Eusebius McKaiser and Sasha Polakaw-Suranksky try to make sense of Barack Obama’s Africa policy:

Obama’s Africa policy is essentially premised on the promotion of — insistence on, even — good governance. This policy is touted not just as an intrinsic good for Africa but also, as Hillary Clinton said at the Eighth African Growth and Opportunity Act conference in Kenya recently, “good [for] business”.

It is also deeply personal. In Accra Obama gave a pointed reminder of how his father’s career was blunted by cronyism and the muffling of dissent in Kenya. His desire for Africans to take their rightful, prominent place in the world is genuine, but by telling Africans to get their own house in order he risks sounding like yet another paternalistic Uncle Sam. Convincing black heads of state to get a handle on corruption, it turns out, is much harder than telling absent black fathers that “responsibility does not end at conception”.

This is true; and it seems to have come as a rude shock to some African governments that expected Obama to be more sympathetic. But is this consistent with Obama’s overall foreign policy? Obama is generally (and accurately, in my view) seen as a representing a return to realism in US foreign policy. And yet, when it comes to Africa policy, Obama comes off as strangely idealistic, insisting on good governance and democracy in ways that he would not if, for example, he was talking about the Middle-East.

But I’m willing to be charitable here, for several reasons. First, there’s considerable overlap between the goals of a “realist” and an “idealist” foreign policy: both them want states that are stable and viable trade partners. (Although a realist won’t care whether this is achieved by means of democracy or a benign dictatorship.) Policies such as foreign aid make sense within a realist framework, if you see them as a (benign) attempt to build and maintain a sphere of influence. Finally, to the extent that Obama is guilty is inconsistency, I think this can be at least partially explained by realist motives such as an acknowledgement of the limits of American power and a realisation that pursuing the national interest in different regions requires different means.

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s Africa trip, the most interesting thing we can say about the way the US deals with Africa is that not much has changed, and not much is going to change. We shouldn’t expect any sort of radical overhaul of US Africa policy. However, this is by no means a bad thing, since Bush’s Africa policy was one of the genuine success stories of his presidency, and we want programmes like PEPFARS, AGOA and the Millennium Challenge Account to remain in place. If Obama keeps the basic framework of Bush’s policies in place, and makes some modest improvements of his own, his presidency will also be good for Africa.