MR. CAMERON HUDSON: Welcome again, Ambassador, and it’s great to be sharing this time with you to talk about topics that are near and dear to your heart, to all of our hearts here, I think, which is the U.S. relationship with Africa. I want to start off by talking about kind of current day – where we are right now on some of the big issues, where the Biden administration will be leaving things, turning over to the Trump administration in just a couple of days.
And I want to start with maybe the hardest issue out there, which is Sudan. And it’s one that you have worked tirelessly on. You’ve kept it on the agenda of the UN. I know from your staff that you have been a quiet force within the U.S. Government, trying to elevate and give weight and muscle to our response. But I also know – you and I have worked together on Sudan 20 years ago, and so
AMBASSADOR LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: That long ago
MR. HUDSON: Well, sadly. [Laughter.] Sadly, yes. So we’ve seen some of this before. There’s been – there’s a lot of déjà vu with what we are experiencing in Sudan today. And so first, I just want to ask: One of the criticisms that has been levied not just against the United States role but the international role is that Sudan is no longer rising to the level of attention that it needs for there to be a serious response to the humanitarian situation, the fighting that’s going on, let alone giving any kind of thought to what a future civilian government might look like in the country.
Can you explain to us where things stand right now with respect to increasing humanitarian access, with how you view the situation on the ground? And then also a reflection on: What have we gotten wrong? What have we not done enough of? What, if you had to do over again, could we go back and try to do to not be in the situation that we are in with Sudan right now?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Cameron, those are some tough questions. And let me just start by saying it’s not just Sudan that gets the short stick, short-shifted in the international community. It’s Africa broadly. Sudan happened to be the crisis of the day on the continent, but any crisis on the continent, we generally don’t give it the attention that it needs – not internationally, and I would even argue not even here in our country. And so Sudan has suffered from, initially, all of the attention was focused on Ukraine, and then all attention was focused on Gaza, and Sudan was nowhere to be seen. And for me, having worked on African issues for my entire career, I could not sit back and let that happen. I couldn’t let it happen in the United Nations, and I couldn’t allow it to happen internationally.
So I made a commitment to raise – at every effort, at every opportunity – the situation in Sudan. I took a group of press to Sudan, to – I’m sorry – to the border with Sudan to Chad. And I will say that they really did some amazing reporting. I had NBC, I had NPR, I had Reuters with me on that trip.And whenever I would give a press briefing on Sudan and someone would toss a question at me about – toss a question at me about Ukraine or toss a question to me about Gaza, I would remind them that that’s the problem, that no one wants to focus on the issue at hand at that particular conference. So I kind of made it a habit of shaming the press to get them to pay attention to Sudan. And I think we succeeded in doing that. The New York Times did a really amazing piece on Sudan. I did an op-ed in The New York Times that they actually printed. And we started to focus more attention.
But I think the problem is – and this happens all over the world – we see one solution, and when we get to that one solution, we move on. So in the case of Sudan, we saw this amazing effort on the part of civilians who were in the streets, women who were raising their fists and really fighting for civilian rule. And they succeeded, and we applauded them, and we embraced them, and we moved on.
And military guys don’t give up easily, and these two guys who had fed on each other suddenly decided that they wanted power. It wasn’t just enough to put power in the hands of civilians. And when they couldn’t decide among themselves who was going to be the voice, they started fighting among themselves, and that’s where we are today. And so we have put pressure on both sides, because there are no good guys in this fight. They both deserve to be held accountable.
But we’re also seeing the actions of others – this has become a regional war, and the actions of others feeding the two sides to continue the fighting. And the people who are suffering are the tens of millions of Sudanese who’ve been forced from their homes.
MR. HUDSON: Yeah. Let me ask you about that, just, again, reflecting back on the experiences that you had in the first Darfur genocide, and the efforts of the then-Bush administration, and going into the Obama administration, to try to end that. It seems that as much as we have done, as much as the United States has done – and it’s the largest donor to humanitarian aid in the country; we have a very active special envoy who has been moving non-stop around the region – it feels like the U.S. role is less effective today than it has been in the past, that we’re gaining less traction or that we are less listened to.
And at the same time, at the UN you have seen some of the enablers of this war use the UN, tie it up in ways that we didn’t see a generation ago. Is the U.S. losing its claim to authority on these issues? Is it becoming harder for the United States to resolve these kind of nettlesome conflicts in the way that we were able to lead on in the past?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I think in the past not only were we able to lead, we were the only one. So we were – it was us, and nobody else played in the sandbox on this. So we were able to exert a lot more power, a lot more influence than in the past. Now you just have players from across the board, players from the Middle East. We have different players on the continent who are engaging in this. And so our place has been diminished. I won’t say that we’ve been sidelined, but we’ve been diminished in the sense that we have to share now that platform with a lot of different voices. So the Jeddah process was not just us. It was Saudi Arabia. It was Egypt.
There were other players that were engaged who have been contributing to this war. And then you add on top of that the role played by Russia, feeding both sides of the conflict. So it makes it harder to find solutions.And that’s where I think it’s important for the UN to be much more engaged, to exert much more influence, to flex your muscles more, because they’ve become the – I think the even hand, if you want to use that term, that might be able to bring all the players to the table.
MR. HUDSON: Do you think that the UN is still in a position to play that role effectively? I mean, we have questions here on DRC, on Mozambique, on the Sahel. Africa is not without its challenges right now. Mvemba raised in his opening this question of whether or not the UN is currently, as it’s conceived of currently, kind of purpose-built for advancing peace efforts the way it was in the past.And then conversely, African attitudes towards the UN are evolving, and international mediation are evolving. You see the exit of the U.S. and France from certain Sahelian states recently, the UN being kicked out of Mali and – among other places where the UN is no longer welcome. Does the UN get something wrong right now that makes it less fit for purpose?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Look, the UN is us. We’re all a part of the UN, so we can’t just sit and point the figure of blame at the United Nations. It’s not a perfect institution. And I think what we’re seeing is that it has not adjusted to situations on the ground. You didn’t see in Liberia, for example, people throwing rocks at the UN, or even in Sierra Leone, where the UN was seen as a force for good.
There’s a tendency for the UN maybe to stay too long and not change its approach. So if you’re going to be in a place for 20 years, you can’t use the same approach you used in year one that you’re using in year 20. And so there have to be some adjustments, some different types of planning, different people brought into the force, so that the UN can continue to be effective.
But when I talk about the UN being more engaged, I look at more in terms of the leadership role – I mean sending out their special envoys to negotiate, to talk to both sides, to be a force for negotiations, a force for bringing about a diplomatic force. That’s – when I talk about the UN, that’s what I’m speaking of because we don’t have a UN peacekeeping force in Sudan. But we need to be much more actively and proactively engaged. And I think the Security Council can do that as well.
MR. HUDSON: Let me – you said something interesting there, which I was going to get at, about this idea of an evolution of these peacekeeping operations, and that the first year doesn’t look like the 20th year. And I think the – maybe the quintessential example of that is peacekeeping in the Eastern DRC. The UN has been essentially permanently deployed for 30 years, right? This is the 30-year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. It seems like a quintessential example of the limitations of international intervention and involvement.
We had the DRC foreign minister here just a few weeks ago, talking about the prospects for peace. How do you view the prospects for peace in Eastern DRC right now? The Biden administration’s been very active with the – with President Lourenço on the Angola process. You in New York have been active as well on this issue. How do you see that particular case right now?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I think the Africans in the Security Council and at the EU like to say African solutions for African problems, and I always challenge them on African solutions. There are no African solutions for African problems because the problems are not African problems. The problems are global problems. But African leadership is important, and I think what I see being where we should move in DRC is to focus on the African leadership, to focus on the Luanda process, to give the Angolans the capacity to move forward on this agenda and bring other African leaders into this.
This is not just, again, an African problem. It is one where we have to support African leadership to address what has become a problem for the world. What we see happening in DRC is not just happening to DRC. We really have to pour more of our effort, more of our power, behind the actions of the leaders who are working to find a solution and, of course, put more pressure on Rwanda and M23 to pull out of the DRC, put more pressure on the DRC government to put resources into those areas to support the people who are being victimized.
MR. HUDSON: The idea of African leadership, I think, is a great segue to one of the other issues that you’ve been working on at the Security Council, which is the reform of the Security Council and a leadership – and a leadership role for Africans on the Security Council. President Biden in his first year in office pledged a permanent seat for an African Member State at the Security Council. And just this last year, his last address at the General Assembly, he doubled down, literally doubled down and offered two seats or suggested that there should be two permanent seats for African members.
Upon some clarification that maybe the United States didn’t support those seats having veto power, there was some consternation among African states suggesting that maybe the United States was proposing a kind of second-class standing for Africans at the Security Council. Can you talk about where you have left those negotiations and discussions around the expansion of the Security Council right now and what your views are on what that should look like?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Yeah, look, reform is a process. We’re not going to come in and suddenly say “thou shall” and the UN will change in the image of whatever it is that we want. So that process – we move the needle on that process. The Sierra Leonian ambassador said our announcements had a seismic impact on the whole reform discussions. What Africans – the C12 or C10, I think – asked for is two permanent seats, two additional elected seats, and the veto power. And there has to be another broader discussion because at that point, two permanent seats, two additional elected seats, and already three elected seats – without knowing what the big picture will look like, how many members of the Security Council will there be – we’re at 15 now. So before you decide that one continent is going to have seven, you have to decide what the big picture is going to be, whether it’s going to be 21, if it’s going to be 25, whatever the broad number. And that will take place within the text-based negotiations.
And that was our second announcement that we supported something we had not supported before – text-based negotiations that will lead to that process. There was a lot of consternation because we did not announce that we supported the veto power. My message to the C10 was this is a process; and if you think the process is that your demands will be immediately granted without considering the demands of others, it’s just not going to happen. You have to be a part of this process; take what you have, continue to negotiate for what you want. So I said to them if you’re turning down the two permanent seats because the veto power is not there – and it’s not our decision in any case – but two permanent seats is a big deal.
We continue the negotiations to see where the negotiations lead. If you don’t want to negotiate, we’re stuck where we have been now for more than 10 years, where every single year the IGN comes in, gives a report, and every single one of us walk in the door and give the same speech that we gave the previous year, and we’ve not moved the needle at all. We are trying to move that needle. And it doesn’t mean the needle is going to go from here to here immediately. It’s going to go from here to here. And then we lock that in and it goes from here to here until we get to a place that we want to find ourselves. And it’s not just about what the Africans want; it’s about what the rest of the world wants as well.
So all of that is part of the negotiation. It is not something that the U.S. on its own will decide. One of the responses I got on our announcement that we supported two permanent seats is, “yay”, that means one seat will go to the African Union and one seat will be rotating for ten years. And I went back and said what’s permanent about a rotating seat? [Laughter.] And when did the African Union become a Member State? Because that’s what the Security Council is made of. So it’s a discussion. We’ll continue that discussion and hopefully get to a place where we come out of this with a new UN that is more fit for purpose than what it is today.
MR. HUDSON: Do you think that there is both momentum to carry this conversation going forward right now? Is there enough kind of built-up momentum there that in your absence and the absence of people who care about these issues that it will continue? And are the Africans organized themselves enough around this issue? Is there enough unanimity on the continent to be a driver for this to go forward?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I’m not going to speak for the continent, although I regularly impose myself as an A3+1 – [laughter] – and would fight to ensure that my plus one status would be accepted, because I’ve spent so much of my life on the continent of Africa. And I had a good relationship with the A3.
But I don’t think the continent is unified on what it will mean to have two permanent seats. I have spoken – Nigeria says it’s not a question, of course, Nigeria is going to get one. [Laughter.] And South Africa says this is not up for discussion. [Laughter.] And then I hear from Ethiopia we should have always had a permanent seat, we were a victor in World War II, so what are you talking about? Of course, Ethiopia is going to have a permanent seat. And then you have North Africa that – they’re part of the AU. They’re on the continent. So where does Egypt and Algeria and Morocco fit into what is going to happen? So Africans are going to have to sit in the context of the AU or in the context of the C10 and figure out what it means for them. That’s not going to be for me to decide.
MR. HUDSON: You started spilling the tea and that’s what we’re here for. [Laughter.] So I just – you’re going down a very dangerous path, because I’m interested in having you spill more of the tea. But I’m going to refrain and ask you a little bit about the kind of changing geopolitics on the continent, right? There’s been a lot of conversation recently about this kind of great power competition that’s going on. One of the refrains of the Biden administration, and you have repeated it, is we don’t want Africans to choose. Africans are free to choose who their partners are. And at the same time, there
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We want to give them a choice.
MR. HUDSON: You want to give them a choice. And I think we are all recognizing the fact that Africa is – has a multitude of choices. They have more choices now in terms of their economic partners, their security partners, than they did even a decade ago. At the same time, the United States is a big country and it has interests which compete. We don’t have just values that we’re promoting around the world; we have hard interests. And sometimes those hard interests and those values, they bump up against each other and they conflict. And that was certainly the case around the war in Ukraine and some of the early votes that emerged from the General Assembly.
I want you to reflect on how well we have done in living that dictum that we want Africa to be able to choose their partners. We don’t want to certainly create penalties for the choices that they make. I bring this up in the context of not just Ukraine, but we’re facing now a conversation around South Africa, I think, going into the new administration here about – and it’s a very active conversation in our Congress – about whether or not the choices that South Africa makes imperils U.S. national security interests and whether it undermines our interests.How do you think about these questions and the relationship that we have of trying to build coalitions that are in support of U.S. interests and values, but at the same time leaving room for African countries to assert themselves and their own national priorities and their own values?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Let’s go back to Ukraine. And so when the war started in Ukraine and thousands of people were rushing to the border and a big news story was that Africans were being sidelined, and that had a huge impact in Africa on how they looked at Ukraine, not how they looked at Russia, but how they looked at the situation in Ukraine and how the neighbors treated them. And the message that we all got from that is that we have to address this and we have to address it immediately if we want to have African countries support what was clearly a wrong being done in Ukraine. And it’s a message that we gave directly to the Ukrainians that they had to be proactively engaged and that the other countries in the border had to be proactively engaged and reach out to African countries. It couldn’t just be me because I was reaching out to everyone, but they too had to join that conversation and reach out to Africans and make their rounds on the continent.
And I think it made a difference. It could have been a bigger difference, but it made a difference that suddenly we were paying attention to the views of people from the continent and how this impacted them in ways that it didn’t impact others. And so we saw some changes, and I really commend the Kenyans. Martin Kimani gave this amazing speech in the Security Council that we all started quoting because it said where the values were in terms of support for the integrity of borders and for the UN Charter.The other message as I met – and I used to meet regularly with the A3, just the four of us – was to say you’re not just on the Security Council to do Africa; this is a global body, and so I want to hear your views on other places in the world. What are your views on what is happening in Haiti, for example? How do you want to see the Security Council address the situation in Ukraine? And again, I think that was an important conversation for us to have with Africans – and again, not forcing countries to choose.
And despite what some of my counterparts would say that we were threatening people to vote with us, that we were intimidating people to vote, that we were putting inordinate pressure – that never, ever happened at the UN on my watch, ever. It was always a conversation. I can express disappointment, I’m really sorry you didn’t vote with us on this, explain to me why. I need to understand what I can do differently that might help you reconsider your vote in the future. And again, I think that helped at lot. You can’t use intimidation, and you certainly can’t use threats to get support.
More broadly on the continent, this competition that we all like to talk about. I don’t see that competition as being as difficult as others see it, because the one value and I think the one advantage that the United States has over any of the competitors in Africa is that we have this diaspora here in this room, all over the United States. There’s not a single country in Africa that does not have a significant diaspora here in the United States – American citizens who are part of influencing our power. That’s not happening in China and it ain’t happening in Russia. It only happens here in the United States, and that’s our superpower when it comes to the continent of Africa.
Do we build the infrastructure that Africans need? It’s just not something the U.S. does anymore. So that’s China’s superpower. But we can help with trying to figure out how we can do better in addressing those issues on the continent of Africa.
MR. HUDSON: Let me touch on something less controversial, which is the war in Gaza. [Laughter.] Just feeding from that conversation that you just – that you just had, I’m not asking you to opine on what is happening, because we’re here to talk about U.S.-Africa relations, but U.S.-Africa relations are impacted by what happens in the other parts of the world, as we were just discussing, right? And it seems that events in that part of the world have impacted our relationship with many African states who feel very strongly about what’s happening there.
And I’m just curious as the leader of our multilateral diplomacy how you – how you see the tradeoffs between what we have said, what the Biden administration has said, about making sure Africans have a voice in global disputes and a seat at the table when decisions are being made, but then clearly pursuing a set of interests and policies – and we can take Gaza out of it, right, because there’s lots of other cases where this has been the case as well. But it seems to me that we hear a lot from our African colleagues that this has emerged as a kind of wedge issue that is exacting a cost on our relationship with this continent. How do you see – how do you manage those tensions in our diplomacy?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: What you said earlier on about interest, and sometimes our interests clash with our values. And so I think there is not a single country on the Security Council or in the broader UN membership that is surprised by the positions that the U.S. government has taken as it relates to Israel and Gaza. They’re disappointed, but they’re not surprised. And so their votes reflect their values, but I don’t think – and maybe I’m wrong and you can tell me if I’m wrong – that broadly that has affected our direct bilateral relationships with any African country. And certainly I am engaged with them on all of these issues. I listen to them very closely. When I’m negotiating, I negotiate with the entire General Assembly, with the E10, sitting with the A3 to say here are our red lines, and we’ve been able to negotiate. People focus on the veto, but nobody focuses on the fact that, one, we’ve passed over 200 resolutions in the Security Council, but we’ve also passed resolutions on Gaza. And that took intense negotiations and a give-and-take between all of the Member States of the Security Council to get us to that place. And they all recognize that the diplomacy that is taking place is only being done by the United States. There is nobody else on the ground, sending their people on the ground trying to negotiate. It’s the United States.
MR. HUDSON: Yeah. Let me take a step back and maybe touch on a few moments in your long career on the continent and dedicated to the continent, and I want to talk about our security relationships in Africa. I remember when AFRICOM was announced and rolled out in the Bush administration. You were one of the lucky ones that got to go to Africa and explain to our partners on the continent what this new combatant command was going to be, what it wasn’t going to be, and so you were really the – on the front line of that.
AFRICOM is going to be celebrating an anniversary coming up. I’m curious how – one of the criticisms that we hear is that our relationships with African countries are too much defined by our security ties. And maybe that’s because they’re the most visible ties, right? You can see soldiers and people being trained, and it’s typically those soldiers if there is a governance problem that step in, as we have seen repeatedly in the central and Sahel region of the country in the last few years. Do you think that broadly speaking we are getting this mix of the three Ds right in our diplomacy towards the continent? Everyone talks about the three Ds, right?But we don’t talk so much about how much they are in balance or in conflict, and I’m curious. The incidents that we had recently in Niger and in Chad where the sort of the public perception is that we only have security concerns in these countries – can you comment a little bit on how you see this evolution of our security relations?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Look, we’re constantly calibrating the three Ds. And there, sometimes diplomacy is the long leg and sometimes security is the longer leg. Development in some countries is also the longer leg.
I was just delighted to learn earlier this week that MCC just approved another compact for Liberia. And in the case of Liberia, it was diplomacy and it was development. We helped to train the military, but we didn’t have troops on the ground in Liberia. We talk about the fact that we put 200 Marines out on a ship on the ocean that really sent a strong message to the warring parties, but the people on the ground were diplomats and development professionals that helped to bring Liberia back to the fore.
So again, people see the security, they actually want the security apparatus – any country we go in, like, “We want a U.S. military base.” But that’s not the end-all and be-all of our relationships. The end-all and be-all of our relationships revolve around diplomacy.
MR. HUDSON: Related to this, I want to pivot to talk about one of the themes that we hear a lot about in Africa, which is this amazing youth generation that is coming up. And I know you feel very passionately about how the United States can better engage with that demographic, because it is so large, and they are already demanding change. They’re demanding change in the world and they’re demanding change in their own countries. You have been like – like all U.S. initiatives in Africa for the last 30 years, you’ve had a role in the – in YALI, our kind of signature program engaging African youth.
But what we have seen more recently, going back to this sort of competition aspect, is more and more African youth going to university not in the United States, because it’s so hard to come to university in the United States and to get visas, but going to China, going to Türkiye, going to Saudi Arabia. Going to Ukraine.How – what more can we be doing to tap into this new generation that is coming up? We’re struggling on the university front, but what are the other things that we can be doing beyond YALI, which is a great program, but are there other things that you would like to see this government and future U.S. administrations do to really engage the spirit of this generation?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I appreciate that question. I was doing an interview earlier today and I was talking about African resources, and the interviewer said, “Oh, you mean like natural resources and oil.” And I’m like, “No – people.” It’s the young people. It’s this median age of 19, it is focusing on giving them hope, helping them invest themselves back into their countries. And university education is part of it, but the other part of it that I think we have to focus more attention on, in answer to your question, is secondary education, primary education, secondary education, and training people in skills so that they feel that they can be part of their country.
So it’s not about getting visas to come and study in the United States or study in China. And I think with most young people, if you give them a choice and they actually have control over the choice, they’re not going to choose to go to China to study. They’re going to choose to come to the United States. So we have to do better in providing the opportunities for young people to come to the U.S. But before that, it is that secondary school and primary school training and skills training that I think is really key, because everybody can’t go to college and there are not enough jobs to support everybody going to college. So we need to train people to do things that will allow them to contribute to their families, to send their kids to school, to build a house, to buy land, to have a car, whatever it is that they need to give them a sense of investment in their country’s future.
So if I had a magic wand, I would go and build high schools. I would do teacher training so that there are teachers to teach in those high schools, and skills training, and I think that will be one option, along with university training, that will see the continent move forward.MR. HUDSON: I wish you had that magic wand.
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I do too. [Laughter.]MR. HUDSON: Let me just – one more question because we’re coming up on time, and maybe this is the kind of capstone for your whole career working on Africa relations. I know that you’re going to be doing some traveling and you’re going to go home, you’re going to go back to Louisiana for a spell. What – what do you say when you go home? What should we say when we go home to all the places that we are from about why we should be engaging Africa?We talked at the very beginning of this about how hard it is to get attention on Africa even from our own government officials, who are presumably paid to care and work on these issues, right? But it’s hard to sustain that attention, especially now that we are entering this – what seems to feel like a supercharged “America first” approach to our foreign policy, right? How do we – how do we sustain attention and engagement on those issues which might not rise to the level of a kind of first-tier national security interest? What’s the argument that you make for people?
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Again, that’s a tough question. So I was asked that question probably 20 years ago: Why should we care about Africa? Why should Americans be engaged in Africa? And my answer at the time was because Americans care. We care about people; we care about the world. We care if we see people suffering. And this is why we can go on TV and watch all of these ads asking Americans to contribute to every humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world, but in Africa, and Americans have always gone to Africa. Our Peace Corps volunteers have been part – I mean, I meet so many Africans who are my generation who say: my Peace Corps teacher was the person who taught me to speak English, and I will never forget that person. Americans generally have this sense of caring about other people, and I think that is still there, that sense of caring, that sense of commitment to helping other people reach their dreams. And so what I find when I go home is people want to know about these countries. They want to know about the people. They want to know what they do, and I find it really important to do that with young people, with high school kids. I would go into a high school with a map of Africa with no names and tell – I don’t know if my brain will allow me to do that now, but say to a kid: point to a place and let me tell you about that place. So they would point to Senegal, and I had the kind of five big things I knew about Senegal, and they wanted to learn. So I think we have to start with young people.
But I think as they grow into adults, they get that sense of caring. We never had a problem recruiting Peace Corps volunteers to go to Africa. There’s no place on the continent that I have been, believe it or not, that I’ve not met a person from Louisiana. [Laughter.] I don’t know how they got there. [Laughter.] But Americans want to travel. I always say get a passport even if you don’t travel, and start thinking about where you might want to travel when you can afford to travel. So I think there’s still that sense of caring, even as we promote America first, it’s about America first as also being America cares.
MR. HUDSON: Well, thank you for that, and we know that you care very deeply about these issues, and it’s why you’ve been so generous with your time today.