US President-elect Donald Trump: Openings and warnings for Africa

Reuters It is difficult to try to predict the decisions that US President-elect Donald Trump will make when he returns to the White House. But one thing seems unlikely to change: his dislike of patient, principled diplomacy as a means to peace and his preference for transactional politics and populist gestures. This brings openings and perils in some areas in Africa. Eight years ago, the Obama administration was working with the African Union (AU) to change United Nations (UN) rules for funding peacekeepers to put African missions on a firm financial basis. The AU Commission worked with the UN and other multilateral organisations to construct an “African peace and security architecture” that ranged from proactive diplomacy to avert looming conflicts through to coordinated mediation efforts and peacekeeping operations, all underpinned by norms and principles enshrined in the UN Charter and the AU Constitutive Act. How long ago that seems. Plans for more robust peacekeeping evaporated in the transition to the first Trump administration. Since then, no new UN or AU peacekeeping missions have been authorised. Several – including in Darfur, Sudan and Mali – have been closed, and others scaled down. The Biden administration did not reverse the trend. The...