By
Dr. Cherkaoui Roudani
Africa-Press – Lesotho. The release of the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy marks not simply an update in policy but a fundamental shift in America’s doctrine of power for the twenty-first century. Washington now recognizes that security can no longer be anchored solely in military predominance. It is increasingly defined by the capacity to organize and govern strategic flows: logistics corridors, maritime chokepoints, critical minerals, digital infrastructures, and the industrial ecosystems that sustain technological sovereignty. Power has acquired a new grammar: one that privileges the mastery of circulation over the control of territory.
This reorientation reflects a modern reading of Hamiltonian industrialism, which locates national strength in production, infrastructure, and technological depth, as well as a renewed Monroe logic that emphasizes the stabilization of one’s strategic environment against external disruption. In this emerging worldview, the international order is shaped less by spatial expansion than by the sovereignty of value chains and the connective architectures that underpin them. Seen through this doctrinal prism, Africa no longer occupies the margins of global strategy. It emerges instead as a central node in the world’s geostrategic and economic reconfiguration, a decisive arena where the balance of power and the very architecture of future interdependence will be defined. Thus, the 2025 NSS moves decisively away from earlier iterations by placing geoeconomic competition at the center of the American strategic horizon and no longer treating it as secondary to military rivalry. Washington now recognizes that the capacity to shape value chains, technological standards, and infrastructural corridors carries greater long-term consequence than the traditional balance of forces. Africa’s rising centrality in this shift is anchored in structural realities that no actor can ignore. Considered accordingly, the continent has become indispensable to the global economy of critical minerals. The Democratic Republic of Congo contributes nearly seventy percent of the world’s cobalt production, Guinea holds the largest known bauxite reserves, and South Africa, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Burundi concentrate rare-earth deposits that continue to be refined primarily by China. Mozambique and Tanzania provide significant graphite resources, while Africa’s manganese endowment represents more than forty percent of global reserves.
Understood with this doctrinal frame, Morocco occupies a distinctive and increasingly strategic position within this landscape. Beyond holding over seventy percent of global phosphate reserves, its sedimentary basins contain measurable concentrations of rare-earth elements, particularly cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, and yttrium, embedded within phosphorite matrices. Recent geological surveys estimate that Moroccan phosphates contain 400 to 700 ppm of REEs, placing them among the most promising non-Chinese sedimentary sources. Crucially, advances in hydrometallurgical extraction, including acid leaching, solvent extraction, ion-exchange resins, and membrane separation technologies, now make it technically feasible to recover REEs from phosphate rock at an industrial scale. The phosphoric acid route used in fertilizer production already mobilizes rare-earth ions, meaning that integrating REE separation into existing OCP processing chains would significantly reduce marginal extraction costs. Pilot studies have demonstrated that REE recovery from phosphogypsum, a by-product of phosphoric acid production, could unlock millions of tons of secondary rare-earth resources, transforming Morocco into one of the world’s leading potential suppliers of high-demand elements such as neodymium and praseodymium, essential for permanent magnets, EV motors, and advanced defense systems.
These mineral systems sustain the foundations of contemporary technological power, including artificial intelligence hardware, defense and aerospace industries, semiconductor manufacturing, renewable-energy systems, and the battery value chain. Africa, therefore, no longer stands as an auxiliary supplier; it has become a systemic enabler of the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the moment when the United States seeks to reduce its exposure to Chinese-dominated processing ecosystems.
This material centrality is reinforced by the rise of corridor geopolitics, as the continent experiences an unprecedented reconfiguration of its connectivity architecture. Deep-water ports stretching from Tanger Med to Lekki and Nacala, regional transport axes linking Sahelian interiors to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, digital infrastructures such as the 2Africa and PEACE submarine cables, and emerging hydrogen and renewable-energy platforms in Morocco, Namibia, and Mauritania are progressively weaving Africa into a dense web of strategic arteries.
Thus, the continent is witnessing the emergence of an integrated architecture of power, a system of interconnected nodes whose influence will be determined by those able to finance, secure, and govern the strategic flows that traverse it. This evolving configuration is explicitly recognized in the 2025 NSS, which elevates supply chain resilience and the safeguarding of critical routes to the highest tier of U.S. national security priorities.
Recognizing this new reality, however, also places responsibilities on Washington. The United States cannot call for a more resilient and diversified global order without adapting its own instruments of engagement. If it genuinely seeks to anchor a strategic partnership with Africa, it must confront its structural ambivalences and assume commitments that match the scale and tempo of Africa’s transformation. This requires moving beyond declaratory support and deploying concrete mechanisms capable of producing material change on the ground.
From this standpoint, a credible Africa-U.S. alignment demands several reforms and commitments. First, American development finance institutions must be recalibrated. Agencies such as the DFC and EXIM Bank need to expand their risk appetite, accelerate disbursement timelines, and establish dedicated financing windows for African corridors in energy, logistics, and digital infrastructure. Current cycles remain too slow and bureaucratic to accompany the continent’s infrastructural acceleration.
Second, Washington must provide sovereign guarantees for corridor financing, enabling African governments to secure capital at sustainable rates. Absent robust de-risking mechanisms, large-scale projects, from rail corridors to port expansions, will continue to lean heavily on non-Western financing, reinforcing the very dependencies the United States claims to counter. Third, cooperation must evolve toward co-sovereignty agreements in strategic fields. Joint mechanisms for mineral certification, corridor protection, and industrial standards can prevent Africa’s absorption into opposing value-chain blocs while giving the U.S. a stable and predictable partner for securing critical supply lines. Fourth, the United States must move from rhetoric to practice on technological partnerships by sharing mineral-processing technologies, battery-precursor know-how, and expertise in digital infrastructure. Africa cannot become a stabilizing pillar of the global economy if confined to raw-material extraction. Technology withholding directly contradicts the NSS 2025’s commitment to resilient and diversified supply chains.
Fifth, maritime domain awareness and maritime security cooperation must be significantly strengthened. Securing the Atlantic façade, the Gulf of Guinea, and the Western Indian Ocean from hybrid actors, illicit flows, and chokepoint vulnerabilities requires joint surveillance platforms, real-time information sharing, and naval cooperation focused on corridor protection rather than militarized projection.
Finally, Washington must recalibrate its diplomatic posture to prioritize Africa’s long-term stability rather than inadvertently transferring its global rivalries onto a continent that remains structurally fragile and politically volatile. The United States cannot allow Africa to become an extension of its strategic competition with China or Russia; doing so would aggravate existing fractures and undermine the very resilience the NSS 2025 seeks to promote. What the continent needs is not the projection of external contestation, but an American engagement capable of addressing Africa’s geopolitical vulnerabilities at their roots. The U.S. has the tools, resources, and institutional capabilities to help stabilize regional fault lines, support governance architectures, and strengthen mechanisms of collective security.
Taken together, these commitments underscore a simple truth: the credibility of any renewed Africa-U.S. partnership rests on Washington’s ability to treat Africa not as a buffer zone in a fractured world, but as a co-architect of the emerging order. The StraitBelt moment signals that Africa is not seeking protection; it is seeking parity. The United States must therefore respond by recognizing the continent as a sovereign partner whose decisions will shape the future geography of global power.
This recalibration is all the more necessary as Africa undergoes its own doctrinal redefinition of sovereignty. A growing number of governments now reject binary alignments and cultivate diversified partnerships across the Gulf, India, Türkiye, the European Union, and the United States. Sovereignty is no longer understood as withdrawal or insulation. It is increasingly measured by the functional ability to process resources, retain value, govern digital infrastructures, and operate strategic corridors. Through this evolution, Africa transitions from an arena exposed to external competition to an active contributor to the emerging governance of global supply chains. It is within this transformed strategic landscape that the convergence between Africa’s trajectory and the logic of the 2025 NSS becomes almost self-evident. Washington seeks to reduce its dependence on Asian production ecosystems, to secure maritime routes, and to rely on partners capable of stabilizing their environments without extensive U.S. military commitments. Africa’s advancing strategic-economic posture, grounded in corridor development, mineral governance, and diversified diplomacy, mirrors these priorities with striking fidelity. The continent is therefore not merely reacting to global transformations. It is deliberately repositioning itself as a generator of strategic stability and a driving force within the global architecture of connectivity.
The StraitBelt Doctrine: Africa’s Indigenous Answer to a Fragmenting Global Order
Africa’s expanding agency is generating the intellectual environment necessary for the rise of endogenous doctrines capable of guiding continental transformation. It is within this moment that the StraitBelt doctrine appears as a coherent African framework, one that reflects and extends the strategic-economic logic underpinning the NSS 2025. Its foundational premise is clear: contemporary geopolitics is increasingly shaped by the sovereignty of flows, whether maritime routes, digital infrastructures, energy networks, industrial corridors, or the governance of value chains. Recognizing the doctrinal relevance of StraitBelt nonetheless requires acknowledging the plurality of Africa’s strategic landscape. The continent does not operate under a single integrative vision. Agenda 2063, the African Continental Free Trade Area, diversified national industrial strategies in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, or Ethiopia, and the sub-regional agendas pursued by ECOWAS, SADC, IGAD, or the EAC all articulate distinct or overlapping connectivity priorities. StraitBelt cannot and should not replace these initiatives. Its viability depends on its capacity to intersect with them, to serve as an organizing grammar that complements rather than imposes, and to facilitate convergence without assuming hegemonic status. Its realization would therefore require a form of consensual continental leadership that remains in formation and will develop progressively through practical cooperation on corridors, digital governance, and mineral value chains.
In conceptual terms, StraitBelt draws inspiration from the broader traditions that have historically structured strategic thought. Hamilton placed productive capacity and infrastructural strength at the heart of national power, while Monroe underscored the need to secure one’s strategic environment. StraitBelt adapts these principles to African realities and frames an indigenous theory of functional sovereignty grounded in the integration of hinterlands, the securitization of chokepoints, and the articulation of interconnected corridors.
At its core, StraitBelt reimagines Africa as a system organized around its strategic passages, from Gibraltar to Bab el-Mandeb and the Mozambique Channel, and around the corridors that channel influence from the Sahel toward the Atlantic and from the interior toward global markets. It affirms the necessity of capturing value locally through mineral processing and the emergence of green-energy industries. Through this shift, Africa moves away from the role of raw-material supplier and begins to acquire genuine leverage within the global economy. The doctrine also carries a political message. StraitBelt rejects bloc thinking and advances the idea of sovereign interdependence, a strategic posture through which Africa manages its partnerships without being subsumed into rivalries between the United States and China or between Russia and the West. In this regard, StraitBelt does more than align with the strategic direction set by the NSS 2025. It provides Africa with its own doctrinal lens for engaging with an increasingly fragmented international landscape while avoiding the reproduction of the very fragmentation it seeks to navigate.
Critical Minerals and the Strategic Avoidance of Bloc Rivalries
The intensification of competition around Africa’s mineral endowment has transformed the continent into one of the most contested spaces of the twenty-first century. China retains a commanding position in upstream and midstream processing, controlling more than eighty percent of global rare-earth refining capacity, while Russia continues to consolidate influence through hybrid networks that blur the line between statecraft and coercive presence. Western economies, acutely aware of their industrial vulnerabilities, now seek alternative sources of critical minerals and new partnerships across the emerging corridors of the continent. Yet this renewed interest risks redrawing ideological frontlines reminiscent of Cold War fault lines. Africa, however, is increasingly unwilling to let external powers determine its strategic horizon. The rise of export restrictions on unprocessed minerals, regional initiatives to develop battery-manufacturing ecosystems, and the growing insistence on domestic beneficiation all signal a doctrinal shift. Minerals are no longer framed as commodities circulating freely through global markets; they are reclaimed as sovereignty assets, instruments through which Africa negotiates its position in the global hierarchy of production and influence.
This recalibration resonates with the logic of the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy, which prioritizes the empowerment of regional actors capable of stabilizing their environments without becoming extensions of great-power rivalries. For Africa, the central challenge is not to pledge allegiance to a bloc but to determine its rank and assert its strategic weight. Its future influence will depend on its ability to set standards, protect infrastructures, and govern the interdependencies that bind mineral value chains to global technological innovation. The continent is thus moving not toward alignment but toward positionality, a sovereign space between competing global poles.
Africa’s expanding connectivity systems deepen this strategic transformation. The rapid proliferation of Dakhla Atlantic ports, Sahel-ocean linkages, Indian Ocean gateways, and next-generation digital and energy infrastructures is reshaping the geometry of global commerce. These networks are more than economic upgrades; they constitute the emerging architecture of continental sovereignty. For Washington, they align directly with the NSS 2025 objective of securing diversified routes resilient to coercive leverage from rival powers. For Africa, they mark the material foundations of a strategic identity rooted in circulation, interoperability, and controlled interdependence. This dual relevance reveals a deeper convergence in which Africa becomes simultaneously a stabilizer of global supply chains and a strategic equalizer within them. Hence, the StraitBelt doctrine crystallizes this transformative moment. By embedding the governance of corridors within a unified continental strategy, it offers Africa the conceptual instrument needed to articulate its role not as a subordinate node in external networks but as a co-designer of global connectivity. While the United States shifts toward a model of prudent military disengagement paired with stronger infrastructural partnerships, Africa emerges as a space of strategic production, where minerals, green-energy platforms, maritime gateways, and digital markets converge to form a new center of gravity in the global economy of power.
Viewed through this lens, StraitBelt provides the continental logic required to structure this convergence. It ensures that Africa’s infrastructural acceleration reinforces autonomy rather than reproducing past dependencies. For the United States, this evolving architecture offers a means of securing critical flows without reinstating asymmetric patterns of influence. For Africa, it opens the possibility of constructing a sovereign alternative to bloc politics, one guided by functional interdependence rather than ideological alignment. From this standpoint, Africa’s influence on the reorganization of the global economic and strategic landscape is now unmistakable. The question is no longer whether the continent will shape the emerging order, but whether it can translate its structural advantages into durable strategic autonomy. The answer will depend on its capacity to govern mineral value chains with authority, stabilize connectivity corridors across regions marked by volatility, and navigate great-power competition without being absorbed by it.
In this evolving strategic landscape, the StraitBelt doctrine emerges as a forward-looking architecture capable of reconciling ambition with sovereignty. It no longer situates Africa as a passive arena of rivalries but elevates it to the role of continental fulcrum between the Global South and the Global North, a space where competing logics of power can be balanced rather than reproduced. StraitBelt charts a trajectory that privileges co-architecture over confrontation, granting Africa the ability to design the very system of interdependencies that will shape the twenty-first century instead of being constrained by it. Through this reframing, the continent moves decisively from theater to architect, from space of contestation to producer of order. The strategic challenge now lies in transforming this emerging structural leverage into durable autonomy, ensuring that Africa’s place in the coming world order is defined not by external prescriptions but by its own sovereign vision.
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