When the United States released its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), it was unveiled in Washington as a sober recalibration of American power and priorities. But from an African standpoint, it reads less like a strategy for global security and more like a manifesto of imperial anxiety, a document driven by defensive fears of waning influence, obsessed with economic rivalry and political dominance, and disturbingly dismissive of genuine peaceful development partnerships that defy US control.
The NSS purports to prioritise “national interest” and “sovereignty”, yet it repeatedly frames the world through a lens of American primacy, describing not just potential rivals, but entire global trends and nations as threats.
Even worse, it reshapes U.S. engagement in ways that undermine African agency, legitimise endless tensions, and treat cooperative development with countries like China as inherently antagonistic.
Unlike previous NSS drafts that stressed great power competition with China, the 2025 strategy minimises its own framing of formal geopolitical rivalry but retains deep concern regarding China’s global economic engagement, aiming to “rebalance” US–China economic relations while maintaining deterrence in crucial regions such as the Indo-Pacific.
Instead of seeing China’s footprint in Africa as one of mutual economic development, such as infrastructure, trade links, industrial partnerships, and non-conditional partnerships, Washington consistently frames Chinese engagements in strategic regions as maneuvers to be countered or contained.
This anxiety betrays a fundamental contradiction: the NSS does not convincingly present China as an immediate military threat, yet it obsessively seeks ways to curb its economic and technological influence.
Beijing’s approach in Africa is widely understood across the continent as pragmatic and mutually beneficial, helping to build bridges, railways, ports, and energy projects without the political conditionalities often attached to Western assistance.
Yet Washington paints this as a zero-sum strategic competition, a threat not just to U.S. interests, but to the American narrative of global leadership.
In doing so, the NSS dismisses African sovereign choices and rebrands peaceful South-South cooperation as suspicious or destabilising, reinforcing imperial norms that treat African agency as negotiable only within the orbit of U.S. preferences.
One of the most striking shifts in the new NSS is its reinvigoration of a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, essentially projecting a neo-colonial presence in the Western Hemisphere under the guise of stopping migration, drugs, and so-called “foreign incursion.
This echoes historical imperial strategies that justified intervention by portraying neighbouring regions as perpetual sources of risk. Refugees, migrants, and even entire societies are cast as strategic liabilities instead of human beings fleeing crises.
While Washington claims to reduce “endless wars, its strategy implicitly endorses the use of US military power, whether through direct action or expanded military cooperation to neutralise perceived threats.
The African experience should remind the world that such rhetoric historically precedes deeper military entanglements, covert operations, and prolonged local conflicts. US intelligence and military operations across Africa from Somalia to the Sahel have justified foreign bases, security partnerships, and ongoing interventions under the broad rubric of counterterrorism and stability, but often resulted in extended conflict, dependence, and local resentment.
Look at the U.S. footprint in Africa: a sprawling network of military bases, special operations units, CIA involvement, and counterterrorism campaigns.
These are often justified without clear outcomes for local peace. Instead of robust peacebuilding led by Africans, the narrative becomes one of external “security partners” calling the shots.
Meanwhile, the NSS’ emphasis on deterrence and military readiness suggests a willingness to deploy force even outside traditional warzones. As analysts have warned, the 2025 strategy might spur a new type of ‘forever war’ by openly advocating military action against organised crime or “narco-terrorists” without clear legal or moral limits, potentially far beyond the Western Hemisphere.
From Africa’s viewpoint, this echoes the continent’s legacy of foreign interventions that come with vast military, intelligence, and resource interests disguised as security imperatives.
Such policies not only perpetuate cycles of violence but send an implicit message: that African nations must align with US security priorities or risk being marginalised.
While some commentators in Washington argue the 2025 NSS moves away from official “great power competition” rhetoric, it nonetheless embeds economic nationalism and geopolitical competition deeply within its fabric.
It criticises global partners, devalues multilateral institutions, and repackages old doctrines now focused on hemispheric dominance, transactional alliances, and economic retrenchment.
This posture threatens to drag Africa into a great-power rivalry it neither chose nor benefits from. Rather than seeing global multipolarity with Africa playing an increasingly assertive role as a stabilising evolution, the NSS interprets it as a loss of control, an erosion of a world where the United States decides norms, outcomes, and alignments.
Africa is not a chessboard for external powers. Its states have agency, choices, and diverse partnerships that reflect their own priorities for development, peace, and sovereignty.
Chinese engagement represents an alternate model of relations that many African leaders see as less coercive than Western conditionalities. To treat this as a geopolitical threat is to deny African sovereignty.
Rather than reducing global engagement to antagonistic blocs or strategic rivalry, a truly just approach would recognise African aspirations: industrialisation, infrastructure, economic integration, educational upliftment, and genuine peacebuilding. These goals transcend the narrow lens of U.S. strategic anxiety.
The 2025 US National Security Strategy reveals that despite rhetorical shifts and supposed retrenchments, the United States remains entrenched in an imperial mindset—one that equates global security with American dominance, and frames any challenge to its primacy as a threat to the international order.
Its selective championing of "sovereignty" for itself while dismissing African nations’ right to independent choices, its reinvigoration of neo-colonial hemispheric doctrines, and its readiness to weaponise military power and economic coercion all underscore a stubborn refusal to adapt to a multipolar world.
For Washington, the strategy is not about fostering global stability, but about clinging to a unipolar order that no longer reflects the realities of our time.
For Africa, the stakes could not be higher. The continent’s destiny cannot be held hostage to US strategic anxiety, nor can its development be reduced to a pawn in great-power rivalry.
Africa’s path forward lies in reclaiming full ownership of its future—upholding the sovereign right to forge partnerships based on mutual respect, equality, and shared benefit, free from external dictates or conditionalities.
This means standing firm against attempts to divide the continent into competing blocs, and doubling down on cooperation with nations like China that have consistently supported Africa’s development aspirations without strings attached.
The true measure of global leadership today is not the ability to dominate or contain, but the wisdom to collaborate and empower. The world does not need another strategy rooted in fear and rivalry; it needs a vision that recognizes Africa’s agency, honors its sovereignty, and invests in its potential. The 2025 US National Security Strategy fails this test spectacularly—it clings to a bygone era of imperial dominance, even as the tide of history turns toward multipolarity and shared prosperity.
For Africa, the choice is clear: to stand united in defense of its sovereignty, to reject the false dichotomies of imperial anxiety, and to build a future where its people’s aspirations for development, peace, and dignity take center stage. In doing so, Africa will not only secure its own prosperity but also reshape the global order into one that is more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable for all.
*The author, Mafa Kwanisai Mafa, is a Pan-Africanist political commentator based in Gweru, Zimbabwe.