How Diplomacy Works in Africa

Summary

Statecraft Podcast Summary

Episode: How Diplomacy Works in Africa
Host: Santi Ruiz
Guest: Judd Devermont, former Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for Africa
Date: November 12, 2025

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with Judd Devermont on the practical realities and challenges of U.S. diplomacy in Africa. Drawing from decades of frontline experience in intelligence and policy roles across multiple administrations, Devermont offers candid insights into where U.S. strategy succeeds, falls short, and struggles to adapt amidst both global crises and continent-specific dynamics. The discussion covers resource prioritization, presidential engagement, statutory and bureaucratic obstacles, the balance of values and interests, and what actually constitutes good diplomatic practice.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Resource Allocation: Africa vs. the Global North

• Recommendation for More Resources in Africa:
  Devermont argues U.S. invests disproportionally in relationships with European allies at the expense of Africa, despite long-term strategic interests in the continent growing.

  "There's too much legacy, I think, in the investment in Europe and not enough investment in where the bulk of the population of the world is, which is in the global South." — Judd Devermont (03:17)

• 'Care and Feeding' in Diplomacy:
  Regular high-level engagement (White House visits, meetings with senior officials) is essential to mutual respect; Africa rarely gets equivalent access as European or Asian leaders.

  "If you don't have a peer to peer relationship with Africans, it is going to be to your detriment." (05:14)

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2. Patterns of Presidential Engagement with Africa

• Bush vs. Later Presidents:
  George W. Bush is the post-Cold War outlier for substantive engagement, credited with more development initiatives and actual time spent with African leaders.

  "President Kennedy spent 25% of all foreign leader meetings with Africans. He truly believed that if we were going to shape the Cold War, shape the international order, that we had to be working with Africans." (08:23)

• Modern Decline in Focus:
  Subsequent administrations (Clinton, Obama, Trump, Biden) have deprioritized Africa, partly due to shifting global dynamics and bandwidth limitations.

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3. Obama vs. Biden: Contrasts in Africa Policy

• Obama Strengths:
  Obama brought a senior team with genuine regional focus, enabling big programs (e.g., Power Africa, YALI) and decisive action (e.g., U.S. military in Ebola response)—but often fell into paternalistic rhetoric.
• Biden Administration:
  Less preachy, actively promoted African voices in international bodies (e.g., AU to G20), but was hampered by the overwhelming demands of the Ukraine and Gaza crises and lacked an "echo chamber" of Africa-focused advocates.
• On Discrepancy between Vision & Reality:

  "We write checks that we can't cash... we're stuck with some very aspiring rhetoric about where we want to take the relationship. And then the reality that we didn't meet that." (13:39)

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4. Navigating Coups and Legal Constraints

• Engagement with Coup Governments:
  Devermont stresses the need for nuanced, flexible engagement rather than blanket isolation, recounting personal negotiation and transition experiences (e.g., Gabon, Niger, Burkina Faso).
• Legal & Aid Limitations—Section 7008:
  Statutory requirements to restrict aid after coups often hamper U.S. influence and can be counterproductive.

  "They're highly problematic... because they don't allow you to have a flexible toolkit." (18:30) Explains a more incremental, incentive-based approach piloted in Gabon versus all-or-nothing aid cutoffs.

• Internal Advocacy for Engagement:
  Career and political officials often push conflicting approaches to senior engagement with "bad guys" vs. rewarding "good behavior," leading to double standards not seen in other regions.

  "I would pull my hair out. I don't have much hair. ... because the day before that, you know, they didn't get engaged with a leader from the Middle east or for Southeast Asia or from Latin America who had an equally torrid past. So I think there's a lot of double standards in the African engagement space. And I think that it's not to our benefit." (24:46)

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5. The Choreography of Diplomacy: Symbolism and Protocol

• Photo Ops, seating, and Absurdity:
  Significant energy is spent on signal-sending via seating arrangements, photo ops, and whom American officials are seen with—sometimes escalating into "kabuki dance" that distracts from substance.

  "At the end of the day, was it as important as all of the stress that we had? Some of this is probably just politics." (32:14)

• Who is it for?
  The target audience is often presumed to be U.S. domestic players worried about congressional or activist backlash, rather than foreign officials themselves.

  "You're fighting against a potential future... you're trying to ward off... a scenario that would be uncomfortable." (34:05)

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6. Summits, Initiatives, and the Problem of Vaporware

• Irreplaceable Value of Big Summits:
  Besides quantifiable outcomes (initiatives, deals), Devermont emphasizes the unique ecosystem and attention generated by D.C.-based Africa leader summits.

  "For three days, this town is about Africa... It's both symbolic and it's actual literal." (37:05)

• Presidential Initiatives: Why Most Fizzle:
  Only a handful (e.g., PEPFAR, Power Africa) are developed with adequate runway and stakeholder buy-in. Most are rushed to generate "deliverables," leading to a parade of short-lived initiatives.

  "The best way to do an initiative... is without a hook." (40:45) "There's a good way to do initiatives, and there's a bad way..." (40:05)

• Middle Path:
  Devermont experimented with launching smaller "pilots" as crack-in-the-door projects, trying to build sustainability after the summit hype fades.

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7. Balancing Values and Interests: Democracy, Minerals, Realpolitik

• Integrating Complex Interests:
  Rather than picking between democracy vs. economic or security interests, the approach is to "take countries in full," weighing progress on various fronts and recognizing tradeoffs.

  "We have to take these countries in full... and not letting one be hostage to the other." (45:26) "Africans, more than any other region, believe in democracy... but they also believe that it is not delivering for them." (55:34)

• Relationship with South Africa as 'Most Mature':
  A prime example where U.S. and South African officials could openly disagree (especially on Russia/Ukraine), but still sustain a robust partnership.

  "I would say one of those countries is South Africa. We were having really difficult conversations with South Africa about Ukraine... President Biden and President Ramaphosa had really productive conversations." (47:24)

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8. Envoys: When Are They Useful and When Are They Not?

• Why Use Special Envoys?
  Often a workaround for staffing shortages or bureaucratic gridlock, envoys can be a virtue signal more than an actual solution.

  "The envoy helps with... staffing issues and with bureaucratic seams and with focus. Now there's another thing that happens often... which is, sometimes it's virtue signaling too." (58:59)

• Failure Modes:
  Envoys given enormous briefs with tiny teams are ineffective. Lack of staff, unclear mandates, and friction with existing teams lead to confusion.

  "We didn't have the staffing to deal with the problem. We've named an envoy and that envoy has 1, 2, 3 people working for him or her." (60:35)

• Success Factors:
  Effective envoys are "people persons," skilled at relationship-building—not just with foreign interlocutors, but within the U.S. bureaucracy.

  "I'm a big fan of one of our envoys, Mike Hammer, who just is a really smart people person. ...knew how to work well, by the way, with the bureaucracy, which is also really important." (63:26)

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9. NSC, State Department, and the Center of Gravity Problem

• Reorganization Fears:
  The folding of the Africa directorate into a larger Middle East team at the NSC is seen as a downgrade—risking less attention and analytic subtlety for a continent of nearly 50 countries.

  "For the first time, the Africa Directorate at the National Security Council has been folded into the Middle East directorate. ...That really concerns me." (69:07)

• Debate vs. Decision:
  The NSC’s value is partly in creating a regular, process-driven forum where competing interests (State, DOD, Treasury) can be discussed—lost if NSC is drastically reduced.

  "The NSC Provides a space at its best for debate and refinement and negotiation and a hearing of all the different things... for us to have a good policy. ...If you let State do its thing and DOD do its thing, they often go in different directions, particularly in Africa." (75:26)

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10. Intelligence: The Value and Its Limits

• Intelligence in Crisis:
  Real-time analysis is rarely as valuable as retrospective/contextual analysis; the "crisis du jour" moves too fast.

  "The IC on the crisis Azure is much better with stand back pieces..." (79:15)

• The Problem of Competition:
  The unique analytic advantage of U.S. intelligence community has eroded as open source and private sector analysis proliferates.

  "There is more, more competition for insights than there has ever been before." (91:29) "The bar... became a lot higher for the analysis to break through and to say something different and to say something new." (92:53)

  • Twitter and open sources now provide "the 80% solution most of the time." (93:13)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Resource Allocation:
  "It's hard for me not to say put more resources in Africa. ...We just haven't done the legwork because we said that Africa as an area of focus is near zero. And I think that's really problematic." — Judd Devermont (02:10)

• On Double Standards:
  "I think there's a lot of double standards in the African engagement space. And I think that it's not to our benefit." (24:54)

• On Diplomatic Symbolism:
  "If you wanted to make a political point and say like, because our relationships are cordial enough that you're invited, but not warm enough that you need to be next to the President... it's a kabuki dance for I don't know who." (33:48, 33:57)

• On Summits as Events:
  "For three days, this town is about Africa... It's very important." (37:05)

• On Presidential Initiatives:
  "The best way to do an initiative... we're going to take the time, we're going to build stakeholder buy in, we're going to launch it, we're going to work with Congress. Those stand the test of time." (40:38)

• On the Realities of Policymaking:
  "70 to 80 reactive... in my last month every day we go through [our proactive goals]. ...it really helped focus us to kind of have that checklist and to keep nailing it as opposed to being more just pulled into the quagmire or whatever the problem of the day was." (81:08)

• On Strategy Documents:
  "We call them strategies. Most of them aren't even strategies, right? They're just a series of values and objectives, framing language." (86:45) "If I did it over again, Santi, I would just say we're going to do a vision statement... I wouldn't throw a whole bunch of objectives into it. And I wouldn't have a Christmas tree." (88:49)

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Important Timestamps

• Resource Allocation & 'Care and Feeding': 02:10 – 05:14
• Presidential Engagement (Bush, Obama, Biden): 06:48 – 10:14
• Obama vs. Biden Africa Policy: 10:37 – 14:02
• Niger Coup & Diplomatic Flexibility: 14:42 – 18:04
• Section 7008 & Aid Constraints: 18:30 – 22:30
• Photo Op “Kabuki” (Symbolism in Diplomacy): 27:55 – 34:05
• Summits & Initiatives: 36:37 – 44:31
• Values vs Interests (South Africa, Angola): 45:14 – 50:18
• Envoys & Their Limits: 57:29 – 66:17
• NSC vs. State Dynamics: 68:27 – 77:52
• Intelligence Analysis – Value & Competition: 78:47 – 94:26
• Strategy Document Process: 84:49 – 91:06

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode is an exceptional deep dive into the contradictions, improvisations, and realpolitik of U.S. foreign policymaking in Africa, punctuated by Judd Devermont’s candor, historical context, and willingness to critique the machinery he once operated. Highlights include the case for more—and better—investment in Africa; the need for humility and flexibility in the face of coups and democratic backsliding; and the persistent gap between grand strategies and actual execution on the ground. Devermont’s reflections on the importance of relationships, messaging, and institutional learning are valuable not only for Africa hands but for anyone interested in how America actually does diplomacy.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign hi, I'm Santi Ruiz, and this is Statecraft. Today I'm talking to Judd Devermont. Let me tell you, this is one of my favorite conversations we've recorded this year. We spent two hours talking, and I still didn't get through all my questions. But let me back up. Judd was the special assistant to the president and senior director at the National Security Council for Africa under President Biden. And before that, he was the national intelligence officer for Africa under Presidents Obama and Trump. And before that, he was a top intelligence analyst for more than a decade at the CIA. To put it simply, Judd is one of the figures in Washington most keyed into how US Diplomacy in Africa actually works, because he's executed it. I wanted his perspective not just on America's goals for diplomacy in Africa and how those change between administrations, but also his honest appraisal of failures to execute in the administrations he served in and what he wishes he'd done differently. Why do presidential initiatives in Africa fail so often? Does the National Security Council deserve to be cut down to size? Why does Foggybottom hate envoys? Why do CIA analysts have such a high opinion of themselves, and is it warranted? How do you negotiate with a military junta? We get into all of this and more, and Judd was very willing to argue with me about all of it. As a reminder, the transcript of this conversation, lightly edited, is at www.statecraft.pub. okay, I think you're going to enjoy this one. Here's Judd. Judd Devermot, thank you for joining Statecraft.

[B]

Really happy to be here. I'm a big fan.

[A]

Oh, back at you. I've been really enjoying your substack post strategy. I want to start with a question or a thought experiment, really. Let's imagine that you get to reallocate American diplomatic resources globally. You're being asked to rebalance how much focus and attention and touch different regions get. But you're not allowed to increase the total amount of diplomatic resources of staffing the Department of State or the White House, et cetera. Do you put more resources into Africa, and if so, where do you pull them from?

[B]

It's hard for me not to say put more resources in Africa. And so I won't be provocative or disappoint. I do believe that at the current state, we're not doing enough for our national security interests based on how much effort and time we put into Africa. And the reason for that is, and I experienced this throughout my career as an intelligence officer in the Obama administration, in the Biden administration, there Comes times where we are at a crunch point and someone says we need to get the Africans on board or how can we work with the Africans on this critical issue? Or there's a problem that's developing in Africa and it's in our interest to be able to resolve it. And we just haven't done the legwork because we said that Africa as an area of focus is near zero. And I think that's really problematic. And so let's pretend that the value of Africa is X. I would bump it up by 10 points and I would give us the opportunity to have that grow as the continent becomes more significant. Then I would question, do we need to put as much effort in parts of the global north like Europe as we do right now? There's too much legacy, I think, in the investment in Europe and not enough investment in where the bulk of the population of the world is, which is in the global South.

[A]

Would the counterargument to that just be our European allies matter a lot more for our national security interests than our friends in Africa.

[B]

I think that we have an extraordinary amount of alignment with the European partners already, or at least we certainly did pre Trump. And so some of the care and feeding that we do with the Europeans and the endless amount of high level meetings that they get and touch points are probably unnecessary to have the same outcome. And if you flip that, the kinds of investments we need to make in Africa to have outcomes that are in our interest is insignificant at this juncture. And meanwhile, many of our allies and adversaries are spending more effort in Africa. And so they are getting more trade, they are getting more alignment in international forums, they are getting the benefit of African voices supporting their positions and their vision of the world. So I'm not discounting the importance of France or Great Britain. What I'm saying is that you probably don't need to put as much effort into those relationships for the same results. And if you don't put more effort into our partnerships with Africans, we are really going to miss out in the future.

[A]

Sure. I like the phrase care and feeding, which you just used. What constitutes, Karen feeding in a diplomatic relationship?

[B]

Well, what we're mainly talking about is senior level engagement. Who gets to go to the White House, who gets a visit by a senior US Official. There's too many countries on the continent of Africa that the most senior US Official they will ever meet is the ambassador of that country. And if you don't have a peer to peer relationship with Africans, it is going to be to your detriment. I'll tell you a story from a couple of years ago. Like decades ago, President Bush, H.W. bush was trying to cultivate votes ahead of the Persian Gulf War, right, against Saddam Hussein. And Cote d' Ivoire was on the Security Council. And the Foreign Minister of Cote d', Ivoire, Amer Essi, comes to Washington and he meets with Secretary Baker. And he says to Secretary Baker, you know, I've been here countless amounts of time here, Washington, and until today, I have never met with anybody higher than the Assistant Secretary of State. And Baker, to his credit, was like, we will change that. Next time you are in New York or you are here, I will meet with you. I'll come up to meet you in New York. I'll bring you down by train. But here we were on the precipice of a critical vote, and the Foreign Minister of a country could only meet with, you know, important figure in African policy, but in the scheme of things, not a very senior official. Think about the other way. If the US President went to an African country or Secretary of State Blinken went to an African country and they said, you can meet with this guy in the middle of the Ministry of Foreign affairs who's the desk officer for the US So that's what I mean by Karen, feeding accruing mutual respect to people who are your equals.

[A]

Yeah. Of the five most recent presidents, and I learned this from, from your substack, only George W. Bush spent really significant time with African leaders as compared to the amount of time they spent with other foreign leaders. So Presidents Bill Clinton, Obama, Trump, Biden spent far less time with African leaders. And it varies among them, but broadly compared especially to folks like JFK, even to Nixon, Ronald Reagan, certainly HW, Jimmy Carter, you've got like a modern, broadly 25 year period where presidents spend a lot less time on Africa than they used to. Why is that?

[B]

Yeah. So President George W. Bush was really remarkable in the post Cold War era with how many African leaders that he met with during his time. And I have found in my research that that's correlated with a whole bunch of different things, including major development programs, travel, consultations on the biggest global issues. President Bush, and a lot of this goes credit to him as a leader. But also I found a nice quote from him that said Condoleezza Rice told him when he took office he's going to be spending a lot more time with Africans and with Africa. And he really did that. And I think he understood the imperative of working closely with Africans to solve problems both on the continent and abroad. He also understood the importance of this continent in terms of, you know, 1.4 billion people that will double by 2050. And that if we weren't addressing the economic challenges together, if we weren't addressing the health challenges, challenges together, that that would be to the detriment of just not just Africans or the United States, but the global community. But there's something else, and a colleague of mine told this story to me, which I really love, is that President Bush met with President Museveni of Uganda. And in the meeting, President Bush asked Museveni about his views on the Iraq war. And later he was asked, why did you bring up the conflict in Iraq? And President Bush said, well, I read Museveni's bio. He was an insurgent leader and we're leading a counterinsurgency. And I'd love to get. I wanted to get his thoughts on the dynamics and his firsthand insights. And I love that story because there he is not just doing African issues with President Museveni. He's talking about the biggest topics that are on top of mind for him. And I think that's phenomenal. But you asked a bigger question, which is why has there been less engagement in the sort of the post Cold War presidents versus the Cold War presidents? Although it varies president to president, I think that for the most part, outside of President George W. Bush, I don't think that there has been a real connection with why Africa is important in the Cold War. President Kennedy, this is crazy. President Kennedy spent 25% of all foreign leader meetings with Africans. He truly believed that if we were going to shape the Cold War, shape the international order, that we had to be working with Africans. And so in his time, not only did he engage with a lot of Africans, but he established usaid, he established the Peace Corps. So for me, those two presidents stand above all the others.

[A]

You worked in the Obama administration and the Biden administration, different roles, both pretty senior in the Biden administration, very senior, focused on Africa issues. If you had to choose, which of those two administrations was more successful in meeting its own stated goals on Africa. Not, you know, in a broader objective sense, but both of them had goals for Africa. Which of them exit?

[B]

Well, God, that's really hard. I feel conflicted loyalties. I'll tell you what I thought was a strength of President Obama's administration on Africa. And I'll tell you what I think went right with President Biden for President Obama, not just his own background and connection to Kenya. I don't even think that's as relevant here. He had a bunch of senior leaders in the cabinet who also thought Africa was important. So obviously National Security Advisor Susan Rice had been assistant secretary for Africa, head of usaid. Gail Smith had been a senior director for Africa in the Clinton administration. Samantha Power in New York had spent a lot of time thinking about Africa. And so I think there was a critical mass of people who understood the importance of Africa and that allowed us to do some big programs like Power Africa or the young African leader or, you know, decide that we are going to send the military to the west coast of Africa to deal with Ebola over anyone's objections. So I think that those were the things that were really working in the Obama administration. Sometimes I think there was a little too much preachiness about Africa and in ways that I think we don't do in anywhere else in the world. Right. Like we have complex, complicated relationships with India or the UAE or Vietnam and we don't do as much lecturing. But I think the Obama administration, there was a little too much of that in the Biden administration. I think we did less lecturing, but we did less engagement. I'm proud of a lot of the things that we did, particularly in terms of how do we get Africans to have a bigger voice in international forum, getting the AU to join the G20, calling for African seats at the Security Council. But I don't think there was enough of an echo chamber around President Biden to kind of break through to get the kind of engagement we needed on the continent. And also the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza were just huge sucking sounds and I think they really strapped the bandwidth. I do think that, you know, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken would do more on Africa, but I think that they were pretty limited given how much those two particular conflicts, as well as just competition with China, was limiting the space for other engagement.

[A]

Sure. That tracks with what I've heard from other folks. As I was prepping for this interview, I asked quite a few people who were in the admin and outside about their views on the Biden admin's engagement on Africa. And bad? Very. You know, they didn't all line up with their feedback, but the big theme was just the admin was in a sense, blindsided by how much time was taken up by Ukraine and Gaza, which makes sense. Foreign policy isn't just proactive, it's also reactive.

[B]

But maybe there's one more point, Santi, on the rhetoric. And I know we'll probably talk about strategies. Those of us who focus on Africa want to do big things in Africa. And in some respects, I think often we write checks that we can't cash. We hope that we can cash them right. We write them down so that we can use them as a bludgeon to push people to get to them. But we, at the end of our administration, we're stuck with some very aspiring rhetoric about where we want to take the relationship. And then the reality that we didn't meet that. And partly that was because we couldn't drive the system to get to where we had hoped to be at the end of the day.

[A]

I want to go back to something you said a moment ago about the Biden admin being less paternalistic or preachy, maybe was your word in its engagement with African countries. And this question might be sensitive because you've worked with some of these people. But in March 2024, there was a kerfuffle that folks who follow this stuff will remember that Niger's military junta ordered US troops out. And that was over a lot of things. We had troops there to do counterterrorism work. But one of the things that junta cited was what it called, quote, condescending demands for US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Molly Fee during American delegation visit. What was your read on that encounter?

[B]

Well, I left the administration in February of 2024, so the coup had happened in July. And I was in a number of meetings where we knew that we had to engage the junta about the direction that they were taking. You know, we wanted to see a pathway back to democratic rule. Although we were flexible about how long that would take. We wanted it to be a conversation. We had this outstanding issue about the future of our military bases both in Niger, in the capital, in Agadez, and some concerning information about, you know, our foreign adversaries. So I can't speak to what happened in that meeting because I wasn't there. I do know the intention was to say, how do we find a way forward together? Right? How do we find a way in which. Because we're under our own domestic constraints as much as you are in Niger as the junta in terms of the things that you're promising your populace or the reasons, the justifications you're giving for your coup and your dissatisfaction with the number of different relationships that you have, and how do we identify the things that are making it even more difficult and is there a way forward on that? That was the intent of the conversation, and maybe it would have ended up in a similar place. But you know, what is missed sometimes in the public conversation is that we weren't saying don't have a relationship with Russia. We were trying to be very specific about the things that would be concerning to us, considering that we have military bases and operations that we do in Niger. You know, there may be certain types of weaponry that the Russians may want to provide or access the Russians may want that would be problematic for our ability to maneuver. So we were, we actually had a more flexibility and more openness to thinking about these arrangements. And sometimes it's giving credit for it. And we were in a place where we wanted to understand what their ultimate trajectory was towards democracy, what was going to be the final disposition of the former head of state Bazoum, who is still to this day under house arrest. But when I left in February, our goal was to let's have this conversation in person so we can figure out a way forward. Let's express our concerns, let's express where we think we can partner. And I don't think that is paternalistic. Again, I don't know what happened in that meeting. Obviously the outcome and the perception of that meeting is not very good and it's not where I would have liked us to be.

[A]

No kidding.

[B]

Maybe some understatement on my side, but I'll tell you that that's the kind of conversation, by the way, that I had in Gabon when I met with the coup leader in Gabon. I went there, I led the delegation after the coup. We talked about the things that are important to us, things that they're important to them. Can we find a way forward? And we largely have. They've transitioned back to civilian rule. The military junta leader is now the president, but they did it in two years. It's faster than any of the countries in the Sahel. And we're having constant engagements with them, relationships with Niger and Mali and Burkina. I mean, it's a much a slower process and there's a lot of hurt feelings on, on both sides, perhaps, and, and a lot of sensitivities.

[A]

By law. We have to. The US has to limit foreign assistance to states that suffer coups. When we see a coup, there's statutory rules that limit what kinds of diplomatic engagement you can do. Now, you've never been in a position to write those laws. You've been executing and, and doing intelligence work. But from your perspective, now that you're on the outside, is that constraint the right call? What does it do for the work?

[B]

Yeah, I think they're highly problematic, not because I disagree with the sentiment behind it, but because how they don't allow you to have a flexible toolkit. And we started in the Biden administration, which I'm proud of, trying to think through how we use that tool better in its current form. So I'll give you an example from Burkina Faso that will help us talk about Niger and Gabon.

[A]

Cool.

[B]

What happens when there's a 7008 determination, which is what we're talking about here? It takes about a month to figure out where all the money is. People on the outside think that we're like slow rolling it. It actually takes almost a month for OMB and F to figure out all the pots of money and which of those pots of money could be affected by 7008.

[A]

And just to. Just to jump in here and specify S, most people won't know what you mean by that. Go for it.

[B]

Yeah, sorry. F is at the State Department's foreign assistance.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So they kind of sit on top of of State and Aid. So that's a process that goes on 708 mainly affects the State Department, but if there are funds from DoD that have some state commingling in it or turnkey, it can affect them as well. But for example, a military base in Niger is not affected by 7,800. Like that could continue. That was not affected as a legal matter.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So in Burkina Faso, there was a coup and we turned on 7008. And you have something called Notwithstanding. So you have a couple of different things, maybe on border security that you can say this is notwithstanding. You can continue to do those things. Well, what we did in Burkina Faso is declare the clue declared 7800 and turn on all of the Notwithstanding. And then Santi, we were done. We had nothing left that we could do for Burkina because we had already spent it all in one moment. And these guys have an insurgency, an extremist threat. 60% of Burkina is is overrun by extremists. And the only way that this money turns back on is after they have a civilian government. And they were saying they're not going to have a civilian government till they deal with the extremist threat. Now you can disagree with that timeline, but it struck us as like we're in a challenging place because before this moment, most transitions in the early post Cold War period in Africa took about two years. So within two years, government came back, money turned back on. So we get to Niger and we get to Gabon and we say we're going to do something a little different. We're not going to turn on all the Notwithstanding. And so we can have flexible money that as we make progress towards civilian rule, we can keep turning things on. And we also have a couple of other pots of money, a pot that I created called the African Democracy and Political Transition. ADAPT Money that we can also give you to help you with your transition. The Nigerians weren't interested in this at all, but the Gabonese were like, oh, we. We got it. Okay, These are the steps. And as we make steps forward, you can get this money out of the ADAPT Fund. We were able to let them still host a military exercise. So even within the constraints of the law, I think we came up with a more flexible way to incentivize positive movement. And so that would be my clearing call, is we Maybe don't need 7008, but we need to be more thoughtful of how do we work with African governments to deal with their most urgent challenges in the moment after the coup, but also find a pathway towards civilian rule that is, by the way, that's durable. Both Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali had coups only 10 years after their last coup. And so the transition in some respects wasn't a success because it was so nascent, so fragile and not delivering for the people. So also, in this transition from coup leader to civilian leader, what are the things the US can do to make it more durable?

[A]

I'm trying to figure out which of my many questions I want to tackle here. Let's stay on the engagement point. You've written about the kind of internal fights that happen in administrations over when the US should engage at all with foreign leaders, because there are always forces who will push against senior officials meeting with coup leaders, with military leaders of a country, autocrats. And then there are folks more on the realist side who will say the US has an interest in, like you said earlier, sitting down with these people, even when we have lots of disagreement. How have you watched that dynamic play out? Are there times when you've watched, you know, say, career officials pressure politicals not to meet with someone you think they should meet with?

[B]

Yeah, you know, I think that there's two villains here. Villain number one is the generalists who say Africa's too complicated. Like, just give me the. Just give me the good news stories. Like, let's do the good news stories. Let's have the heroes, let's have the saints, let's have the countries that represent values that we cherish. Let's have them have the meetings. And so they could stand up as some sort of exemplar totem of what we want to be. And these countries that are really Complicated. These leaders that have, you know, past that we don't agree with, let's not spend time with them. So that's the generalist side and the. And I'm talking about generalists, both politicals and civil servants. And then the other side, there's the Africanists, who also kind of play this game, who just want us to make sure that we're rewarding good behavior. And so the leaders that they push. I had a meeting with someone, an ambassador, who told me, hey, why are you guys even considering a meeting with that guy? Don't you know how bad he is? You should be meeting with my leader from my country. And so instead of an arguing the merits of what the problems are that we were going to address in the Oval Office, he was trying to figure out who had more virtue, which is, you know, crazy.

[A]

The good guys.

[B]

The good guys. So that's a dynamic, and I've seen it play out so many times, where even when you have heads of state, US Presidents who aren't spending a lot of time on human rights issues, people below them will say, wow, should we really be engaging with this leader? I read a human rights report watch. Or I read this cable, and it looks like they're pretty bad. And I would pull my hair out. I don't have much hair. But what I had, you and me both. Because the day before that, you know, they didn't get engaged with a leader from the Middle east or for Southeast Asia or from Latin America who had an equally torrid past. So I think there's a lot of double standards in the African engagement space. And I think that it's not to our benefit. One last point, because it gets back to how many leaders that you have in the Oval Office. And this is where I did have a problem. If I was only going to get four leaders in the Oval Office.

[A]

You mean African political leaders? Sorry, just to be clear, African political.

[B]

Leaders in the Oval Office. If I was only going to be allotted one or two a year, then I was going to pick Nigeria and South Africa and Angola or Kenya. Right. I didn't have the luxury of saying, like, hey, let's bring in some of the. A variety of leaders in the way that President Bush or Kennedy did. So that is one of the challenges. When you're only given so many slots, it's not never explicit. Then you also are being more careful. You're not only trying to get the most strategic countries in there, which is a good thing, but you're not willing to take the risk of having the country and the leader who you're going to get a lot of hell from the Hill from, or you're going to get a lot of hell from activists from or the bureaucracy. So that's the third dynamic that I just want to be, you know, confessional about.

[A]

When you say you're only getting so many slots and that it's not explicit, what is it? In what implicit way are you told you only get so many slots?

[B]

Well, a couple of things happen. So sometimes after you have a big meeting like the Africa Leaders Summit, you're kind of told, don't come bother us for a while. Right?

[A]

By who? In the executive office of the President.

[B]

Sometimes it's by the people who run the access to the president or people who have to rack and stack all the foreign leaders. You had a great event. I'm very thankful that we had that event. It's a great event, but take a beat for a little while, right? So that's one of the ways it's done. And the other one it's done, which is a little more subtly, is, hey, we put this list together. Your country was on it. It just didn't make the cut line. You know, we were told we didn't have 10, we have five. So you dropped off. And so you start realizing that, you know, you're only going to get a couple of these, at least in my experience, and you're gonna have to be persistent about it. One of the things that I did as a trick is that I would send a request, I would be told no. I would send a second request, I would be told no. And then I would say to myself, I'm really uncomfortable that I keep asking for this, so I definitely need to do it one more time. And, you know, you just have to keep pushing and try to keep refining the arguments and not give up. And you have to be that pain in the ass. But maybe in retrospect, Santee, I needed to be a bigger pain in the ass.

[A]

You would fit right in in Washington. There was something you mentioned in your newsletter on engagement that was really striking to me. You had this one line about saying how at times you had to tiptoe around certain kinds of big events to make sure that you don't have the wrong encounter between Americans and the wrong African political leader. And you say, and I quote, that you had to choreograph an elaborate two step to keep the US delegation at arm's length from the Zimbabwean president at this big council event in 2023. I want to know what two step you were choreographing. Yeah.

[B]

So the corporate council in Africa, which is not a US Government institution, has an annual business forum. And sometimes they do it at the United States, sometimes they do it in Africa. They just did one in Angola. Next year is going to be in Mauritius. And the one that they were doing in 2023 was in Botswana. And the corporate council in Africa and government Botswana work together to decide who's on the invite list.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And because Zimbabwe, which is Botswana's neighbor, is part of a larger regional grouping called the Southern African Development Community, they were on the list, by the way. They were there for the 2019 summit in Mozambique. We were all fine with that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

We didn't control the guest list, but that made sense. Batuan is the co host. Well, there's a sanctions program on Zimbabwe. And there was an uproar by different parts of the federal government, legislative branch about the fact that a sanctioned individual, the president of Zimbabwe, was going to be there.

[A]

Even though it's not a US Hosted event. It's an.

[B]

Even though it's not a US Hosted event.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And so we would have done a family photo where the US Delegation and the African leaders sat together, stood together. We could no longer do that. There was a whole bunch of other things that we had to do or that cca, I should say, had to do.

[A]

And like what?

[B]

Well, like, look at the Investing in Zimbabwe breakfast. Couldn't happen anymore that they were doing. You know, there's. And the president of Botswana at the time, Masisi, was actually very understanding about it, but we created a political headache for him. I mean, it was a real problem for him. This is his neighbor. He doesn't have sanctions on Zimbabwe. And he is now having to figure out how that the US Delegation for the US Africa Business Forum has to be quarantined from the Zimbabwe leader. And that just felt, in my view, kind of over the top.

[A]

And the. Just to get clear, the main political driver for you guys or for the US Here was we can't give them the photo op or the. The moment that can be read as us being too buddy. Buddy.

[B]

Yes, that's it. Whereas, I mean, two things that are really important here. This is a forum about increasing U.S. trade investment in Africa. Let's not get twisted on what we're trying to do, which is invest in Africa. And while there are sanctions on Zimbabwe, there are not sanctions on investing in Zimbabwe. It's just with particular individuals and entities. So for the sake of a photo op, I think that we at the Minimum, it was a distraction.

[A]

Sure. What about another example that you mentioned in passing in this same post about making sure President Biden stood far enough away from certain leaders without breaking diplomatic protocol during US Africa leaders summit a year prior in 2022. Oh, how far away is. Is appropriate?

[B]

I don't know how far away is. But you know, and I played the game a little bit too, right? Like you have we invited about 50 leaders on the continent. We didn't invite the president of Zimbabwe because he's under sanctions. We didn't invite the president of Eritrea because they're under sanctions and coup leaders, but so about 50 leaders. And usually it's organized by alphabetical, reverse alphabetical protocol order. There's all these sorts of different ways and it's like a Rubik's cube. You're like, oh, I don't like the way that this looks. Try a different one. We would try the different one. Okay, well actually the second step is going to end here and start the third step. So we're okay. So, you know, it was just again, I played into it too, but it's, it was just like again, I keep thinking about to myself, like, what was it all for? Like at the end of the day, was it as important as all of the stress that we had? Some of this is probably just politics.

[A]

Did it matter? I mean, I'm to take the opposite side. What I understand is diplomacy is a lot of these kinds of elaborate, you know, maybe stuffy games that you play to send very concrete signals about who, not just who you're formal allies with, but who stands next to who in a photo op is a sign of legitimacy. And you know, there's a reason that we have this kind of whole elaborate invented by the French language of diplomacy to send various kinds of messages. Would that be the argument that someone's got to do this, the table seating and sometimes it's got to be you?

[B]

That would be the argument. The argument be is that by virtue of being next to the president that you are accruing some legitimacy to that leader. Sure.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

We also have already invited that leader to Washington to attend a three day summit hosted by the President of the United States. That's one. And two, if you wanted to make a political point and say like, because our relationships are cordial enough that you're invited, but not warm enough that you need to be next to the President. It's not like we told those leaders that. So at least that message, they're meant.

[A]

To pick it up from where they got staged in The.

[B]

In the photo op, they're unlikely to pick it up. So, again, it's a kabuki dance for I don't know who.

[A]

So who's that? Who is it for then? I mean, is it a dance for American audience, for American consumers, who's meant to pick up on these signals?

[B]

What I think is really at the heart of it is a fear that someone would see it and get upset and yell at us, that you would have activists or the Hill or, you know, legitimate, like, civil society in those countries express deep frustration with the US for doing that. And so you're fighting against a potential future. You're trying to ward off or prevent a scenario that would be uncomfortable. But it's the degrees of the differences, right? The degree between you've already invited the person to the event. You know, there was an earlier part of the summit where we have all of these different events throughout the three days. And, you know, African leader X will speak at this summit event, and African leader Y will do this one. And then we shared the schematics with the African diplomatic corps, and a couple of diplomats were like, where is our leader? How come they don't have any speaking engagement? And nine times out of ten it was because, well, that was a leader that we had a challenge with, and so we ended up fixing that. But the African ambassadors are white. Why are you asking if you're going to be inclusive in asking our leader to come here, but you don't want to give them anything to do the entire three days. So we did fix it, but it was out of that same sort of sense, like, oh, someone's going to be annoyed at us or mad at us or angry at us. And I think that got in the way of doing good policy.

[A]

Yeah, maybe this is a dumb question. I think it is, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What's the value of a convening like this? I think when people. In a past job, I used to help run a retreat that I really loved, and it was really like. Like a fantastic event, mostly because of all the serendipity that happened. You put a bunch of people together and they form companies and they built these lifelong relationships, and you didn't plan exactly in advance. You kind of choreographed the whole event, but the actual specific outcomes that come out of it. You. You didn't foresee an event like this where you're convening all 50 African leaders, assuming there's some of that. But really you have very concrete goals that you want out of it as well. As some of the stuff that's much fuzzier, that's like we want to, you know, have an opportunity to engage and share our perspectives, yada, yada, yada. How does like the National Security Council think of an event like this? What constitutes success? Measure that in advance.

[B]

Yeah, there's a couple of metrics that we use, but you know, how many deals were announced, private sector deals, what kind of initiatives did we launch there? How is it received by Americans and by our African partners and quite frankly by our adversaries? How do they see it? Sure, that's also important. What I think is really important about these summits and we've only done two. The United States has done one in 2014 and in 2022, China does one every three years, Japan does one every three years. You know, most of allies and adversaries do it much more frequently. But I think what's really special, particularly when we do it in Washington, is for three days this town is about Africa. Right? You know, you get on the news, you hear from the news, a traffic report. Well, because of the Africa leaders summit, it's going to be more difficult to go down Pennsylvania. And it's both symbolic and it's actual literal that, you know, Africa becomes the focus of Washington D.C. and you get in a way you would never get on a day to day basis, Secretary of Transportation is like, where's my Africa meeting? Right. And all the think tanks that may spend very little time on Africa, we're like, well, we got to have a big Africa thing. Let's make sure we host this African leader here during the summit. And all the private sector companies are like, oh, you're having a summit? Well, let's hold back our big announcement so we can announce it at the summit. Or hey, is there a leader or a country that we've been, you know, on the fence about that maybe we can have an initial engagement that we can start talking about an MOU or some sort of process. So having a summit, there's all these metrics, but there's also some vibes that go on too about this is the moment that the President and his administration is that we're going to spend on Africa and everyone wants to be part of that. And so it's very important. The Trump administration for a minute talked about doing it in New York and I thought that was a disaster. You just wouldn't get the focus, time and attention to do it in New York. On the sidelines of Unger, you wouldn't have the Secretary of Commerce coming up perhaps or the HUD secretary. There'd be just too much distractions. So doing it in D.C. is really important. I mean one day it'd be great to do on the African continent, but for a town that doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about Africa, you know, you force the issue with those summits.

[A]

So I actually think I'm more convinced by the less metric, by the more vibesy argument here. Like I'm a believer in serendipity and the kind of unquantifiable stuff and actually the metrics that you mentioned at the very beginning about how many initiatives are announced or how many deals are announced. Maybe I've learned some of this skepticism from you. You have a piece about. This is actually really valuable for me. Just that there's been like at Last more than 60 US government launched initiatives on Africa, often presidentially, back since the early 90s. And you've got your short list from your perspective of the really successful ones, it's like a handful, like a little bit more than a handful. The vast majority of these initiatives flame out or they don't last pass administration. Like I have a sense that like number of deals announced, number of new government initiatives announced at something like this is like vaporware that's faked. Am I right in taking that cue from you?

[B]

Yeah, I mean I think it can be. So there's a good way to do initiatives and there's a bad way to do initiatives and then there's sort of the, here's the reality of doing initiatives. So the best way to do an initiative, and I would put the pepfar, the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief as a great example or Power Africa under Obama where the administration team sat down and thought through what they were going to do without a hook. It wasn't like we're going to do this for a summit, we're going to do this because the President's going on a trip. This is important.

[A]

There's no deadline, there's no deadline.

[B]

This is important. We're going to take the time, we're going to build stakeholder buy in, we're going to launch it, we're going to work with Congress. Those stand the test of time. That's the best way to do it. The bad way to do it is like, hey, we need a deliverable here because the President's going somewhere, the vice President's going somewhere.

[A]

What do we have for them?

[B]

Yeah, can you come up with something? And so you're kind of like, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul. And you're, you're just kind of building these things and pushing them out. Now the reality is somewhere in the middle, which, which is that when you have a president like President George W. Bush, who's going to support you even without a summit, like you just have an ability to do some big things. And when you have presidents that are going to spend less time on Africa, you need those summits or you need those initiatives to kind of break through the bureaucracy. So what I did with some of them, most of them didn't survive in part because the Trump administration cleaned the decks a little bit, is instead of being like, here's the big initiative that's going to define our Africa policy that we're using the trip or the summit to do. I had the view of let's use the summit to just get a crack in the door of something really cool and interesting. Right. This adapt that I mentioned earlier, we have this idea for how do we do positive conditionality for security assistance. Let's call them a pilot, we can birth them with the summit and then let's spend the next months, years to kind of see if they're a real thing. And if they're a real thing, well then you have the momentum to make them long lasting and really core to what we do. That was kind of my middle road is I needed the summit to have leverage, but I didn't want to over promise. And so I actually put in three or four initiatives. None of them would get all of the attention and sort of die under the weight of the attention. And they were creative and different and they needed some nurturing and bureaucratic buy in to see if they could actually, you know, leave the home and fly away.

[A]

And how, how did that go? I mean, in retrospect, when you reflect on that tactic of throwing a bunch of small initiatives in and trying to see which ones take root. Well, would you do that again?

[B]

I think I would do a little of that again. I would carve out more space to just think the big program, the big initiative. I really want to do something in urbanization. I, I hid it in the strategy and I just couldn't find the time to do it. And I really do regret that. On the initiatives I learned a little bit from that process adapt. I had a lot of stakeholder buy in over time. I had AID and state working on it and I had a lot of test cases with the coups to try to work them through. And I think it would have probably lived on as the end of the biden administration was upon us. The team just spent all the money because they thought it just wouldn't live in the Trump administration. But I think the concept was really solid and we were seeing people think about how do we use this? So that was a really positive one. The positive conditionality, which we call the 21st century for African partnership. 21 pass. We shoved it down DOD's throat like we literally had Jake Sullivan call Secretary Austin and they found money for it. DOD hated the idea and did not want to do it. And they fought us tooth and nail and there was no other agency or department that had any skin on it. And so they were able to just to kill it. We're not going to do it. We're just going to appropriate the money as we always have. It was really unfortunate. So I would probably do some of the same things, but I would think even more deeply about the construction, the stakeholders, how it could grow over time and make sure that, that even if we had this spark from a summit or a trip, that I had enough momentum and buy in to actually build it over time.

[A]

That makes sense. Over the conversation, we've talked a lot about the US government's interest in supporting democracy in Africa. And this was a big theme, especially with the Biden administration. Although it's been a theme for many administrators. It's not like a novel thing that the Biden admin did, but it was definitely a key focus and that sat next to more realist moves like a embrace of Angola for geostrategic reasons. Angola is not a thriving, functioning democracy, but it matters for, you know, rare earths and all these other kinds of reasons. I'm not going to hold you or the admin to a perfect consistency standard here, but how did you guys think about that internally?

[B]

You know, I think that these, they don't have to be intention. Sometimes our realist geopolitical goals versus, you know, more of a values agenda. But sometimes they are, sometimes they are, sometimes they are. So first of all, with Angola, there was a number of important things that were happening in Angola, not just geopolitical. They had a transition. The leader had been in power since 1979, left power in 2018, peacefully, handed it over to his successor. And his successor was, you know, looking at economic reforms, being more active in the region as well as we were making all these investments in the rail. And so it's, it still continues to have challenges with growing its democracy, but it, it was making it important steps. What I thought was important is that we have to take these countries in Full right. We have to think about the progress that they're making on democracy and values as well as the geopolitics and not letting one be hostage to the other. And I think that was my biggest takeaway, is that too often we were letting one particular factor. Now, it could be democracy, because that's your question. But if you look at today, it's like critical minerals. The critical minerals is the sort of the most important factor. And the way that I wanted us to think about the continent is think about each of these countries having multiple points of value to us so that we could struggle through, hey, this country is doing really important work on hydro energy. Right. Or it's leading the charge on climate change, or it's been a remarkable partner on Covid, or it's a democracy or it's a counterterrorism partner. I want us to inject more complexity in these relationships. I wanted us to be able to, if we're going to meet with a leader about China, and maybe we are in alignment on some of the issues around China, we could also talk about some of the things that we disagree with. There's a couple of countries that I would always tell them that we have one of the most mature relationships on the continent because we fought hard about a bunch of different things and we cooperated so well on a bunch of others.

[A]

What are those countries?

[B]

Well, I would say one of those countries is South Africa. We were having really difficult conversations with South Africa about Ukraine.

[A]

And sorry to back you up here, because South Africa was basically aligned with the Russians.

[B]

South Africa, during the Russia's war with Ukraine, took a much more neutral position, sometimes would reiterate some of the Russian talking points. They wouldn't vote with us in the General Assembly. In fact, at one point, they had a dueling General assembly resolution. They wanted to negotiate, which is not what we wanted to do. You know, we had a line, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. There's also questions about they did military exercises with China and Russia, naval exercises. So there's a whole bunch of things that were pretty concerning for us on their alignment. But they're also a vibrant democracy. The ruling party lost its majority in 2024, and President Biden and President Ramaphosa had really productive conversations where they worked. They talked about their differences of opinion and particularly on the Russian war in Ukraine. And we didn't see eye to eye necessarily, but we were able to narrow those differences. And actually, Jake Sullivan had a really productive relationship with his counterpart, Cindy Mufammadi, where they would talk on the phone. He invited Sydney to join him at a couple of these meetings of national security advisors like in Malta. And so I like that. And you know, South Africa's in the news a lot right now with President Trump and this false allegation of white genocide. And certainly there are real problems with corruption and violence in South Africa. But we took South Africa as it is engaged, tried to work on the things that we agreed on, tried to narrow the disagreements that we had. And I thought that was a more mature relationship than the sort of one note approach that we can have in.

[A]

Other places on that allegation of white genocide was one of the things that you've talked through with the South Africans, the killing of farmers?

[B]

Well, one, there is no white genocide. I mean, there are more black South Africans that are killed in South Africa than white South Africans. It was part of the bilateral conversation about violence, police training. It was not brought to the level that it was under President Trump, either in Trump 1 or in Trump 2. But, you know, our embassy, you know, did engage on a whole bunch of law enforcement and security issues as much as they could. And by the way, it is a big issue for South Africans. I mean, the reason why the anc, one of the many reasons why the ANC lost its majority is because there is, you know, rampant crime in lots of parts of South Africa and it's a, it's a concern to all of its citizens.

[A]

Sure, yeah, no doubt. Let me ask you about another tricky case of engagement that you've talked about with Equatorial guinea and you've written about this where the there was a vote that the Biden admin publicly condemned. A presidential vote. Biden admin said there were, quote, credible allegations of fraud, intimidation and coercion. I think that's all true. And then a few days later, you personally had to call the Ecuador Ghanaian foreign minister to congratulate the president and invite him to the summit at the White House, despite what the US had, you know, kind of publicly affirmed a few days ago. Tell me about that incident.

[B]

Yeah, I've thought a lot about that incident. And actually, Secretary Rubio's decision not to comment on elections was a part of the spur for kind of thinking through all of that. The US government comments on more African elections than any other region in the world. I mean, with maybe one or two exceptions in its four years, we commented on every single election. Some of them were pretty paternalistic, some of them were pretty vanilla, but every single one, that's not true for Europe. US diplomats almost never comment on European elections. Or Latin America, where they're actually the most vociferous of comments like on Maduro's elections in Venezuela or in. In Asia Pacific. But because we had been, we had traveled to Equatorial guinea, both John Finer and then myself and the Assistant Secretary Molly Fee and then they had this election, it was problematic. You know, there was a statement that was pretty punchy and it was just before the Africa Leaders Summit and the Kuwait Ghanaians, I kind of understand it called up and said why are we coming to Washington if this is what you think about our election? And that was not the outcome that we wanted. We have a whole bunch of issues that we wanted to engage with the equado Ghanaians about. And I also don't know what end we were on the record. We thought the election was problematic, but we weren't saying we don't recognize that President Obiang had won his election. And so I called up the foreign minister and said to him, you know, essentially like we look forward to working with President Obiang in his next term and that and that smooth it over. So.

[A]

And he tweeted about it.

[B]

He said, yeah, he tweeted about it.

[A]

And he said, just talked to him and we're good.

[B]

I remember it was like six in the morning and I'm outside of my house on the phone chatting with him about this election. This gets to this question about the balance. We should be able to talk about democracy and human rights. I just think it's one of the many things that we need to think about in our relationship and figure out how we do all of these things in a way that not all of them are canceled out. You know, why can't we walk in, chew gum? I just, that's my thing is we should be able to do that in Africa as cause we do it everywhere else.

[A]

Well, look, let me, let me tie this back to a kind of a broader conversation happening about the legacy of the Biden admin. I think as you see a lot of conversation within the Democratic Party, one of the big themes or regrets that comes up is we tried to walk and chew gum at the same time. It turns out that we couldn't. And you see this in like the everything bagel critique of domestic programs right now. I'll just say straight out. I tend to think I'm more on your side on the foreign policy thing. I think it's just true that you don't get to pick necessarily which priorities you want to focus on in foreign policy to the same extent because there's other Nation state actors that make some of those decisions for you. But I mean, isn't there a grain of truth to this critique here that you have to prioritize? And that means maybe not making a policy of not commenting on elections so that you have firepower for other issues that you care about. How much truth is there to that critique in foreign policy?

[B]

I take it a different way, which is that, and by doing this, it's not really about President Biden and the Biden administration. If we are going to behave a certain way in other parts of the world in our foreign policy, that allows space to be critical, that allows space to promote trade and investment, that allows space to talk about global issues, then why shouldn't we be doing that in Africa? So for me, the challenge is that because Africa is given so little space, that both generalists and specialists want to narrow the way we talk about Africa to very specific issues and let those issues be the ones that wag the dog.

[A]

Those issues typically being democracy promotion.

[B]

Not really. I mean, no, it depends on the country. But if you think about in the post 911 era, a lot of it was about counterterrorism.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And then really starting the Trump administration for the Biden administration, a lot of it got sort of boiled down to China. And then in this administration, I'm not sure, is it migration and critical minerals in Africa?

[A]

Seems like it, yeah.

[B]

So those are such narrow sets of issues. And what we need to be doing is talking about trade offs and calibration. So we should be talking about democracy. When we're talking to governments that have had military transitions, coups, we should be talking about how do we get back to civilian rule. Because Africans, more than any other region, believe in democracy. Right. That's what polling suggests, that they have the highest percentage of belief in democracy, but they also believe that it is not delivering for them. Right. So that it's high demand, but the supply of it has been pretty low. And so what do we do to get back to democratic rule? What do we do to work with African leaders so that democratic rule actually has dividends? But we still need to talk about the extremist threat. We still need to talk about issues like critical minerals. We still need to talk about the shape and the form of the global order that we are moving into. We should be able to do all that. And if you do all those things, hopefully you can do it in a way that not all of them are so dulled. But you can say, as I mentioned with the South African case, hey, we're going to maybe probably violently disagree about this particular issue. But we have this offset here where we talk about things that we work through and that's okay. So maybe part of it is an education for all of us on what is the parameters of a healthy diplomatic relationship. It shouldn't be all, you know, hugs and flowers. It shouldn't be all, you know, brickbats. How do you figure out that space? And I think it's possible, but you know, we have to get off our high horse sometimes and we have to not let ourselves be captured by single issues.

[A]

Let me ask you about the tools that we use to do diplomacy in Africa. I want to talk about envoys. So not ambassadors. Kind of standard way that we interface with the, with another country is via the State Department ambassador. But sometimes a president will appoint a special envoy. I'm going to quote you, you said you worked with three Horn of Africa envoys. So onwards that whole region, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, maybe we can see one more country in that bucket. Formally Sudan. Sudan. Thank you. And you said based on that experience, I think we need to reconsider the entire approach that is the whole approach to envoys. What's wrong with envoys?

[B]

Well, if we take a step back, the reason why we often do envoys in Africa is because we're quite short staffed. Right. Most of our embassies aren't fully staffed up. And with 49 countries, you know, as our responsibility and you know, sometimes multiple crises at the same time, and sometimes those crises sort of spill over geographic or bureaucratic boundaries that an envoy ends up being a fix to a problem at State Department or a problem in the broader national security apparatus.

[A]

So just to put a finer point on that, the, on the envoy is in some sense a solution to an American internal problem.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

First, before it's that it's not necessarily the right tool for that job over there is that we need to fix some bureaucratic tangle over here. And the envoy cuts through that.

[B]

Yeah, the envoy helps with again with staffing issues and with bureaucratic seams and with focus. Now there's another thing that happens often with envoys which is it's a lot of. It's sometimes it's virtue signaling too. Right. You're saying, hey, this issue is important and it's so important that we've named an envoy.

[A]

The president has picked Joe Smith.

[B]

The president has picked Joe Smith. Talked to you guys to deal with this problem. Hence we're on it. And so my view, some of it I had before the administration, some of them has been refined Having the actual experience of working with lots of envoys is that one we should be very clear about what we're trying to solve for. And particularly in places where the issue is bigger than one embassy or maybe is so challenging and difficult that it would subsume all the time of the Assistant secretary and Das's deputy Assistant secretary is that it's really useful to have someone or, you know, it's an issue that is both about Africa and the Middle East. A great example is sometimes negotiations. You know, sometimes we have an envoy to deal with negotiation between several countries and that's going to be 100% of your time. You're not going to have time for anything else but negotiations.

[A]

I was going to mention Steve Witkoff in the Trump Admin, who is like had been a pretty successful envoy in terms of being empowered to go do a bunch of things. And that's a primarily negotiating role.

[B]

Yeah, it's primarily negotiating, but in some respects Witkoff is running into the same problem of just a regular assistant secretary as I think he's got too many of them to do.

[A]

It is a huge brief.

[B]

It's a huge, it's an insane brief. So the problem sometimes with our envoys because we sort of, we don't actually staff them up very well either. So we didn't have the staffing to deal with the problem. We've native an envoy and that envoy has 1, 2, 3 people working for him or her. And so they don't have the power really the heft to deal with it themselves, to process all the paper, to do the thinking. They sometimes sit outside of the bureaucracy so they can't tap into the the rest of the country team or the folks back in Washington. So my view on envoys, I don't think they're a bad thing. I think you really have to understand what they're trying to do. You want to make sure they're not trying to solve everything. Which I think was one of our problems with our horn of envoy, like what they're trying to do. Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, three people. I mean that.

[A]

That's way too much light work.

[B]

Yeah, that's insane. I mean like you need a lot of wit coughs for that, you know.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then making sure that they're actually staffed successfully so they can do the work and then thinking about what's their exit strategy as well.

[A]

You raised in an essay about envoy something you described as fairly obvious but crucial, just that the White House and the State Department should build a team and agree on what the job is and who's going to do it and pick the right person for the. Now that does seem fairly obvious that if you want to solve a problem, a diplomatic problem, the major stakeholders on the American side should tag up and make sure they're running in the right lanes. So why is that so hard? And why did you work with several envoys who were not given a clear lane to run in or given a clear team to work with? Because it does seem fairly obvious. You're right.

[B]

I think the dirty secret is sometimes envoys are appointed because there's a view that like the current team isn't getting the job done. That's not a negative about the current team. It's just beyond them. It's too immense. They've got other things and you need someone who's going to run point on this. And so sometimes there's tension just by the virtue of having an envoy, because it can suggest that you're taking the.

[A]

Envoy shows that you're. You don't trust necessarily the team to.

[B]

Yeah. Or you're just not necessarily don't trust them. But you're taking a portfolio away from the current bureaucracy and that's really sensitive. So one, ideally, you all agree that this would be a force multiplier for everyone and it's not a fix for something that we seem to not be able to solve in our current arrangement. And then finding the individual with the personality that is going to be really effective, not just the resume. And sometimes there's a lot more about like resumes. Oh, this person was a diplomat, he worked at the UN or this person was, you know, has a lot of Middle east experience. I'm a big fan of one of our envoys, Mike Hammer, who just is a really smart people person. And he came to Africa late. He was our ambassador to Congo. And then we asked him to do this and I think he hit the ground running. He was just, he's very good at relationships and very dogged and he ended up being the right person and knew how to work well, by the way, with the bureaucracy, which is also really important.

[A]

Will you say a little bit more about the personal qualities of an excellent envoy? I mean, what personality types listening to this conversation should think they do a decent job?

[B]

Well, it depends again about what the challenge that they're trying to solve for, especially ones that they're doing negotiations. I think that you really want people, persons. I'll give you an example that's from the Obama administration, is that we had two envoys for the Horn of Africa. We Had Tom Perriello, who ended up being again our envoy for Sudan. And I like Tom a lot. But prior to Tom we had Feingold. So Perriello is a lawyer by background. He did serve one term in Congress. Feingold, longtime Africanist, long time in the Senate. And I would watch Feingold engage with African leaders and he built relationships and then kind of took the demarche somewhere in there and other envoys, maybe not necessarily Periello, but I've seen this with, you know, senior diplomats do the demarche and then build a relationship around that. So I, I think person people's politicians more than diplomats are actually better schmoozers. And an extension of that is can you work with a bureaucracy, make all the bureaucracy feel like you're not taking away something for them, not that you're operating outside of them, but you're doing the work, you're keeping them informed, you're being inclusive and it's to everyone's advantage that you succeed.

[A]

Let's say I'm, by some twist of fate, I'm named as an envoy to solve some thorny issue. How do I keep the bureaucracy on side? I mean, practically, let's say I'm somebody who's more of a politician and more of a schmoozer than someone who has deep expertise in the region. What are my first steps?

[B]

I think you spend a lot of time with the staff, getting to know them as people, asking for their expertise, asking for their feedback. Find opportunities to bring them with you to in your conversations with your foreign leaders, you're referencing other senior leaders in the government and how we've all worked together on this approach. You're setting up calls, but not only back briefing your peers back in Washington, but you're even setting up calls so they're involved in the conversation. You're setting up side meetings for strategy, sharing what you're learning and asking for their opinion. I mean it's a lot of Karen feeding to go back to another theme.

[A]

A lot of ego stroking, man.

[B]

It's a lot of ego. I mean government is full of people. That's the reality, right? And so I spent so much time thinking about how do I make people believe, feel, understand that I may not do what they say or what they recommend, but I want to hear their recommendations and I want to hear their input and I want to be cordial about it. And you know, I don't think I got that right a hundred percent of the time. Sometimes I think maybe I should have done less of it, but I do Think that, you know, you want people to feel and believe that this is one team, one mission, an effort, that it's only because all of us together are in it and sharing, you know, their expertise and leveraging their relationships that we can move forward, even if one is the one with the ball.

[A]

Right. Well, what's the line there on bringing them in? Because you talk about going to meetings where there's just like a massive American delegation to engage with one foreign counterpart. So you've got like five or six pretty senior US People engaging. And that seemed clearly suboptimal, like to have all the 6v1 in a meeting with somebody you're negotiating with, say.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this was a meeting that we had in New York with a foreign minister, and just seems like all of us were there and it was kind of like part of it. The value maybe is showing this is important. Maybe the value was that we were all hearing the same things, but it probably wasn't a good use of our time. And I don't know, you know, really, if it was that instrumental in moving the ball forward. You know, one of the ways to do it is when you and the negotiating partners maybe come to Washington, right? You kind of are all briefing out together what is happening or doing calls together. That's one of the ways that you do it. You know, another way you can do it is I'm just spitballing, doing some press statements, right? Like, we've had this meeting, you know, in coordination with such and such person. We've worked this out. I mean, there's probably a bunch of ways that you can do it. So it's not onerous, but it keeps everyone feeling on the same team.

[A]

Sure. Is the National Security Council basically neutered today? It was obviously one of the most important policy organs of the Biden administration. There were lots of stories about, you know, how much it was the nerve center of the White House as opposed to other White Houses, where that's not necessarily been the case. What's your read on it right now?

[B]

Well, I. I'm on the outside, so I'm only hearing secondhand accounts.

[A]

But you were one of the few people on the inside of very important executive branch organ.

[B]

One of the things that I'm most concerned about as someone who follows Africa is that for the first time, the Africa Directorate at the National Security Council has been folded into the Middle east directorate. So there are two people who do Africa, sub Saharan Africa, and they're part of the larger Middle east team. And that really concerns me because it's challenging to work 49 accounts now, some you don't work. You work more than others. But to have responsibility for a very large continent and your boss in what, I don't know, a team of five or a team of six, Team of seven. I don't know what the current size of that directorate is also responsible for the Middle East. That's a challenge. And I don't know the current senior director. I wish him the best. I do think that it's hard if you have a couple of slots for a phone call with the President or a meeting with the President and now you have to pick between the Middle east countries and the African countries. That's hard if you're not someone who's invested in Africa and you've only got certain amount of meetings you can host in a day, and I don't know even how many they're hosting. And my fear is that it relegates Africa even further down the pecking order.

[A]

Can I throw a steel man at you of these ships and I see and get your thoughts? And I'm not sure if I buy this myself, but that if I was trying to convince myself this is the right way of organizing all the relevant functions, I would say something about how the State Department has often in recent presidential administrations been sidelined by the National Security Council and that you've got this whole built out system. I think people have said this on statecraft in the past. We've had past guests say it's bad that you have this whole apparatus called the State Department that in practice doesn't make a lot of major diplomatic calls. And instead is this, no matter how big the National Security Council is, it's tiny compared to State. The NSC making these important calls and being the first people to talk to the President about whether it's the Middle east or Africa or what have you. And the argument would be, you know, Secretary Rubio is a much more forceful and clearly quite a trusted member of this administration. He's Secretary of State. Maybe that's good for Africa. What would you make of that rhetorical approach?

[B]

You know, my experience is not that the NSC was the most powerful player on Africa in the Biden administration. And I've seen lots of different administrations on Africa and some where that's clearly the case that the NSC is the most powerful.

[A]

Really? Which one would that be?

[B]

Well, I do think that in different moments, the NSC was more powerful under President Obama.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But I'll tell you the two most important setups in the Africa space had a lot to do with the people who were sitting in those two jobs, the Assistant Secretary and the senior director. And that was under President George W. Bush, and that was under President Clinton, where you had the senior director and the Assistant Secretary in lockstep about what they were doing. And even in the Bush administration, almost a division of labor. Hey, I'm going to take the lead on some of these countries and these issues and you'll take the lead on some of others. And why that's important for Africa is that it allows you to crowd in, right? It allows you to put pressure on both systems so that you're moving up to the Secretary of State, you're moving up to the national Security Advisor. They're hearing the same things, they're hearing the same policy recommendations. And so when they get together, they're much more comfortable making a big decision. Now, I had a good relationship with my counterpart, so I don't want to suggest that wasn't the case. But I do think that under Bush and Clinton, the alignment between the two were closer than I have ever experienced or read about or seen. And it allowed for a very powerful catalytic effect. This is my view. Santi, the NSC is kind of like the emperor with no clothes, right? It's only as powerful as people want to believe in it. If they don't think that the senior director is speaking for the President, all they're doing is calling meetings. You always knew if you were doing well, you know, depending on who came to your meetings. When I was a director under President Obama, I was constantly like looking, wait, are you pushing it down from the Deputy Assistant Secretary to the office director to the Deputy Director to the desk officer? Well, if you keep pushing it down, you don't think this meeting is very consequential. And so I was very like focused on like, are we going to make decisions that people find are meaningful and do they find this process productive and constructive? Because what the NSC is important is giving a space for all the department and agencies to come together because all of them have their own equities, they all have different tools and different goals and you need someone to adjudicate that. And yes, the NSC can get too over dominant and kind of push people around. But the best NSCs are ones where all the agencies believe that they are going to get equal hearing, that we're going to make a decision that is going to move us all forward and not that we're just getting told what to do and then we're going to do it kind of poorly or at least sort of, you know, weapon of the Week, kind of resist it.

[A]

That's a good reference. Wow. James C. Scott keeps coming up on Statecraft. That's crazy. We're going to have to do a Scott episode at some point. Scott special.

[B]

There you go.

[A]

Okay, but so given that idea of the NSC as this emperor with no clothes or, you know, can be exposed as such. Yeah. What is concretely the risk of cutting the NSC down to size and just saying NSC has no clothes. We're gonna. The president trusts other organs, other people, other voices in his admin and he's gonna slash the NSC headcount. And no more people on Africa except for the folks who've been folded into this other desk. Whatever. What's the concrete problem that could arise from that?

[B]

Well, the concrete problem is that first of all, the only space then for you to adjudicate or talk about Africa now is at the cabinet level. Otherwise it's all within Rubio's purview. Right. And DOD has an important role and has really important assets and equities. Same for Treasury. When it comes to the IMF or the World bank or Commerce, where is the place in which they go to? And they are going to disagree with State. They just are. That's okay. That's not a bad thing. But that's part of the process. And if the only time when the heads of agencies and departments are really meeting are at the cabinet level or even at a principal's level, you don't have enough of the kind of rumination, the back and forth, the kicking of the tires, the hardening of positions that you need for a good decision. I'll give you one example. Sometimes State Department would push back. Why are we having this meeting? We've already made a decision, we're going forward, et cetera. And sometimes I would say, like, it's important that the rest of the US government understands what you're trying to do. That's if I was being nice. Other times I would think to myself, by just coming to our meeting and writing talking points for yourself and getting your staff and coordinating your vision, your plan is going to be sharper, more refined, more articulate. So it's not just performance art so that everyone is included. It's also about getting the best version of an idea on a table. And because of this action forcing event and then kicking it around in that meeting and then coming back to it and moving it up further and further. So I do think that the NSC Provides a space at its best for debate and refinement and negotiation and a hearing of all the different things that have to come into place for us to have a good policy. I mean, this is why we created in 47. If you let State do its thing and DOD do its thing, they often go in different directions, particularly in Africa, counterterrorism, security partnerships over maybe some diplomatic issues where you need a vote somewhere. You've got to coordinate somehow and you can't be doing it at a three hour cabinet level meeting. On camera.

[A]

Fair enough. When you were at the National Security Council, you'd get a lot of intelligence analysis. I think I have you on record as saying you didn't always find the analysis on the big crisis of the week helpful. I want to hear why not.

[B]

When you're an intelligence analyst, you're often consuming and you're absorbing different streams of reporting from the embassy, right, from all the different secret clandestine avenues that one has. But you're also not exposed to a lot of the email traffic that is happening that is not being ingested to you. You're maybe not aware of conversations that people are having, but they just haven't written up and put into the system in a formal way. And the crisis du jour moves really fast.

[A]

And you're telling me that the spooks are not listening in on NSC calls, they're not digesting.

[B]

I don't think people have broken that law yet, so I think we're okay. So I do think that they're at a disadvantage by giving the oftentimes in the tactical, you know, here's what's happening and I understand the impetus and the reasons why you want to do that, but I found that the IC on the crisis Azure is much better with stand back pieces that we can debate on.

[A]

Define that.

[B]

Well, like it's been six months into the conflict, we're at a stalemate. These are the key factors that are shaping the stalemate. And until one of these move, we're unlikely to be ripe for negotiations or we are actually probably on the precipice of more conflict or the opportunity for an adversary to come in and exploit this dynamic. So those step back pieces are pretty good at different points, at least you debate those. But sometimes the more tactical pieces in the middle and the throws of a conflict, one or two pieces may be, you know, there may be something that they have that really kind of sheds light on something, but we're just moving pretty fast. What I wrote about, and I appreciate it, is tell me what's happening in what, some of the smaller countries that I'm just not spending a lot of time in. Maybe I should be worried about a development there. Maybe there's an opportunity that we can seize because especially when there's a crisis that's taking all my energy, that's less for other developments elsewhere. So I understand why the IC I spent 16 years in the intelligence community wants to be in the room and have something to say in the biggest conflicts and the biggest crises. I totally get that. But that is sometimes very costly to having the insights in other parts to help us have strategic depth, to help us be aware of discontinuities, to help us with strategic surprise.

[A]

This is like a really high level question, but how much of your work at the National Security Council was reactive and how much was proactive? I mean, just help me think through how much are you just responding to events and how much was there any room to say, to wake up in the morning and say this is the priority of the President, like I wonder how I can advance it today?

[B]

Yeah, I mean it was probably 70 to 80 reactive. The initiatives, to go back to initiatives actually helped a little bit focus on other things because we made a commitment to do the initiative and that gave me some time. I probably too late thought about this, but in my last couple of months, my last month or so, I always had this board in my office of the big things that I wanted to accomplish and I would look at it and I would raise them with my team. But towards the end, every day I put it in the board in the main room and every day we go through them or you know, every two days. And that actually was much more powerful to sort of have that checklist in our face all the time. We actually moved a lot. My team was working not just for me and those are things that I want to do because we all want to do them, but it really helped focus us to kind of have that checklist and to keep nailing it as opposed to being more just pulled into the quagmire or whatever the problem of the day was. Because you know, at the NSC you're working till 9 or 10 every day and then you get home and you're still dealing with emails. I mean it's non stop. You don't have enough time to do everything that you want. So anyway that's, I think it's a big percentage. But you know, my last month or so I, I thought about there was probably a better way to keep everyone focused on some of these other tasks and then we could have a conversation about did we get the balance right? But that was. I found that to be too little, too late. But that was a useful tool.

[A]

One thing I've been struck by in the last few months of conversations is how many people come out of the administration and then say something to the effect of if you wanted to do any planning of any sort, any forward looking, proactive planning, you had to do it before you went into the executive branch, because by the time you're in, it's too late. And Dean Ball, who was at the Office of Science and Tech Policy, said something to that effect. I'm hearing some, some of that from you here. It's quite a striking thing to relay, but I think I get what you're saying.

[B]

Yeah, I think I agree with it in some part. But also before you get into the administration, you really don't understand the administration's DNA. And unfortunately it takes a little time to figure out who are your advocates, what is the leverage that you have, what is the cadence of the administration. So you kind of need to sit a little bit in the space. I was very fortunate, Santi, because I was brought in exclusively to write the Africa strategy and then I became senior director. So I was kind of like the guy at the poker table that didn't play any hands and I just looked at people's towels.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So by the time it was my job, I had already seen what kind of emails really are effective with Jake Sullivan. And I had already seen, you know, what are some of the trade offs I need to make with State to have a positive relationship. And I'm really thankful for that. My predecessor had to get working on day one and figure all that out on the job. And I mean, I was working, but I had a little more space to kind of observe. And I think that really helped me for a huge portion of the job. I think more critical is being able to stop and not just in like an off site way and say, are we doing the things that we want to do and if we're not doing them, how do we change our routine so that they're not aspirational, but they're part of the agenda?

[A]

You mentioned the US Strategy doc that you were brought in to write and I'm realizing we're like an hour and a half into the conversation and that's why I wanted to have you on in the first place. And I haven't brought it up at all yet, so let's talk about that. So you're the primary author not the sole author, as I understand. Like, nothing in the White House has one author. Everything gets touched by a million people. But you're the primary author of President Biden's 2022 US strategy towards sub Saharan Africa. And coming out of the admin, you said, I really dislike the way we write and present strategies. So what was so wrong about the process for writing and presenting that strategy?

[B]

I was so honored to be asked to write the Africa strategy. It's a little bit unique to be brought in from the outside to write the Africa strategy as opposed to the team doing in that. But it's a huge credit to my predecessor and to the administration. That's what they decided to do. And the irony was I had written strategies in the Obama administration. I had written classified ones and unclassified ones, and I wasn't particularly a big fan of them. But this was an opportunity. It was a credible responsibility. And I had done a lot of thinking about what our approach should be. In fact, I had written a document at CSIS in August of 2020 called a new Strategic Framework for the African Century, which had a lot of my ideas in there. So I assumed there was already somewhat of a cosine on what I wanted to do. I think the challenge with strategies is, first of all, we call them strategies. Most of them aren't even strategies, right? They're just a series of values and objectives, framing language. But they're never about. If we do X concurrently with Y and then follow that up with Z, we can get to our goal. I mean, our goal is advancing democracy. Our goal is increasing trade and investment. Like, those are pretty abstract concepts, and some of them are not even measurable.

[A]

I think it's a good exercise to glance through, you know, a typical, you know, White House strategy document and then to just think about or play a strategy game, any game that, you know is like, formally about strategy. And just think about, like, what's the difference between this document, which. Which is a bunch of words, and then like, you engage in some toy actual strategy exercise? Yeah, very different.

[B]

You can't really do it. When I came in, I remember having this conversation, said, well, are we writing a strategy or is the task to write a public diplomacy tool? Is the task to give directive to the interagency that may have budgetary implications? Is the idea is that this will be a platform to launch new initiatives? You know, what is the goal? And unfortunately, the answer was kind of all of the above. And I think all of the above is probably not the right answer. So I am really proud of probably the first two or three pages of that strategy. It is a vision, which I've said throughout our interview about where I think the importance of Africa is and how we have to engage with our partners, big and small and treating them as real partners. I'm also, because I'm an amateur historian, really like the text box on sort of looking back at 30 years of Africa policy. I believed really strongly that, and I continue to believe that we had a policy for the last 30 years that I think had a lot of benefit for Africans and Americans. But the world has changed and Africa has changed and we needed to update our approach and think differently. And so I'm proud that we changed the rhetoric. I'm proud that we have introduced ideas that even Agenda 2025 mirrored in the Heritage document. But the back half I could have done without. The back half was four objectives. And I really struggled with like, are they even new? It's kind of the same ones I put in one about climate and the post pandemic world and, you know, different departments and agencies put their little pet rocks in there. And that was sort of like the trade off between getting a strategy document that said something that I was really proud of and believed that we needed to say and should be ignore starfare policy. And having said that, the agencies could say no. Look, on page 13, it says that we are going to do y. If I did it over again, Santi, I would just say we're going to do a vision statement because I do like the idea of engaging publicly about our thoughts. I think a speech is insufficient. I think being quiet on it, which some administrations do, isn't that useful either. But I wouldn't throw a whole bunch of objectives into it. And I wouldn't have a Christmas tree. I would be very clear about intellectually, how do we think about this moment in Africa and the way in which we want to engage with our African partners and probably leave it at that.

[A]

What's an example of a pet rock that was left in the strategy document?

[B]

I think there was like something in the DoD one about how we're going to invest in African defense industries. Maybe not a bad idea. I don't think we ever did any of that. The one that I always think about actually is AN Obama administration 1. Where is that? Like, because Secretary Clinton was really interested in clean stoves. You know, you would find the cleave stove people adding that to every document they had. So ours wasn't that bad and I kicked out a bunch of them. But that's like a totemic like version of it.

[A]

Sixteen pages is long, but it's not so long that clean stoves folks can get their point.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know where the clean stoves folks were in the Bay administration, but you know, I did work really hard. Our assistant secretary had a great idea. She sent a cable to all of our embassies to provide their input before I even put pen to paper. Talk to their African government partners, maybe talk to partners in Europe or in the Indo Pacific about what the strategy should be. I talked to a whole bunch of different think tanks and shared drafts at different versions. I mean, I really tried to consult and get the best ideas, both because that would make the document stronger, but also I wanted people on the other side to validate it, to say, this is a good strategy, this is a thoughtful strategy. This is the strategy, the right direction. Because you want to, you want to have some validators too.

[A]

John, I want to be conscious of time and you let me run way over our calendar block. So I've got just a couple more questions on intelligence before we close. You were an intelligence analyst, do you say 13 or 16?

[B]

16 years.

[A]

16 years. How has the profession changed most since you started your career? If you had to boil it down, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of things, but what's most different, I.

[B]

Think there is more, more competition for insights than there has ever been before. So when I first started as an analyst that what the agency said, particularly on Africa, was pretty singular. You just couldn't have that kind of insight. I'm talking about finished analysis.

[A]

Nobody else was producing that kind of.

[B]

Work, work product, no one was producing that work in a significant amount that you could shop around. And I think in my lifetime, whether it's the proliferation of geopolitical risk firms or you know, the ability for people to self publish on the Internet or just social media in general, or the fact that at the NSC I received raw intelligence reports. In addition, I received all of the back and forth with the embassies that the bar in my mind became a lot higher for the analysis to break through and to say something different and to say something new. And I don't think that they've grappled with that enough. They still believe that they have. In some cases they do, but in some cases they don't. It's not the only piece of information that can be exquisite. Exquisite has a meaning probably different than I'm suggesting here. Exquisite often sort of means satellite secret stuff. But I mean Just like an insight that is sophisticated and refined, that it will deliver decision advantage.

[A]

And you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you're saying that some chunk of what the Agency provides is on par with the stuff that you could get from, like, a geopolitical risk firm in the private sector.

[B]

Yeah, sometimes, you know, I would. I took the bus off into the agency and I would be on my phone scrolling through Twitter when Twitter was good, and I was like, at the 80% solution most of the time.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When I was at a think tank and I wrote my own papers, I think I was highly competitive with anything the. The intelligence community said. And I don't think that's a bad thing, per se. But it does put extra emphasis on not just regurgitating reports, and it puts an extra emphasis on diving deep into history, to thinking about context, to drawing on maybe even political science and different sort of modeling to really challenge a policymaker. Sometimes as a policymaker, I wanted you to just tell me, hey, that this thing is about to happen. But the best pieces were the pieces that challenged me, challenged me to think differently about the way I was going at a problem and to really marshal evidence. And I think that you realize that you need to do that when you kind of see that you don't have a monopoly on insights anymore, for sure.

[A]

I don't know if this is a weird question to end on, because it's really specific, but it's just something I'm curious about. So on this podcast, I've heard a lot about US versus China on the continent of Africa and different diplomatic approaches, things that they've done, well, dramatically that we haven't done. You talk about the African leaders can do every three years, so they lap us on. I haven't heard much from folks on this show about Chinese intelligence efforts or where we stand relative to them in intelligence gathering or analysis. And obviously, we're not direct consumers of Chinese intelligence. But I'm curious, like, do we have any frame of reference for them versus us from an intelligence perspective? In Africa, you've been in the field for a while. So, like, what. What's your. Even if you don't have, like, a formal sense of, like, your back of.

[B]

The napkin, I think it's a great question. I don't think I'm going to answer it for you.

[A]

Okay. Ah, yeah, I should have known. We can leave it there. Judd Devermont, thank you very much for joining.

[B]

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

[A]

Sam.