US President Donald Trump held an informal summit with five African heads of state. Ahead is a major summit with African leaders scheduled for September.
Against the backdrop of regional wars and maritime conflicts fragmenting our world, this July 9, 2025, oval meeting exposes the West’s ruthless reconquest of the Gulf of Guinea, in defiance of African sovereignty. This summit takes place in an era of heightened tensions – proxy war in Ukraine, conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, instabilities in Asia and Latin America – and maritime rivalries in the South and East China Seas, as well as in the Indo-Pacific. Faced with the rise of the Sino-Russian axis, the United States aspires to consolidate its influence over the Gulf of Guinea, a strategic pivot for trade routes and energy resources. This article clearly demonstrates that this summit reflects the West’s instrumentalization of Africa and urges the Global South to reclaim its geopolitical sovereignty.
Washington dictates, Africa executes: this is the content of the humiliation of the US-Africa mini-summit.
Orchestrated by Donald Trump and disguised as a “strategic dialogue”, this gathering turned out to be an imperial performance where the United States rekindled its desire for domination under the guise of economic partnership. In this diplomatic spectacle, the invited African leaders – Senegal, Mauritania, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, and Liberia – engaged in a collective political capitulation, delivering speeches that demeaned their peoples and Africa as a whole, and endorsing unbalanced agreements on investment, energy, and migration. Trump, seen by some analysts as the imperial embodiment of an unashamed America, plans to exploit the Gulf of Guinea as a strategic lever to counter the growing influence of China, Russia, and Turkey, at the heart of his policy of containment. Rather than defending the sovereign interests of their nations, these leaders have sealed an alliance that instrumentalizes African resources and militarizes maritime routes, exclusively for the benefit of Washington.
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This summit, to which I dedicate a new concept, “ovalerie”, exposes the moral decline of a fraction of African elites who sacrifice the continent’s geostrategic future for promises of assistance and diplomatic prestige. Like European Union officials, often physically absent but omnipresent in influence strategies, these elites are part of a logic of dependency, seduced by a Western chimera. The Gulf of Guinea, a key maritime hub, is becoming the arena of a global restructuring that some Africans passively accept, accentuating systemic imbalances. This recurring servility is hindering the emergence of a South-South axis based on mutual cooperation, self-determination, and the development of endogenous resources. It is time for the Global South to stop playing the role of silent executor in a script written in Washington or Brussels – and to take charge of its geopolitical destiny.
From the above, we can deduce that these five African leaders have relegated the Pan-African spirit, so precious to the African people, to the background and bowed to the American emperor, Donald Trump. However, it is clear that the American ambition to subjugate the Gulf of Guinea has as much chance of materializing as a cow attempting a moon jump. It remains to be seen whether these vassals of Washington will remain at the feet of the master, affectionately wagging the tail for too long.
For the Global South to become a protagonist and no longer a mere spectator of world history, it must break the invisible chains of forced alliances and regain its strategic sovereignty, as the multipolarism of the BRICS Alliance demands.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in Geopolitics of Governance and Regional Integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
