The US is sabotaging its own Africa strategy

By Conor M. Savoy, opinion contributor 

The State Department memo is unambiguous. According to reporting in The New York Times, State Department staff advised Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the United States “will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”

The priorities in question are preferential access to Zambia’s copper and cobalt reserves. The support being threatened is antiretroviral treatment for 1.3 million Zambians living with HIV. This is not a wise use of U.S. foreign assistance. It is coercion dressed in the language of strategy, and it will fail on its own terms.

The administration’s instinct to demand a return on foreign assistance is not wrong. Foreign assistance has always served the interests of the donor as well as those of the recipient. The Marshall Plan opened European markets to American goods as much as it stabilized Western Europe against Soviet expansion.

Aid to Egypt after Camp David secured peace with Israel, along with U.S. basing rights and canal access. The question is not whether the United States should expect something in return for its foreign assistance. The question is whether threatening to cut global health funding is a rational way to secure long-term access to minerals. The answer, on strategic grounds alone, is no.

Three costs are immediate and concrete. First, Zambia has already rejected the deal. Zimbabwe has walked away from a comparable agreement. Kenya’s health compact is suspended by court order. According to the leaked memo, the State Department has set a May deadline for Zambia to sign or lose all funding, a deadline that, if enforced, would trigger an abrupt cut to existing and future programs.

When the administration’s own counterparts refuse to sign, the leverage has failed. What remains is the threat itself, now public, now attributed to a leaked memo, and now a signal to every mineral-rich country in Africa and elsewhere about what U.S. partnership means.

Second, the approach is actively undermining the economic corridor strategy that the administration correctly chose to maintain. Zambia is a central node in the Lobito Corridor, the U.S.-backed infrastructure spine connecting Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, that the administration has repeatedly reaffirmed.

The Lobito Corridor itself demonstrates what a different approach produces. Three reformist presidents, in Angola, DRC and Zambia, engaged directly because the corridor offered a path to diversify their economies and reduce dependence on China. That buy-in was not purchased through coercion. It was earned because the offer was credible, layered, and mutually beneficial.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) committed to financing railroad rehabilitation and the port of Lobito. USAID supported agricultural development in Zambia and regulatory reform in all three countries. The EU, Italy, and the African Development Bank committed co-financing. The result was a co-investment framework that no single transaction could replicate.

The Zambia health memo is not an isolated misstep. In December 2025, the DFC issued letters of intent for a mineral mining project and railroad in southern DRC, driven explicitly by U.S. demand for critical minerals, with no broader development partnership on offer, reflecting the same extractive pattern. A transactional approach may win individual deals while losing the wider strategic competition.

Third, the approach conflates two categories of assistance that must remain permanently separate. Humanitarian and life-saving assistance exists to address needs. Strategic assistance exists to advance U.S. economic and national security interests.

The administration defined these as distinct categories. Its own State Department Agency Strategic Plan identifies strategic assistance as advancing “longer-term U.S. interests” through infrastructure and commercial ties. Conditioning life-saving assistance on mineral concessions does not make PEPFAR strategic. It makes strategic assistance look predatory, and it makes the entire U.S. offer less credible.

What the Zambia memo reveals is not a bold negotiating posture. It reveals an administration that has not resolved the internal contradiction between its stated corridor strategy and its transactional instincts. American companies face real barriers to investing in Zambia’s mining sector, regulatory complexity, inadequate grid infrastructure, limited local financing capacity, and weak contract enforcement.

These are solvable problems, but the State Department must develop tools to address them: constraints analyses that identify specific barriers to investment, regulatory reform programs that reduce the cost and risk of doing business, and transaction advisory support that moves prospective deals from concept to bankable project. That is the work that could produce a durable U.S. commercial presence in Zambia’s copper and cobalt sector, and it is work that USAID did for many years.

The administration must establish a firm, permanent firewall between humanitarian and strategic assistance, and then direct the full weight of its economic tools toward building the conditions that make U.S. investment in Zambia viable in the long term. That is the return on investment the administration claims to want, and it is achievable without making global health funding a bargaining chip.

Conor Savoy is a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development the former lead for foreign policy engagement at USAID.