I think The US stopped caring for reasons that track the 2 sides: Red America isn't really evangelical anymore (they LARP as Christians more than they act like them), and Blue America only sees Africa as a cudgel for why the West needs to change, prostrate, or destroy itself for minorities. Neither side actually cares about African suffering on its own terms. Red America is too Social Darwinistic and Blue America is too Fanon-esque to actually care about Africa.
To build on your Sudan point: there was a time when evangelicals were the ones dragging Washington into Sudan. Going back to the H.W. Bush era and through the 1990s, when Khartoum's militias were enslaving southerners (Dinka women and children abducted and marched north) and the "Lost Boys" were fleeing the war on foot, it was the Christian right that kept the pressure on, from Operation Lifeline Sudan through the eventual Sudan Peace Act. His son also was tough on Khartoum for how they treated the non-Arabs in Darfur. I wrote about that here: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-political-history
Now picture today's GOP mobilizing to stop ethnic cleansing, extermination, and slavery in Africa, which is exactly what's happening in Darfur in the current civil war. It's laughable. They wouldn't do it. They don't even know about it.
The deeper problem is that R2P is just hard to defend once you stop believing American intervention actually helps. The only time it was really invoked was Libya, and that was a shitshow. Gaddafi was massacring civilians, so NATO and the Arab League backed the rebels and took him out. What we got afterward was a country split between Khalifa Haftar in the east and the recognized government in the west, with no real path to reunification (or maybe Haftar's sons inherit the whole thing one day).
And after Libya's collapse post-Gaddafi, it caused havoc in the Sahel. Right now JNIM (al-Qaeda's arm in West Africa) and the Islamic State's Sahel branch are terrorizing Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. After Gaddafi fell, his Tuareg mercenaries grabbed his weapon stockpiles and went home to northern Mali wanting their own state. The Tuareg then allied with Jihadists to carve a state in North Mali called Azawad. Mali asked for international help, the UN authorized it, and then France went in. During that time, it was basically a stalemate, and in those years, jihadists spread into Niger and Burkina Faso, Russian spread disinfo about the West, and France was constantly nagging Mali toward negotiations. Eventually Mali, Burkina, and Niger all had coups, the juntas turned hard against the West, expelled anything Western, and invited in Russia. Russia has been a terrible partner to them, and all three are more unstable than before. Burkinabè state propaganda now runs on anti-Westernism.
To add insult to injury: the US has poured far more aid into those countries than Russia ever has, and they still turned into beacons of anti-Westernism. The coups showed how thin American soft power actually is.
Which is why I think the center-left and center-right both quietly gave up on most of Black Africa, and South Sudan is the clearest reason. America helped the South win independence from a Khartoum that had spent decades murdering, enslaving, and neglecting them. The world's newest democracy then collapsed into civil war two years after independence, because the Dinka and Nuer have never gotten along. The leader we helped put in power still refuses to hold elections, and the country is on the verge of another civil war. I covered that here: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-5eb.
At this point there's basically no expectation or hope left for much of Africa. My bet is that the next time America really thinks about Africans, it won't be about saving them. It'll be about deterring immigration driven by high birth rates.
>To add insult to injury: the US has poured far more aid into those countries than Russia
> ever has, and they still turned into beacons of anti-Westernism.
This is why foreign aid has become politically toxic for 90% of American (and Western world) voters. Sending millions of dollars to countries that continue to hate the West and instead cozy up to Russia and China isn't a good look. You are just giving money to people who hate you.
I'm not sure the zero-intervention counterfactual is significantly better or worse from a humanitarian perspective. The main difference is that since the US now has some involvement, locals can blame us whenever something goes wrong. Or, if we don't continue to help indefinitely, we're sometimes accused of "abandoning our allies". So it kinda ends up just draining our soft power for zero benefit. Grist for the mill of Jeffrey Sachs and friends.
>they LARP as Christians more than they act like them
Technically, the US under Trump recently did airstrikes in Nigeria, supposedly to protect Christians from Muslims. Any thoughts on that incident? I saw a lot of conspiracy theories on Nigerian social media about how US help was a ploy to obtain local oil or uranium. IIRC, other Nigerians might've responded by saying "yeah that's probably true, but we need the help anyways, these Islamists are nuts, we can't live like this".
I do wonder if we have a tendency to remember the failures more than the successes, since the successes are quiet and the failures are loud. For example, it's far more common for Americans to invoke the Vietnam War in FP discussions than the Korean War. The wars were rather similar: communist North attacks non-communist South. One was a success, one a failure. Failure is discussed endlessly, success is forgotten.
Here's an interesting miltube video about US special ops in Africa which might provide a more unbiased sample of our actions there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4U0mRt64c4
The Sahel was mostly a function of French politics; they were only ever independent countries on paper, but Macron fumbled Mali so badly that the others realised they were in Gorbachev territory (helped by Russia putting itself forward as an alternative sponsor).
Bill Gates did a lot for Africans but in return his reputation was tarnished. By making conspiracies about vaccines or criticism of him over patents.
America intervened in Somalia just to help feed people still so many people criticize it.
The issue with helping Africans is that instead of praise you get criticism. But if you only do virtue signaling it doesn’t cost you anything. So incentive is to do nothing.
Exactly. Furthermore, as everyone got connected to the internet globally, Americans learned that foreigners are highly suspicious of our foreign policy, and believe conspiracy theories about how we are only out for ourselves. (Not totally wrong, either!) Foreigners use simple heuristics like "how many conflicts is the US involved in?" to determine if we are good actors. If we are involved in another conflict, that gets added to the "conflicts with US involvement" Wikipedia page, making it even longer, which makes us look bad. Global public opinion isn't sophisticated enough to look much deeper than that.
I still remember a Lithuanian guy I had an argument with a few years ago. He was complaining about US foreign policy, and mentioned that Lithuania was once oppressed under the boot of the USSR. I pointed out that Lithuania was a listing on the famous "US involvement in regime change" Wikipedia page he was linking to prove that America is evil, since we supported civil society groups which were protesting the Soviet Union. One of the rare times I actually changed someone's mind by arguing online.
Nowadays, social media has essentially replaced international law as the means by which global public opinion is determined. I'm not super pleased.
I tried chatting with Sudanese online about their conflict. They seem to dislike the US and are skeptical of any sort of US intervention. They read all the negative coverage around US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. And they still remember Bill Clinton bombing a Sudanese medicaments factory during the Lewinsky scandal for absolutely no reason. https://benthams.substack.com/p/dont-forget-the-victims-of-al-shifa
Ukraine wants US help badly because Eastern Europe is perhaps one of the few regions where the US looks like an unambiguously good actor: first fighting the Nazis, then resisting the Soviets. Elsewhere in the world, US "help" is too colonialism-coded.
I haven’t even read this piece but I am completely baffled by your comment actually. We cannot deny that western organizations have made significant contributions to health and humanitarian issues in Africa like vaccines, medication and food etc BUT most of the criticism and skepticism is quite literally evidence based. The fact is countries deadass never operate from purely altruistic motives. The criticism is not and should not be surprising given the long history of colonialism, exploitation and foreign interference by Western powers in Africa. These so-called ‘well wishers’ should recognize that historical grievances have shaped our perceptions and lastly, I’d be damned if I was about to praise a billionaire on the internet😭.
I go to a large mainline church in Tennessee. One of the church's main mission endeavors is a church and school in South Africa. A church member/successful businessman/conservative Republican with a pretty high-ranking job with the governor created a school in Haiti in 2010 ans has supported it ever since. A lot of church members are involved with a refugee organization helping integrate mostly-African refugees locally (I'm on the board). And this isn't just a mainline thing; Baptists and successful evangelical churches in the region also support missions and humanitarian work in Africa.
I think you're definitely on to something about current pessimism and its effects. But a lot of what you're seeing is pretty directly related to Trump being president for most of the past decade and Russia invading Ukraine in the middle of the one Democratic presidency during that time. And a lot of things go on regardless of what the president is doing. A lot of people care about Africa and spend money trying to make it better.
Also, Rwanda galvanized people because there was a sudden, highly visible, massive massacre. But that massacre helped indirectly cause the overthrow of the Mobutu regime in the Congo, which has been in a state of low- and sometimes high-level civil war pretty much ever since without getting much attention. The conflicts are very confusing, it's impossible to root for anyone, and it's difficult to know what's going on. So there wasn't much international intervention, even during the time when Americans supposedly cared about Africa. The South Sudan civil war seems more like the Congo than Rwanda.
The buried lede is how stable honest healthy suburban middle class people* with families stopped being the default audience of American media. I have soooo many hypotheses:
1. They became a smaller share of the US population due to some combination of a) aging, b) immigration,* c) falling marriage rates and d) house prices. I've asked ChatGPT, which thinks this has gone from 35% of the adult population to 25% using janky back-of-a-napkin math, and the only factor that seems to matter is aging. Old people who are terrified of everything don't count.
2. Media consumption switched from household TVs to individual screens, so could shed the need to be family friendly or retain social desirability bias.
3. The Counterculture won the culture war in such a way that suburbo-normativity became deprecated in entertainment circles.
4. Friends etc outcompeted the Brady Bunch etc by being funnier and not having the rigmarole of dealing with child actors.
5. On some fundamental aesthetic level, earnest 90s enthusiasm is less cool than brooding edgy cynicism.
6. We're all millennials comparing our childhood to our adulthood. In reality, elementary school kids still make wall posters about building wells in Africa, and 90s adults didn't even pretend to give a shit when there weren't kids around. In about 6 years time, all of a sudden it will seem like everyone cares about the rainforest, children having to walk x miles to fetch water from wells, civil wars in countries we've never heard of etc at the point our kids are that age.
7. The half-assed fake-seeming mainline Christianity that was still near-universal in the 90s was actually load-bearing. Without it, we have basically no good answer to why we should help people which doesn't imply we should empty our savings accounts to buy malaria nets which isn't just trash-coded cope like Ordo Amoris or Circles of Concern.
8. Somehow the norm where everyone in America is meant to aspire to become fairly WASP-like died, freeing the lower portion of the suburban class to sink back into Polak/Redneck-hood whilst keeping the houses. After they'd become more "like the Simpsons" as HW said, there was no longer a suburban monoculture to form the American norm.
9. America got richer, possibly coastal cities got more richer [?], and the centre of gravity in consumer spending, and hence advertising, shifted to spendthrift 20-somethings.
My guess is the answer is mostly 1 (I'm not sure if 3 is just begging the question), but it's a weird phenomenon.
*I nearly wrote "White" but that wouldn't have been correct - the understanding in the 90s was that people of all races were mostly like that or would gravitate to that in time (which, in fairness, most of them basically want to do).
Isn't it a bit of a hollow answer: "What is a good life? How can I find meaning?"
"A good life is giving your money away to Africans because they are poor and will enjoy it more than you."
It's the answer which both Evangelical Christians and Reddit Atheists give you, but it seems hollow to rely on some abstracted far-off 'good'.
A kind of utility monster; 'Every dollar you give to the utility monster will create more 'good' than if you had spent it on yourself'.
Why aren't we creating giant vats full of human braincells and flooding them with synthetic dopamine? On a Joy/Watt of energy basis this is far superior to foreign aid.
I think part of the reason is the blue side of the equation got very uncomfortable with the optics of black Africa being hopelessly dysfunctional and in need of white help.
Interesting observations. I’ll have to check out this docu soon. In addition to the shift (on both sides really) regarding “what about our problems at home” with infrastructure, homelessness, drug crisis etc many people also have been talking about regional focus: aka our own borders, Darien Gap, and cartels etc. Ie: “Donroe Doctrine” which fueled Venezuela operation, and to my understanding, possibly something arising soon with Cuba(?) Also, keep in mind that China and Russia have a large footprint in Africa, albeit in different ways. Ultimately, I think the root cause as to why we have a smaller African footprint now is because of foreign policy changes. Business investment/transactions vs endless humanitarian aid channels will be moreso the model of the future.
Rwanda, Sudan and Kony involve black villains. People only want white villains nowadays, preferably hurting non-white people. Atrocities that don’t fit that framework are ignored or downplayed. Even Ukraine can’t get the attention Gaza does.
Maybe some of the pessimism is rational? The failed 20 year intervention in Afghanistan, the rise of IS in Iraq. The failure to “bring back” the Nigerian school girls. Not sure - but feels like the idea we’ve got the power to fix these societies is now a bit tarnished.
In terms of direct aid, I don't think the question is really about whether programs like PEPFAR are effective. Clearly, they have saved a lot of lives. The underdiscussed issue in the long run is the moral hazard of aid dependency. That is, having taxpayers in developed countries essentially subsidize basic healthcare and nutrition for developing countries indefinitely. Thereby preventing corrupt, embezzling third-world governments from being held accountable for failing to facilitate those basic pillars of modern civilization.
Great question! Another possibility is that interest in African welfare has decreased due to the twin rises of the culture war and populism.
At best, these movements are orthogonal to African welfare, outcompeting it for attention. At worst, they're hostile to it.
In the case of populism, that's through promotion of zero-sum thinking, in which the welfare of foreigners is necessarily to the detriment of natives (the case of foreign aid is a rare example where to a small extent it's true). Furthermore, elites were always more cosmopolitan than the rest of the population, so their declining influence with the rise of populism naturally led to decreased interest in African welfare.
In the case of the culture war, that's through, the rise of woke. The late 20th - early 21st century interest in Africa seems rooted in a universalist perspective that people are all fundamentally the same. Your child in suburbia could be a child soldier in East Africa. Under woke, however, differences between groups are highlighted, with identity being defined by demographics like sex and race.
Not only does woke thinking create new distractions from African welfare, as noted in regards to the culture war, it erodes the universalist perspective that motivated it.
As alluded to in other comments, the related rise of Third-Worldist thinking contributes to all the above. It's anti-universalist, viewing foreign countries as inherently distinct from the West, and furthermore, views the the misfortune of the former as a direct result of involvement of the latter. This doesn't lend itself to further Western involvement, or even interest.
The left has never cared about African welfare. Watch 'Africa adio' in italian with english subtitle if you want to see what was forced on Africa by the US. How one country after another was destroyed in the name of spreading democracy. There were no endangered African animals before 1960. What happened to millions of elephants and hippos? Watch the movie, you'll see.
Somalia and Rwanda were both disasters for Canada, so pardon us for not wanting to have anything to do with Africa, even if we had the military capacity anymore to intervene or peace-keep for the UN (which brought us low in both places.) The Taliban sent our combat soldiers packing from Afghanistan several years before the Americans pulled out. Our exit was more orderly because the Americans still controlled the exit routes. (Yes I know Afghanistan isn't in Africa. But it behaves like it was: tribal and post-colonial, just more effective fighting men.)
There is a certain futility in doing anything in Africa, especially in the failed states that cry out for salvation. The other drawback for western countries that set up missions in Africa is that we end up accepting hundreds of thousands of them as refugees because we'd had face-to-face contact with them during the mission.
There is the same futility in showering money on rednecks in Appalachia, aboriginals in Canada, and disaffected college students and radical leftists everywhere. I don't think those count as "problems at home we should be fixing instead", which I agree is annoyingly parochial. Turn away from all of them except if you need to buy them off to prevent them from murdering and rioting and don't have the stomach to do so with retaliatory violence.
Quite true but the types that usually would care and volunteer to help in developing countries never were the same as the virtue-signaling self-pity kind. Actually takes balls and care. In these, I think there is a general sense that Western-directed aid is not very efficient, and harmful at times. Or at least, that the business-like approach of China is delivering better in Africa.
Like, it's harder to play the role of the white saviour preaching your cultural gospel, when these far less haughty Chinese dudes build the roads and telecoms that are actually needed there.
Do you believe the rapid removal of USAID means the program was negative on net? All the good the program did was cancelled out? I'm highly doubtful of that claim.
If you run a hospital, you probably save a lot of lives, especially if the hospital runs for many years. If somebody comes into the hospital, destroys the generators, and cuts the power, they are correctly identified as a "bad person," even though the number of people killed is almost certainly far less than the number saved.
Yes, USAID was obviously a net good, but the people currently running the USA are the people who killed it, for no real benefit to anyone, great destructive effect, and ideological reasons that seem to be mostly horrible on the face of them.
That's a bad analogy for multiple reasons. A better analogy would be a charity hospital funded by a religious organization which provides free care. Imagine the religious organization has tight finances and cannot afford the hospital anymore. So they cut the funding for the hospital. Sure, you can condemn them for not finding a way to fund it further. But the net effect of this condemnation is just to discourage people from engaging in this type of charity. You never noticed when they were funding the hospital; you only noticed when they stopped.
Most of these people aren't even real. If you offer a third world country cash for having poor people, they'll claim to have far more poor people than they really do.
Most of these countries are moderately prosperous and sparcely populated, not the picture you get shown in the west.
Google map any medium-large African city and search 'Mercedes dealership'.
You'll find a suprising number of them.
The sick thing about all this is that the US is giving money to dysfunctional countries which stay dysfunctional because they aren't under pressure to improve. They also have an incentive to overstate how bad things are, if you actually live in one of these countries you'll see a lot less poverty than you expect.
On top of all this, they hate us. We give them money, and they make alliances with China and give speeches in the UN about how everything is the West's fault.
China could easily have replaced the aid programs for its allies, but didn't, because they are an unappreciated waste of money.
I do wonder how willing the author and favorable commentators are to going to Africa or Ukraine to fight all the injustices.
This is in keeping with the author’s thesis — emoting is sufficient unto itself.
The irrebuttable presumption is that these are the good people. They are willing to speak against evil. They don’t hate anyone. “Hate has no home here!” But, hey, ok, they DO hate Trump and his kind. And as for the 60,000,000+ torn limb from limb while not yet aborning, well, they feel no hate … they just don’t care. And to them that’s not the same thing. As for 40,000+ gunned down in Iran? Pity. Charlie Kirk? Ok to hate him. Elon? “When is someone going to Kirk him?!?!”
But they emote so well. These matters are mere pettifoggery.
None of them have been to Africa for more than a Safari.
'Africans' aren't real to them.
What is an African? A mirror image of you with the same intelligence, desires and worldview. As well as having everything you have, they also have a vital, cheerful experience of the world, grounded in their connection of nature and their community.
As well as possessing wise, ancient wisdom, along with simple, edenic joy, they also agree with you on all LGBTQ+ and social justice topics.
It looks like the more the right has power, the more stingy and negative the tone of the entire society becomes. I do not see Republicans being joyful, magnanimous and thriving when they get into power, they remain as pissed and victimized as ever, everything going wrong is still because of the Deep State and Obama/Biden.
It is a stinginess in the very psyche and why no one cares anymore.
This could be seen from the start, when Trump got into power he didn’t unleash a Reagan moment where magnanimous charm won over people around the world, his base stinginess and hostility picked fights, tried to screw people over and alienated others. He snatched defeat from victory by being… it needs to be said, extremely small minded with selfishness.
Republicans are sore winners and stingy, which makes everyone just feel negative, the negativity trickles down. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this.
Bush and Reagan led to a far more positive vibe than Trump's MAGA. It's a real decline. Personally, I think this is caused by the internet scene. It's been exploited by bad people to push everything into a very negative direction.
I am disappointed but not surprised that the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa is not mentioned in this article - that of ongoing Christian persecution. I assume the reason is that Christ Himself is no longer popular in the West, so why care?
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN CONCERN and OPEN DOORS are two of similar organisations who minister to persecuted Christians. Raymond Ibrahim the historian and authority on Islam, regularly reports on Gatestone of the latest atrocities committed on Christians world wide.
To quote from ICC reports, between 2009 and 2022 more than 45,000 African Christians were murdered by extremist Islamic groups such as Boko Haram, Fulani militants and Islamic State West Africa. In 2022 alone more than 5,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria. There is a disturbing rise in attacks, abductions, massacres and forced displacements across parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria, the Congo and Kenya. Few people are aware that these massacres have reached as far south as Mozambique.
What is especially appalling to me is that King Charles rolled out his red carpet for a state visit of President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria in March of this year.
Galations 6:7 , “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”
I think that there will be a market for these types of sentiments to come back. Many figures on the modern left privately understand that anti-market and other leftist policies do not work practically and are electoral losers. Nevertheless, there is a big demand among college students to be on the 'right side of history' by opposing some sort of major political injustice. The Israel and Palestine conflict filled this niche: politicians like Zohran and AOC can 'take a stand' against Israel, direct college campus and DSA activists towards this aim, without risking damaging the Democrat brand or being backed into a status quo where they have to enact some disastrous policy. Opposing injustices in Africa is another issue that could fill this type of void. Most 'left-wing' Democrat politicians are educated and bright people who are privately aware of basic economic literature: they are just stuck with an activist, idealistic base that are opposed to 'liberalism' because it reminds them of their parents and implies brutal and hard truths about the world. The name of the game with 'Zohran leftism' is finding issues like this to divert the base, engaging in optics well to make young supporters feel like you are 'trendy', while quietly governing in a liberal way. Zohran himself is not a perfect encapsulation of this trend yet but it is the direction the cultural headwinds are going in.
Yeah I also think there is electoral alpha in working to eliminate poverty on Native American reservations. It manages to tick both the "nativism" box and the "anti-racism" box simultaneously. A great card to play in a general election if you can thread the needle properly, e.g. mentioning the high rate at which natives serve in the US military.
This a topic of quite a bit interest to me — the major problem I think, is any intervention looks colonialist, and maybe to an extent it is.
Yet if we could figure out how to pressure the most dysfunctional governments to adopt pro market and pro rule of law reforms, that could be a major unlock to the African poor.
The optics from a colonial past stand point would be TERRIBLE.
I also wonder what these kind of thing looks like in the context of a rising China. It seem to me if they can pressure really dysfunctional governments to be more like that also would be improvement (for certain African countries not all).
I think The US stopped caring for reasons that track the 2 sides: Red America isn't really evangelical anymore (they LARP as Christians more than they act like them), and Blue America only sees Africa as a cudgel for why the West needs to change, prostrate, or destroy itself for minorities. Neither side actually cares about African suffering on its own terms. Red America is too Social Darwinistic and Blue America is too Fanon-esque to actually care about Africa.
To build on your Sudan point: there was a time when evangelicals were the ones dragging Washington into Sudan. Going back to the H.W. Bush era and through the 1990s, when Khartoum's militias were enslaving southerners (Dinka women and children abducted and marched north) and the "Lost Boys" were fleeing the war on foot, it was the Christian right that kept the pressure on, from Operation Lifeline Sudan through the eventual Sudan Peace Act. His son also was tough on Khartoum for how they treated the non-Arabs in Darfur. I wrote about that here: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-political-history
Now picture today's GOP mobilizing to stop ethnic cleansing, extermination, and slavery in Africa, which is exactly what's happening in Darfur in the current civil war. It's laughable. They wouldn't do it. They don't even know about it.
The deeper problem is that R2P is just hard to defend once you stop believing American intervention actually helps. The only time it was really invoked was Libya, and that was a shitshow. Gaddafi was massacring civilians, so NATO and the Arab League backed the rebels and took him out. What we got afterward was a country split between Khalifa Haftar in the east and the recognized government in the west, with no real path to reunification (or maybe Haftar's sons inherit the whole thing one day).
And after Libya's collapse post-Gaddafi, it caused havoc in the Sahel. Right now JNIM (al-Qaeda's arm in West Africa) and the Islamic State's Sahel branch are terrorizing Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. After Gaddafi fell, his Tuareg mercenaries grabbed his weapon stockpiles and went home to northern Mali wanting their own state. The Tuareg then allied with Jihadists to carve a state in North Mali called Azawad. Mali asked for international help, the UN authorized it, and then France went in. During that time, it was basically a stalemate, and in those years, jihadists spread into Niger and Burkina Faso, Russian spread disinfo about the West, and France was constantly nagging Mali toward negotiations. Eventually Mali, Burkina, and Niger all had coups, the juntas turned hard against the West, expelled anything Western, and invited in Russia. Russia has been a terrible partner to them, and all three are more unstable than before. Burkinabè state propaganda now runs on anti-Westernism.
To add insult to injury: the US has poured far more aid into those countries than Russia ever has, and they still turned into beacons of anti-Westernism. The coups showed how thin American soft power actually is.
Which is why I think the center-left and center-right both quietly gave up on most of Black Africa, and South Sudan is the clearest reason. America helped the South win independence from a Khartoum that had spent decades murdering, enslaving, and neglecting them. The world's newest democracy then collapsed into civil war two years after independence, because the Dinka and Nuer have never gotten along. The leader we helped put in power still refuses to hold elections, and the country is on the verge of another civil war. I covered that here: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-5eb.
At this point there's basically no expectation or hope left for much of Africa. My bet is that the next time America really thinks about Africans, it won't be about saving them. It'll be about deterring immigration driven by high birth rates.
>To add insult to injury: the US has poured far more aid into those countries than Russia
> ever has, and they still turned into beacons of anti-Westernism.
This is why foreign aid has become politically toxic for 90% of American (and Western world) voters. Sending millions of dollars to countries that continue to hate the West and instead cozy up to Russia and China isn't a good look. You are just giving money to people who hate you.
You illustrate what Samantha Power types just can't grok - sometimes no "help" is the best help
I'm not sure the zero-intervention counterfactual is significantly better or worse from a humanitarian perspective. The main difference is that since the US now has some involvement, locals can blame us whenever something goes wrong. Or, if we don't continue to help indefinitely, we're sometimes accused of "abandoning our allies". So it kinda ends up just draining our soft power for zero benefit. Grist for the mill of Jeffrey Sachs and friends.
>they LARP as Christians more than they act like them
Technically, the US under Trump recently did airstrikes in Nigeria, supposedly to protect Christians from Muslims. Any thoughts on that incident? I saw a lot of conspiracy theories on Nigerian social media about how US help was a ploy to obtain local oil or uranium. IIRC, other Nigerians might've responded by saying "yeah that's probably true, but we need the help anyways, these Islamists are nuts, we can't live like this".
I do wonder if we have a tendency to remember the failures more than the successes, since the successes are quiet and the failures are loud. For example, it's far more common for Americans to invoke the Vietnam War in FP discussions than the Korean War. The wars were rather similar: communist North attacks non-communist South. One was a success, one a failure. Failure is discussed endlessly, success is forgotten.
Here's an interesting miltube video about US special ops in Africa which might provide a more unbiased sample of our actions there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4U0mRt64c4
The Sahel was mostly a function of French politics; they were only ever independent countries on paper, but Macron fumbled Mali so badly that the others realised they were in Gorbachev territory (helped by Russia putting itself forward as an alternative sponsor).
Bill Gates did a lot for Africans but in return his reputation was tarnished. By making conspiracies about vaccines or criticism of him over patents.
America intervened in Somalia just to help feed people still so many people criticize it.
The issue with helping Africans is that instead of praise you get criticism. But if you only do virtue signaling it doesn’t cost you anything. So incentive is to do nothing.
Exactly. Furthermore, as everyone got connected to the internet globally, Americans learned that foreigners are highly suspicious of our foreign policy, and believe conspiracy theories about how we are only out for ourselves. (Not totally wrong, either!) Foreigners use simple heuristics like "how many conflicts is the US involved in?" to determine if we are good actors. If we are involved in another conflict, that gets added to the "conflicts with US involvement" Wikipedia page, making it even longer, which makes us look bad. Global public opinion isn't sophisticated enough to look much deeper than that.
I still remember a Lithuanian guy I had an argument with a few years ago. He was complaining about US foreign policy, and mentioned that Lithuania was once oppressed under the boot of the USSR. I pointed out that Lithuania was a listing on the famous "US involvement in regime change" Wikipedia page he was linking to prove that America is evil, since we supported civil society groups which were protesting the Soviet Union. One of the rare times I actually changed someone's mind by arguing online.
It's rather interesting to read about the history of the United Nations and see what it was like when we were actually going through the motions of implementing international law and so forth: https://www.amazon.com/United-Nations-History-Stanley-Meisler/dp/0802145299
Nowadays, social media has essentially replaced international law as the means by which global public opinion is determined. I'm not super pleased.
I tried chatting with Sudanese online about their conflict. They seem to dislike the US and are skeptical of any sort of US intervention. They read all the negative coverage around US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. And they still remember Bill Clinton bombing a Sudanese medicaments factory during the Lewinsky scandal for absolutely no reason. https://benthams.substack.com/p/dont-forget-the-victims-of-al-shifa
Ukraine wants US help badly because Eastern Europe is perhaps one of the few regions where the US looks like an unambiguously good actor: first fighting the Nazis, then resisting the Soviets. Elsewhere in the world, US "help" is too colonialism-coded.
I haven’t even read this piece but I am completely baffled by your comment actually. We cannot deny that western organizations have made significant contributions to health and humanitarian issues in Africa like vaccines, medication and food etc BUT most of the criticism and skepticism is quite literally evidence based. The fact is countries deadass never operate from purely altruistic motives. The criticism is not and should not be surprising given the long history of colonialism, exploitation and foreign interference by Western powers in Africa. These so-called ‘well wishers’ should recognize that historical grievances have shaped our perceptions and lastly, I’d be damned if I was about to praise a billionaire on the internet😭.
Idea that Bill Gated wants to put chips in vaccine or want to sterilize people through vaccines is not evidence based.
Bill Gates is not a country and it is fair to say altruism is a major motivator for him.
Yes I know they will never get praise for helping. That is what I was saying. That is why you should not help.
I go to a large mainline church in Tennessee. One of the church's main mission endeavors is a church and school in South Africa. A church member/successful businessman/conservative Republican with a pretty high-ranking job with the governor created a school in Haiti in 2010 ans has supported it ever since. A lot of church members are involved with a refugee organization helping integrate mostly-African refugees locally (I'm on the board). And this isn't just a mainline thing; Baptists and successful evangelical churches in the region also support missions and humanitarian work in Africa.
I think you're definitely on to something about current pessimism and its effects. But a lot of what you're seeing is pretty directly related to Trump being president for most of the past decade and Russia invading Ukraine in the middle of the one Democratic presidency during that time. And a lot of things go on regardless of what the president is doing. A lot of people care about Africa and spend money trying to make it better.
Also, Rwanda galvanized people because there was a sudden, highly visible, massive massacre. But that massacre helped indirectly cause the overthrow of the Mobutu regime in the Congo, which has been in a state of low- and sometimes high-level civil war pretty much ever since without getting much attention. The conflicts are very confusing, it's impossible to root for anyone, and it's difficult to know what's going on. So there wasn't much international intervention, even during the time when Americans supposedly cared about Africa. The South Sudan civil war seems more like the Congo than Rwanda.
The buried lede is how stable honest healthy suburban middle class people* with families stopped being the default audience of American media. I have soooo many hypotheses:
1. They became a smaller share of the US population due to some combination of a) aging, b) immigration,* c) falling marriage rates and d) house prices. I've asked ChatGPT, which thinks this has gone from 35% of the adult population to 25% using janky back-of-a-napkin math, and the only factor that seems to matter is aging. Old people who are terrified of everything don't count.
2. Media consumption switched from household TVs to individual screens, so could shed the need to be family friendly or retain social desirability bias.
3. The Counterculture won the culture war in such a way that suburbo-normativity became deprecated in entertainment circles.
4. Friends etc outcompeted the Brady Bunch etc by being funnier and not having the rigmarole of dealing with child actors.
5. On some fundamental aesthetic level, earnest 90s enthusiasm is less cool than brooding edgy cynicism.
6. We're all millennials comparing our childhood to our adulthood. In reality, elementary school kids still make wall posters about building wells in Africa, and 90s adults didn't even pretend to give a shit when there weren't kids around. In about 6 years time, all of a sudden it will seem like everyone cares about the rainforest, children having to walk x miles to fetch water from wells, civil wars in countries we've never heard of etc at the point our kids are that age.
7. The half-assed fake-seeming mainline Christianity that was still near-universal in the 90s was actually load-bearing. Without it, we have basically no good answer to why we should help people which doesn't imply we should empty our savings accounts to buy malaria nets which isn't just trash-coded cope like Ordo Amoris or Circles of Concern.
8. Somehow the norm where everyone in America is meant to aspire to become fairly WASP-like died, freeing the lower portion of the suburban class to sink back into Polak/Redneck-hood whilst keeping the houses. After they'd become more "like the Simpsons" as HW said, there was no longer a suburban monoculture to form the American norm.
9. America got richer, possibly coastal cities got more richer [?], and the centre of gravity in consumer spending, and hence advertising, shifted to spendthrift 20-somethings.
My guess is the answer is mostly 1 (I'm not sure if 3 is just begging the question), but it's a weird phenomenon.
*I nearly wrote "White" but that wouldn't have been correct - the understanding in the 90s was that people of all races were mostly like that or would gravitate to that in time (which, in fairness, most of them basically want to do).
Isn't it a bit of a hollow answer: "What is a good life? How can I find meaning?"
"A good life is giving your money away to Africans because they are poor and will enjoy it more than you."
It's the answer which both Evangelical Christians and Reddit Atheists give you, but it seems hollow to rely on some abstracted far-off 'good'.
A kind of utility monster; 'Every dollar you give to the utility monster will create more 'good' than if you had spent it on yourself'.
Why aren't we creating giant vats full of human braincells and flooding them with synthetic dopamine? On a Joy/Watt of energy basis this is far superior to foreign aid.
I think part of the reason is the blue side of the equation got very uncomfortable with the optics of black Africa being hopelessly dysfunctional and in need of white help.
Every White boy who goes to Africa with dreams of saving the world learns how warped and wrong the liberal-democratic mythology is.
They stopped sending people because they kept finding the truth out there.
Interesting observations. I’ll have to check out this docu soon. In addition to the shift (on both sides really) regarding “what about our problems at home” with infrastructure, homelessness, drug crisis etc many people also have been talking about regional focus: aka our own borders, Darien Gap, and cartels etc. Ie: “Donroe Doctrine” which fueled Venezuela operation, and to my understanding, possibly something arising soon with Cuba(?) Also, keep in mind that China and Russia have a large footprint in Africa, albeit in different ways. Ultimately, I think the root cause as to why we have a smaller African footprint now is because of foreign policy changes. Business investment/transactions vs endless humanitarian aid channels will be moreso the model of the future.
IMO this is one of your best posts I've seen
Rwanda, Sudan and Kony involve black villains. People only want white villains nowadays, preferably hurting non-white people. Atrocities that don’t fit that framework are ignored or downplayed. Even Ukraine can’t get the attention Gaza does.
MAGA is a fascist racist movement that explicitly denies the importance of empathy
Sudan has Arab villains. Conservatives should be able to get behind that, for a good cause!
They are also black
Maybe some of the pessimism is rational? The failed 20 year intervention in Afghanistan, the rise of IS in Iraq. The failure to “bring back” the Nigerian school girls. Not sure - but feels like the idea we’ve got the power to fix these societies is now a bit tarnished.
In terms of direct aid, I don't think the question is really about whether programs like PEPFAR are effective. Clearly, they have saved a lot of lives. The underdiscussed issue in the long run is the moral hazard of aid dependency. That is, having taxpayers in developed countries essentially subsidize basic healthcare and nutrition for developing countries indefinitely. Thereby preventing corrupt, embezzling third-world governments from being held accountable for failing to facilitate those basic pillars of modern civilization.
Great question! Another possibility is that interest in African welfare has decreased due to the twin rises of the culture war and populism.
At best, these movements are orthogonal to African welfare, outcompeting it for attention. At worst, they're hostile to it.
In the case of populism, that's through promotion of zero-sum thinking, in which the welfare of foreigners is necessarily to the detriment of natives (the case of foreign aid is a rare example where to a small extent it's true). Furthermore, elites were always more cosmopolitan than the rest of the population, so their declining influence with the rise of populism naturally led to decreased interest in African welfare.
In the case of the culture war, that's through, the rise of woke. The late 20th - early 21st century interest in Africa seems rooted in a universalist perspective that people are all fundamentally the same. Your child in suburbia could be a child soldier in East Africa. Under woke, however, differences between groups are highlighted, with identity being defined by demographics like sex and race.
Not only does woke thinking create new distractions from African welfare, as noted in regards to the culture war, it erodes the universalist perspective that motivated it.
As alluded to in other comments, the related rise of Third-Worldist thinking contributes to all the above. It's anti-universalist, viewing foreign countries as inherently distinct from the West, and furthermore, views the the misfortune of the former as a direct result of involvement of the latter. This doesn't lend itself to further Western involvement, or even interest.
The left has never cared about African welfare. Watch 'Africa adio' in italian with english subtitle if you want to see what was forced on Africa by the US. How one country after another was destroyed in the name of spreading democracy. There were no endangered African animals before 1960. What happened to millions of elephants and hippos? Watch the movie, you'll see.
Somalia and Rwanda were both disasters for Canada, so pardon us for not wanting to have anything to do with Africa, even if we had the military capacity anymore to intervene or peace-keep for the UN (which brought us low in both places.) The Taliban sent our combat soldiers packing from Afghanistan several years before the Americans pulled out. Our exit was more orderly because the Americans still controlled the exit routes. (Yes I know Afghanistan isn't in Africa. But it behaves like it was: tribal and post-colonial, just more effective fighting men.)
There is a certain futility in doing anything in Africa, especially in the failed states that cry out for salvation. The other drawback for western countries that set up missions in Africa is that we end up accepting hundreds of thousands of them as refugees because we'd had face-to-face contact with them during the mission.
There is the same futility in showering money on rednecks in Appalachia, aboriginals in Canada, and disaffected college students and radical leftists everywhere. I don't think those count as "problems at home we should be fixing instead", which I agree is annoyingly parochial. Turn away from all of them except if you need to buy them off to prevent them from murdering and rioting and don't have the stomach to do so with retaliatory violence.
Quite true but the types that usually would care and volunteer to help in developing countries never were the same as the virtue-signaling self-pity kind. Actually takes balls and care. In these, I think there is a general sense that Western-directed aid is not very efficient, and harmful at times. Or at least, that the business-like approach of China is delivering better in Africa.
Like, it's harder to play the role of the white saviour preaching your cultural gospel, when these far less haughty Chinese dudes build the roads and telecoms that are actually needed there.
And yet Musk took away tons of aid which already killed hundreds of thousands. It’s MAGA. They are responsible for most bad things in America
Seems like we got more negative press for removing the aid than we ever got positive press for providing it in the first place.
Yes, this is how things tend to happen if you remove something immediately and without any planning.
Do you believe the rapid removal of USAID means the program was negative on net? All the good the program did was cancelled out? I'm highly doubtful of that claim.
If you run a hospital, you probably save a lot of lives, especially if the hospital runs for many years. If somebody comes into the hospital, destroys the generators, and cuts the power, they are correctly identified as a "bad person," even though the number of people killed is almost certainly far less than the number saved.
Yes, USAID was obviously a net good, but the people currently running the USA are the people who killed it, for no real benefit to anyone, great destructive effect, and ideological reasons that seem to be mostly horrible on the face of them.
That's a bad analogy for multiple reasons. A better analogy would be a charity hospital funded by a religious organization which provides free care. Imagine the religious organization has tight finances and cannot afford the hospital anymore. So they cut the funding for the hospital. Sure, you can condemn them for not finding a way to fund it further. But the net effect of this condemnation is just to discourage people from engaging in this type of charity. You never noticed when they were funding the hospital; you only noticed when they stopped.
What are you talking about? They carelessly cut it which caused deaths of hundreds of thousands extra people
There's a difference between "cause" and "fail to prevent". We are all constantly failing to prevent lots of deaths all of the time.
Most of these people aren't even real. If you offer a third world country cash for having poor people, they'll claim to have far more poor people than they really do.
Most of these countries are moderately prosperous and sparcely populated, not the picture you get shown in the west.
They have a lot of corruption that's true. But in no way they are moderately prosperous. They have tons of really poor people.
How do you know that's true?
And do you know where the aid money goes?
Google map any medium-large African city and search 'Mercedes dealership'.
You'll find a suprising number of them.
The sick thing about all this is that the US is giving money to dysfunctional countries which stay dysfunctional because they aren't under pressure to improve. They also have an incentive to overstate how bad things are, if you actually live in one of these countries you'll see a lot less poverty than you expect.
On top of all this, they hate us. We give them money, and they make alliances with China and give speeches in the UN about how everything is the West's fault.
China could easily have replaced the aid programs for its allies, but didn't, because they are an unappreciated waste of money.
Total bullshit
How long have you lived in Africa for?
I do wonder how willing the author and favorable commentators are to going to Africa or Ukraine to fight all the injustices.
This is in keeping with the author’s thesis — emoting is sufficient unto itself.
The irrebuttable presumption is that these are the good people. They are willing to speak against evil. They don’t hate anyone. “Hate has no home here!” But, hey, ok, they DO hate Trump and his kind. And as for the 60,000,000+ torn limb from limb while not yet aborning, well, they feel no hate … they just don’t care. And to them that’s not the same thing. As for 40,000+ gunned down in Iran? Pity. Charlie Kirk? Ok to hate him. Elon? “When is someone going to Kirk him?!?!”
But they emote so well. These matters are mere pettifoggery.
None of them have been to Africa for more than a Safari.
'Africans' aren't real to them.
What is an African? A mirror image of you with the same intelligence, desires and worldview. As well as having everything you have, they also have a vital, cheerful experience of the world, grounded in their connection of nature and their community.
As well as possessing wise, ancient wisdom, along with simple, edenic joy, they also agree with you on all LGBTQ+ and social justice topics.
It looks like the more the right has power, the more stingy and negative the tone of the entire society becomes. I do not see Republicans being joyful, magnanimous and thriving when they get into power, they remain as pissed and victimized as ever, everything going wrong is still because of the Deep State and Obama/Biden.
It is a stinginess in the very psyche and why no one cares anymore.
This could be seen from the start, when Trump got into power he didn’t unleash a Reagan moment where magnanimous charm won over people around the world, his base stinginess and hostility picked fights, tried to screw people over and alienated others. He snatched defeat from victory by being… it needs to be said, extremely small minded with selfishness.
Republicans are sore winners and stingy, which makes everyone just feel negative, the negativity trickles down. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this.
George Bush initiated the PEPFAR program which saved millions of African lives from HIV/AIDS
https://pepfarreport.org/
You're right!
Bush and Reagan led to a far more positive vibe than Trump's MAGA. It's a real decline. Personally, I think this is caused by the internet scene. It's been exploited by bad people to push everything into a very negative direction.
I am disappointed but not surprised that the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa is not mentioned in this article - that of ongoing Christian persecution. I assume the reason is that Christ Himself is no longer popular in the West, so why care?
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN CONCERN and OPEN DOORS are two of similar organisations who minister to persecuted Christians. Raymond Ibrahim the historian and authority on Islam, regularly reports on Gatestone of the latest atrocities committed on Christians world wide.
To quote from ICC reports, between 2009 and 2022 more than 45,000 African Christians were murdered by extremist Islamic groups such as Boko Haram, Fulani militants and Islamic State West Africa. In 2022 alone more than 5,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria. There is a disturbing rise in attacks, abductions, massacres and forced displacements across parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria, the Congo and Kenya. Few people are aware that these massacres have reached as far south as Mozambique.
What is especially appalling to me is that King Charles rolled out his red carpet for a state visit of President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria in March of this year.
Galations 6:7 , “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”
I think that there will be a market for these types of sentiments to come back. Many figures on the modern left privately understand that anti-market and other leftist policies do not work practically and are electoral losers. Nevertheless, there is a big demand among college students to be on the 'right side of history' by opposing some sort of major political injustice. The Israel and Palestine conflict filled this niche: politicians like Zohran and AOC can 'take a stand' against Israel, direct college campus and DSA activists towards this aim, without risking damaging the Democrat brand or being backed into a status quo where they have to enact some disastrous policy. Opposing injustices in Africa is another issue that could fill this type of void. Most 'left-wing' Democrat politicians are educated and bright people who are privately aware of basic economic literature: they are just stuck with an activist, idealistic base that are opposed to 'liberalism' because it reminds them of their parents and implies brutal and hard truths about the world. The name of the game with 'Zohran leftism' is finding issues like this to divert the base, engaging in optics well to make young supporters feel like you are 'trendy', while quietly governing in a liberal way. Zohran himself is not a perfect encapsulation of this trend yet but it is the direction the cultural headwinds are going in.
Yeah I also think there is electoral alpha in working to eliminate poverty on Native American reservations. It manages to tick both the "nativism" box and the "anti-racism" box simultaneously. A great card to play in a general election if you can thread the needle properly, e.g. mentioning the high rate at which natives serve in the US military.
This a topic of quite a bit interest to me — the major problem I think, is any intervention looks colonialist, and maybe to an extent it is.
Yet if we could figure out how to pressure the most dysfunctional governments to adopt pro market and pro rule of law reforms, that could be a major unlock to the African poor.
The optics from a colonial past stand point would be TERRIBLE.
I also wonder what these kind of thing looks like in the context of a rising China. It seem to me if they can pressure really dysfunctional governments to be more like that also would be improvement (for certain African countries not all).