Donald Trump is not set to attend the 39th annual meeting of the African Union, which kicks off its leaders’ summit on Friday.

But his presence will still be felt as delegations from the 55 member states grapple with the new, disruptive reality of the United States president’s second term.

Trump’s historic cuts to foreign aid, his overhaul of US trade policy, and his sweeping changes to immigration admissions have all had an outsized impact on Africa, though he gave the continent only slight mention in his wider global agenda.

Amid the upheaval, the Trump administration has sought to forge new, bilateral agreements with African countries, focused on resources and security gains.

“Over the past year, US policy toward Africa has introduced a degree of uncertainty that will inevitably shape how African leaders approach this summit,” Carlos Lopes, a professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Al Jazeera.

“There has been a perceptible shift away from broad multilateral engagement and large-scale development programming, toward a more transactional, security- and deal-focused approach.”

Many African leaders have sought to strike a careful balance with the new US leadership.

Lopes has observed officials engaging with the US, while simultaneously “hedging” by “strengthening relations with China, the Gulf states, Europe and intra-African institutions to avoid over-dependence on any single partner”.

“The defining theme of this summit, in that sense, is likely to be recalibration on both sides: the US testing a more transactional model of engagement, and African leaders signalling that partnership must be reciprocal, predictable and respectful if it is to endure,” Lopes said.

An outsize impact

The White House National Security Strategy, released in November, gave only fleeting mention to Africa.

In the entire 29-page document, only three paragraphs mention the continent, at the bottom of the last page.

Some of those paragraphs reiterate the longstanding US goal of countering China’s influence. The section also highlights Trump’s recent push to end conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

But the document also alludes to a wider vision for US-Africa ties, shifting from a “foreign aid paradigm to an investment and growth paradigm”.

That approach would be fuelled by new bilateral relationships with countries “committed to opening their markets to US goods and services”. In turn, the US envisions boosting development efforts on the continent, particularly when it comes to accessing strategic energy and rare earth mineral resources.

However, that paradigm shift — away from foreign aid — has had a disproportionate effect on Africa and is likely to be a topic of conversation at Friday’s summit.

An estimated 26 percent of the continent’s foreign aid came from the US. As of 2024, the country’s direct foreign investment in Africa was estimated at $47.47bn, much of it coming through the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

But Trump has since dismantled USAID, as well as cancelled billions of dollars in aid programmes. Those moves have been accompanied by a wider US retreat from the United Nations. Experts say the repercussions have already been felt on the ground in Africa.

“We have experienced the end of USAID, and that has had huge, detrimental negative impacts — at least in the short run — on global health, particularly on health funding for African countries,” Belinda Archibong, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), told Al Jazeera.

The Center for Global Development has assessed that the current US foreign aid cuts could lead to 500,000 to 1,000,000 deaths annually.

In a December report, the organisation said the evidence of Trump’s aid cuts could be seen through increases in malnutrition mortality in northern Nigeria and Somalia, food insecurity in northeast Kenya and malaria deaths in northern Cameroon, among others.

Archibong also pointed to disruptions in HIV treatment and prevention across the continent, an area of concern for African Union members.

Trump’s funding freeze, for example, has caused service interruptions for programmes financed by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a US initiative credited with saving 25 million lives, primarily in Africa.

“So what does the health funding and health security globally look like in the aftermath of the US pulling back?” Archibong said. “That is going to be a very, very key point of discussion at the summit.”

With USAID scuttled, the Trump administration has pursued at least 16 preliminary bilateral agreements on public health aid, including with Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mozambique, and Kenya. It has dubbed its new aid model the “America First global health strategy”.

Critics, though, have raised concerns about such deals being tainted by “transactional pressures”, creating the potential for corruption and questions about their long-term sustainability.

‘Strategic ambiguity?’

For Everisto Benyera, a politics professor at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, Trump is likely to be the “proverbial elephant in the room” during the African Union’s two-day summit.

“This summit will be aware of his presence in his absence,” he told Al Jazeera.

Trump’s tariff policies have also had a wide impact on the continent. In April, 20 countries were hit with custom tariffs ranging from 11 percent to 50 percent, and another 29 countries faced a baseline tariff of 10 percent.

Experts say the nature of the tariffs adds to the air of uncertainty before this year’s summit.

The heightened, individualised tariffs disproportionately affect countries with specialised export industries that rely, in part, on protectionist trade policies to keep their economies afloat.

For instance, the kingdom of Lesotho, a nation of about 2 million, landlocked by South Africa, initially faced a staggering 50 percent tariff rate, risking ravages to its garment industry. Meanwhile, Madagascar, known for its vanilla exports, was slammed with an initial 47 percent tariff rate.

The rates for both Lesotho and Madagascar were later dropped to 15 percent.

Some reprieve has been offered by Trump’s decision this month to temporarily extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade agreement dating back to 2000.

It allows eligible countries to export 1,800 products — including fossil fuels, car parts, textiles and agricultural products — to the US duty-free. However, the extension only stretches through the end of 2026.

Adding to the tensions is Trump’s decision to stop processing immigration visas for 75 countries, including 26 in Africa. That accounts for nearly half of the African Union’s members.

Three African countries have launched reciprocal policies, banning travel for US citizens.

Still, Benyera predicted most leaders at this week’s summit would strive to maintain “strategic ambiguity”, with an eye towards arranging future agreements.

“The African Union will, therefore, not want to make policy pronunciations that contradict Trump,” he said.

“They will aim to strike a strategic balance between appeasing Trump, reassuring [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and maintaining relations with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping.”

‘Normative actor’

Lopes, meanwhile, predicted that the summit will include “subtle but pointed language emphasising international law, multilateralism and consistency”.

He pointed out that several African states have taken “vocal stances” on “global flashpoints”, including Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza — which the US supports — and the recent US military action in Venezuela.

The governments of South Africa, Namibia and Ghana, for instance, have led condemnation of the US’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a blatant violation of international law.

South Africa, meanwhile, has spearheaded a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

“I do expect that theme of international justice to continue, not necessarily as open confrontation but as a reminder that Africa increasingly sees itself as a normative actor on the global stage,” Lopes said.

He explained that recent dealings between the US, South Africa and Nigeria have been “illustrative” of the tightrope walk many African Union members face in the Trump era.

In South Africa, Trump has pushed claims that white Afrikaner farmers have been persecuted in a “white genocide”, a position rejected by the government of Cyril Ramaphosa and several top Afrikaner officials.

But even after an extraordinary — and falsehood-laden — confrontation at the Oval Office, Ramaphosa’s government has sought to forge new deals with the Trump administration, while also strengthening ties with its top trading partner, China.

Trump has also pushed dubious claims about Christian persecution in Nigeria. In December, the US struck an alleged ISIL (ISIS)-linked group in the country’s restive northeast, promising more bombings if armed actors “continue to kill Christians”.

Nigeria’s government has responded to the US attack carefully, characterising it as a “joint operation”, while rejecting the notion that religion was the root of the violence.

It has also used Trump’s interest in the region to boost security cooperation and intelligence sharing with the US, in an effort to counter the persistent insecurity in the country’s north.

“Both have experienced a more antagonistic tone from Washington. Yet, both have also leveraged that friction to diversify partnerships and assert strategic autonomy,” Lopes said.

“That reflects the broader balancing act under way across the continent.” (Al Jazeera)

Update news