Nigeria and the American Interest in Africa

American Greatness ^ | November 3, 2025 | Michael S. Kochin

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The American interest is best served by finding and backing African statesmen. That won’t be easy.

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.

The one truly successful American intervention in Africa since 1942’s Operation Torch landings was the 1994 dispatch, or “facilitated departure,” of Paul Kagame. Kagame, nominally an officer in the Ugandan Army and in reality commander-designate of...

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TOPICS: Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: spammingfr

[Sirius Lee]

Anything that eliminates koranimals on a global scale is good for America.

[FlingWingFlyer]

Most Americans, even the black ones have no “interest” in Afrika. It’s a third world crap hole and always has been.

[Veto!]

My very smart MD is Nigerian. Just returned from a month there visiting relatives and giving free medical; care to poor people. He is from the Yoruba Tribe. Very intelligent with members scattered all over the world doing well in business, etc.

One of them shouldld stay home and take charge.

[FlingWingFlyer]

Slaves knew they were lucky to be bought and brought to the New World. Who the hell wants to live in a jungle? How many pro sport multimillionaires does Africa have. One? Two?

[marktwain]

This is the hard truth of African geopolitics. The stability America desires will not come from NGOs, humanitarian aid, or lectures on democracy. It can only come from a local strongman with the will to power, backed by American technology.

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Truth to power. If European colonialism of Africa had lasted another century, Africa would have been much better off.

With extremely rare exceptions, the end of the colonial era was a nightmare for Africans.

[rfp1234]

It’s full of strategic minerals and oil. The NIMBY / neocon crowd would rather dig and drill there than in North America.

[Uncle Miltie]

Don’t waste our time and resources trying to make Africans into Americans.

We may wish to stop the muslim massacres of absolutely everybody else.

islam is on the march, and like communism, must be contained and opposed. Otherwise, they win, and you and you and I are dead.

[Nateman]

Africa has over a billion people and unlike most of the rest of the World, that population is still growing. Keeping out Islam is going to get harder and harder as that continues.