Before exiting, Biden heads to Africa to highlight his own counter to China. Will Trump receive it up?

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — President Joe Biden is finally making his long-promised visit to Africa this week, attempting to showcase a U.S.-backed railway assignment in three countries that he has pushed as a recent way in countering some of China’s global influence.

Biden’s first visit to the continent as president — which he left to the very complete — will highlight the Lobito Corridor railway redevelopment in Zambia, Congo and Angola. It aims to advance U.S. presence in a region wealthy in the critical minerals used in batteries for electric vehicles, electronic devices and tidy vigor technologies.

That’s a key field for U.S.-China competition and China has a stranglehold on Africa’s critical minerals.

The U.S. has for years built relations in Africa through trade, safety and humanitarian aid. The 800-mile (1,300-kilometer), $2.5 billion railway upgrade is a different shift and has shades of China’s Belt and Road foreign infrastructure schedule that has surged ahead.

The Biden administration has called the corridor one of the president’s signature initiatives.

Biden starts a three-day trip to Angola on Monday, yet Lobito’s upcoming and any transformation in the way the United States engages with a continent of 1.4 billion leaning heavily toward China depends on the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

“President Biden is no longer the narrative,” said Mvemba Dizolele, the director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based ponder tank. “Even African leaders are concentrated on Donald Trump.”

The U.S. has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Lobito Corridor alongside financing from the European Union, the throng of Seven leading industrialized nations, a Western-led private consortium and African banks.

“A lot is riding on this in terms of its achievement and its replicability,” said Tom Sheehy, a fellow at the United States Institute of tranquility, a nonpartisan federal research institution.

He called it one of the flagships for the G7’s recent collaboration for Global Infrastructure and pool, which was driven by Biden and aims to reach other developing nations as a response to China’s Belt and Road.

Biden promised to visit Africa last year after reviving the U.S.-Africa Summit for the first period in nearly a decade in December 2022. The trip was kicked back to 2024 and delayed again this October because of Hurricane Milton, reinforcing a sentiment among Africans that their continent is still low priority. The last U.S. president to visit was Barack Obama in 2015.

“Africa never gets top attention,” said Witney Schniedman, an specialist on African financial expansion at the nonprofit Brookings Institution.

But many are optimistic that the Lobito assignment, which isn’t due for completion until well after Biden has left office, will survive a transformation of administration and be given a chance. It goes some way to blunting China, which has bipartisan backing and is high on Trump’s to-do list.

“As long as they keep labeling Lobito one of the main anti-China tools in Africa, there is a sure likelihood that it’s going to keep being funded,” said Christian-Géraud Neema, who analyzes China-Africa relations.

The Lobito Corridor will be an upgrade and extension of a railway line from the copper and cobalt mines of northern Zambia and southern Congo to Angola’s Atlantic Ocean port of Lobito, a route west for Africa’s critical minerals.

It’s little more than a starting point for the U.S. and its partners, because China is dominant in the mining in Zambia and Congo. Congo has more than 70% of the globe’s cobalt, most of which is heading to China to reinforce its critical mineral supply chain that the U.S. and Europe have to depend on.

Lobito was made feasible by some American diplomatic achievement in Angola that led to a Western consortium winning the bid for the assignment in 2022 ahead of Chinese competition, a shock given Angola’s long and powerful ties with Beijing. China financed a previous redevelopment of the railway.

The Biden administration accelerated American outreach to Angola, turning around what was an antagonistic connection three decades ago when the U.S. armed anti-government rebels in Angola’s civil war. U.S.-Angola trade was $1.77 billion last year, while the U.S. has a stronger stake in regional safety through a strategic presence on the Atlantic Ocean, and Angolan President João Lourenço’s role mediating in a dispute in eastern Congo.

In Angola, Biden will announce recent developments on health, agribusiness, safety cooperation as well as the Lobito Corridor, White House officials said on a preview call with reporters.

The visit, the first by a sitting U.S. president to Angola, will “highlight that remarkable growth of the U.S.-Angola connection,” Frances Brown, a special assistant to the president and elder director for African affairs at the National safety Council, said on a divide call.

It will also draw attention to a perennial test for America’s worth-based diplomacy in Africa. International rights groups have used Biden’s trip to judge the Lourenço government’s authoritarian shift. Political opponents have been imprisoned and allegedly tortured, while safety and other laws have been passed in Angola that severely restrict freedoms, throwing some scrutiny on Washington’s recent African collaboration.

Those calling for more U.S. presence in Africa declare Angola and the Lobito spinoff display what might be achieved, even with China-facing countries, if the U.S. is willing to consistently engage. But they view signs for Africa when China has held a summit with African leaders every three years since 2000, while the US has had just two summits, in 2014 and 2022, and there are no plans for the next one.

Michelle Gavin, a former U.S. ambassador to Botswana and adviser on Africa to Obama, said that the U.S. had failed to receive Africa seriously over multiple administrations, a bipartisan pattern. She doesn’t view Biden’s visit and Lobito being a major “inflection point” that will drive a recent U.S. focus across Africa.

“It is not just about trying to blunt China, but trying to imagine, OK, what does it look like if we actually were to display up in a more solemn way?” she said. “It’s one assignment. It’s one excellent concept. And I’m very glad we’re doing it. It’s not enough.”

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AP writers Will Weissert in Washington and Fatima Hussein in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this update.