NEW DELHI: “The ability to box-in President-elect Biden on foreign policy is extremely limited and overstated,” says Ambassador John Campbell, the former U.S. Envoy to Nigeria, adding, “in the case of Sudan and Morocco, the Biden administration will not reverse either of those” deals that has four arab countries, so far, joining the Abraham Accords in normalising ties with Israel. The U.S. lifted Sudan’s state sponsor of terrorism designation on December 14 after an October deal in which Khartoum is required to pay $335 million to victims of the 1998 twin bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. On December 10, Morocco became the fourth Arab country (after the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan) to agree to normalise ties with Israel in five months. In return, the U.S. recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a disputed territory in northwestern Africa under Rabat’s control for decades.
In our series ‘Eye On Africa‘, the Former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria also discusses the Nigerian government’s “inability to provide security for its own citizens” after more than 300 schoolboys were kidnapped by armed gunmen in the north-western Katsina state last week. The Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington tells StratNews Global Associate Editor Amitabh P. Revi, “when Boko Haram has attacked schools in the past, it has enslaved the girls and murdered the boys,” adding, “kidnapping is ubiquitous all over Nigeria.” Ambassador Campbell also discusses his latest book, ‘Nigeria and the Nation-State: Rethinking Diplomacy with the Postcolonial World’, China’s growing economic, political and strategic influence in Africa and India’s “enormously important, largely under-reported and more successful business presence than China.”
