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes.” The US has never had an upper class big enough even to staff its embassies, much less to spare to rule great swathes of Africa with breeding, ability, and frigid hauteur.
