Against the backdrop of the 16th BRICS Summit held in Kazan from 22-24 October this year, Angola’s recent efforts to strengthen ties with the United States stand out.
Luanda’s Focus on Strengthening Relations with the US
It was only in 1993 that Washington officially recognised the MPLA government, yet it continued supporting UNITA until the end of Angola’s devastating 27-year civil war in 2002. The conflict claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and left the country’s infrastructure in ruins.
Therefore, the signing of a military cooperation agreement in Washington on June, 7 this year between Angola’s Secretary of Defence Afonso Carlos Neto and US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Tressa Guenov, marks a turning point. The agreement includes the production of military logistics equipment such as vehicles, bridge layers, light armoured vehicles, and aircraft within Angola.
During these talks, both parties agreed to further discuss strengthening ties in military and security domains in Angola in 2025. Washington’s aim is clear: to prevent China from establishing a naval base in Angola, a country strategically located on the southwest African Atlantic coast, by enhancing cooperation in these fields. As Michelle Gavin of the US Council on Foreign Relations noted, such a base would pose a direct threat to US national security.
This agreement followed a meeting between US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Angolan Defence Minister João Ernesto dos Santos at the Pentagon, where the latter emphasised Angola’s multi-vector approach to military cooperation to maintain its armed forces’ high combat readiness.
And this was not a complete surprise. According to the American website Africa Country, the deepening of US-Angola relations shouldn’t be surprising as it builds on a solid foundation. By this time, according to ISS Africa, the US had already provided $21 million in military assistance to Angola.
A senior official in President Biden’s administration, as quoted by Nigeria’s Premium Times, linked the agreement’s signing to President João Lourenço’s close ties with Pentagon representatives during his tenure as Defence Minister from 2014 to 2017.
Moreover, in his inaugural speech in 2017, as recalled by The Guardian, Lourenço expressed Angola’s interest in close cooperation with the US and Europe. Shortly after his election, he hired a lobbying firm to improve Luanda’s reputation in Washington, signalling his intent to strengthen ties with the US. During a private visit to Madrid, when asked if he wanted to be remembered as a reformer like Mikhail Gorbachev, he replied, “Not Gorbachev, but Deng Xiaoping. I’d prefer to be compared to him,” as cited by the American edition of Africa Country.
Lourenço’s December 2022 interview with Voice of America, where he welcomed US participation in Angola’s military procurement diversification programmes, further underlined his westward ambitions.
His travel record is also telling: during his seven years in office, he has made official visits to the US and Portugal three times each, France twice, and other G7 countries once each (excluding Canada). Conversely, he has visited China, Angola’s longstanding economic partner, only twice. This shift towards the West stems partly from Luanda’s desire to reduce dependency on Chinese loans by seeking alternative investment sources.
The Lobito Corridor: A Strategic Move to Counter Chinese and Russian Influence
Reflecting these sentiments among Angola’s political elite, on 26 October 2023 in Brussels, the US, EU, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the African Finance Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop the “Lobito Corridor.” This project aims to connect southern DRC and northwestern Zambia to global trade routes via Angola’s Lobito port.
The US and EU had already reached a preliminary agreement on this initiative during the G20 Summit in India in September 2023.
According to Bloomberg, this project represents Washington’s most assertive recent move to challenge China’s dominance in Africa’s critical minerals market. While most minerals exported from Lobito currently head to Asia, the $100 million modernisation project aims to redirect these exports primarily to the US and Western countries.
As the American digital magazine Geopolitical Monitor notes, the Lobito Corridor project, albeit belated, is a much-needed US response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. To date, 52 African nations have signed Memorandums of Understanding with China under this initiative, which has led to billions in investments in African roads, railways, ports, airports, and other critical infrastructure.
This not only improved transportation links within the continent but also granted China unprecedented access to vast reserves of strategically important mineral resources. Beijing’s active credit policy over the past two decades has resulted in Chinese companies controlling 72 percent of cobalt and copper production in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
A similar situation is unfolding in Zambia, where around 600 Chinese companies, primarily operating in the Copperbelt region, have established two special economic zones. Transactions in these zones are carried out not in local kwachas, dollars, or euros, but in Chinese yuan.
AFRICOM stands guard over American business interests
The American investment conglomerate BlackRock also operates in the region, holding a controlling stake in several companies involved in copper mining. This is one of the reasons behind Washington’s concerns about protecting its economic interests in the region, including the involvement of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). It is worth noting that in 2007, its founder, Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, stated that the main mission of this military command is to “protect the free flow of Africa’s natural resources to the global market.”
In 2022, AFRICOM opened a regional office at the U.S. Embassy in Zambia, officially tasked with expanding cooperation with African countries in military personnel and security forces training to ensure internal political stability.
However, as the American publication Covert Action points out, the role of this AFRICOM regional division also includes undermining China’s influence in the country and protecting the interests of BlackRock and other American companies.
The enormous investments made by Beijing in mining mineral resources, primarily copper and cobalt, in Africa—including in the DRC and Zambia—have enabled it to achieve global leadership in the production of electric vehicle batteries.
Thus, Washington sees Luanda’s interest in strengthening ties with the U.S. and the West in general, in order to acquire new sources of investment and modern technologies, as a great opportunity to strike back at Russia and China’s positions in Africa, as well as to exact political revenge for its defeats in Niger, where U.S. military forces were disgracefully expelled from two military bases in September of this year. These bases had been considered strongholds of U.S. military presence in the western Sahel region.
Viktor Goncharov, Africa expert and PhD in Economics
