Since taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, paused wind farm leasing on U.S. public lands and offshore waters, and defiantly declared that “we will drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas to achieve energy dominance. In response, climate policy advocates have wasted no time in proclaiming China to be the world’s last best hope for climate action.

“Insofar as there is to be a global climate leader it can now only be China,” wrote economist Adam Tooze. A Chinese climate policy analyst speculated in a Straits Times interview whether this moment might mark structural Western decline in the “climate space” and the rise of “alternative voices.” Bloomberg journalists contrasted Trump’s return against China’s record-breaking solar and wind build-outs, arguing that China could be poised to upstage the United States by assuming global climate leadership. Recent newsletters from Carbon Brief overflow with positive headlines about China’s energy transition efforts while reporting grimly on the Trump-led shift on climate policy.

While the United States now makes for an even more convenient climate pariah than usual, framing Washington as the villain and Beijing as the climate savior ignores the facts of China’s energy use and trajectory. More importantly, selectively framing the debate this way also deflects attention from Beijing’s own emissions, particularly in the coal power and industrial sectors.

As the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement fundamentally challenges the usefulness of climate summits and pledges, praise for China’s alleged climate progress validates charges that the climate policy circuit exists only for performative promises and symbolic pageantry.

There is a stark dichotomy between applause for Beijing’s climate rhetoric and the reality of China’s emissions trajectory. Since China signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, it has accounted for 90 percent of all global growth in carbon emissions. China now produces more than 30 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. China’s greenhouse gas emissions are more than twice the United States’ and more than four times India’s or the European Union’s.

Five years have passed since Chinese President Xi Jinping’s landmark pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060, but there is little evidence to suggest that the country’s energy system and policies are moving in the right direction. China will very likely miss its 2025 carbon-intensity pledge—an 18 percent reduction in carbon emissions per unit of economic output compared to 2020 levels—along with all of its other 2025 pledges related to limiting coal use and expanding clean power. And far from making good on a widely celebrated 2021 promise to phase out international financing of coal projects, China remains, by far, the leading financier of overseas coal power capacity. At home, Chinese planners started construction of 94.5 gigawatts of coal power generation in 2024 alone, roughly equal to the power generated by the entire U.S. nuclear power sector.

China’s emissions trajectory illustrates the limitations of the most venerated global climate pledge of all: limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. Even if China’s carbon emissions peaked this year and then plummeted linearly to zero by 2060, China alone would consume the entire world’s remaining carbon budget for a 66 percent chance of achieving the 1.5 degree goal.

Commentators and activists demanding muscular climate policies from the West usually look away when others point an accusatory finger at China. But a Chinese climate analyst writing in the Financial Times effectively conceded that an emissions pathway that avoids breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius target would require an unlikely “crash decarbonization” by China.

Planners and thinkers need to accept that the 1.5 degree goal is now irreconcilable with reality—no matter how much they imagine that Chinese technological and construction magic might save the day.

Some might counter that while the 1.5 degree target may have slipped away, Beijing nonetheless has a real chance of executing an about-face and leading the world in fast-paced decarbonization. Certainly, China is building solar, wind, battery, and nuclear energy facilities at a blinding pace, installing nearly 100 gigawatts more solar capacity in the first half of 2024 than the rest of the world combined. More than 80 percent of the world’s solar cell manufacturing takes place in Chinese factories. This year, sales of electric vehicles in the country will likely exceed those of combustion-engine cars. And Beijing can build on these successes by helping other countries, particularly low- and middle-income states, develop renewable power projects. Indeed, Chinese solar exports are on the rise.

But none of these numbers can change the bigger picture. Since 2011, China has consistently consumed more coal than the rest of the world combined; last year, coal use likely hit another record high. China’s clean electricity additions may be impressive, but they are only now beginning to match growth in overall energy demand, which means that fossil fuel energy consumption is—at best—only plateauing, without any of it yet being displaced. Meanwhile, an uptick in curtailed and otherwise wasted renewable generation suggests that a further build-out of renewables is increasingly constrained by grid infrastructure and market inflexibility.

China’s vast industrial sector—often glossed over in climate discussions—accounts for around 60 percent to 70 percent of the country’s emissions. Industry currently depends on fossil fuels to smelt ores, fire up furnaces, and serve as the feedstock from which various products are made. The Chinese aluminum sector alone produces roughly as much carbon dioxide as the entire country of Indonesia. China’s chemical, steel, metal, and minerals industries together exceed the total emissions of the entire United States. Next to such figures, the strident demands by various activists and advocacy groups for climate commitments from sub-Saharan African nations with negligible emissions appear even more absurd.

Some of China’s policies, including its lack of ambition to electrify heavy industry, actually hold back global decarbonization efforts. Cleaner means of producing steel, nickel, graphite, or ubiquitous chemicals such as calcium carbide and sodium hydroxide face fierce competition from highly polluting but low-cost Chinese producers that enjoy generous government support.

China has proposed and imposed export controls on key technologies required to manufacture solar panels, batteries, and other clean technology. Beijing may be keen to sell electric cars and solar equipment at home and abroad, but it is clearly not giving these technologies to the world.

If anything, the Chinese example does not buoy hopes that a developing country can both build a heavy industrial base and mitigate emissions. Meanwhile, activists and international policymakers have expressed concern over the entanglement of China’s solar, battery, and electric car industries with state-sponsored forced labor programs in the province of Xinjiang. Such objectionable policies have now forced many governments and firms into difficult quandaries over the ethical sourcing of solar panels and other clean technology.

And far from making good on the 2021 promise to phase out international financing of coal projects, state-owned banks and financial institutions such as the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China continue to play a central role in funding coal-fired projects. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has extended its financial influence globally by providing loans and investments specifically earmarked for energy infrastructure, including coal. These investments often come with attractive financing terms that make them appealing to governments with limited access to capital. China’s stated climate ambitions thus stand in sharp contrast to its overseas financing of coal plants.

To this day, China has duly ratified global climate treaties, consistently attended climate summits, and contributed some funds to global climate finance mechanisms. But when it comes to the key metric of emissions, U.S. and EU numbers are decreasing, while China’s have not yet peaked. Distaste for Trump’s climate policies must not mislead commentators into mistaking Chinese decarbonization dreams for real-world deeds.

A more serious debate about the global energy transition must grapple with what Beijing is still not doing instead of just cheering at China’s solar and electric car milestones. Climate commentary about the country must grow beyond getting excited when a communique of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee mentions the words “carbon reduction” for the first time.

And rather than asking softball questions about whether Beijing remains committed to climate action despite Trump’s uncooperativeness, perhaps commentators should repeatedly ask when the government will cease its efforts to subsidize heavy industry in the most carbon-intensive manner imaginable. They should question whether China messages its climate progress as a means to influence U.S. and European behavior, or if Beijing has instead received concessions from Washington or Brussels by offering unenforceable climate promises.

Most of all, the climate policy circuit must open its eyes to the reality that Chinese policymakers follow a “China First” geopolitical strategy that is at least as relentless as Trump’s “America First” posture. Official spokespeople insist that China is still a developing country with a lower obligation to cut emissions or contribute toward climate finance, while Chinese climate negotiators’ stress that climate cooperation is conditional on efforts to improve relations in other areas to Beijing’s satisfaction—a policy linkage that is entirely at odds with the widespread Western view of climate as a challenge above all others.

And if climate activists still doubt that Beijing’s real intentions diverge from its cooperative rhetoric, they need look no further than Russian troops riding across Ukraine in Chinese-made Desertcross all-terrain vehicles, supported by Chinese drones, and funded by Chinese purchases of Russian oil and gas.

Behind all the promises and signaling, the numbers don’t lie: China is not going to drive a rapid transition away from fossil fuels at home or abroad. It may well be the case that what is happening in China is simply what is happening everywhere else: slow, long-term decarbonization. In other words, China will be using fossil fuels for a long time, even as it makes progress on clean energy and low carbon technology.

If climate advocates are now giving up hope that Trump’s United States might supply their Hollywood climate ending, then they will find little solace in turning expectantly toward China.

Global events during the past several years make three things crystal clear: Energy security is national security, abundant energy is an irreplaceable tool for adapting to climate volatility and improving living standards, and U.S. diplomacy abroad is only as credible as the concrete options and solutions the country brings to the table. In some cases, these are fully private solutions, such as the liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports that helped Europe weather the cutoff of Russian gas supplies resulting from Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In others, they are government-facilitated efforts, such as the power grid resilience efforts that the U.S. Agency for International Development led in the Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine, and other countries.

If Washington cannot deliver, China will and while doing so diminish U.S. position and power. Consider, for instance, the roughly 50 gigawatts of power projects that Chinese state-owned firms have built or are building for electricity systems in Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam—all of which are (or can be) key U.S. regional partners.

Washington should openly embrace and lead the fight against global energy poverty. The same way the Green Revolution enhanced U.S. power and position by improving food security across the global south two generations ago, so too can an energy abundance revolution bolster the U.S. strategic position in this generation’s great-power competition.

The United States’ tremendous resource base, technological capabilities, and industrial prowess position it to first ensure that U.S. citizens do not face “heat versus eat” decisions and then to build a better world for the billions of people who still live in energy poverty. Full pursuit of these two vital priorities will cement Americans’ own prosperity and strategic position.

When the United States pursues energy abundance itself and postures other countries to do the same, it fortifies the world against tyrants, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who would use energy as a weapon. Imagine how dark—figuratively and literally—the world would be if U.S. exporters had not been able to swing their LNG exports to Europe in a matter of days and weeks once Russia began curtailing gas supplies before and after its second invasion of Ukraine? Just as the Berlin Airlift helped the free world stand strong in 1948, so too did the U.S.-led effort in 2022 help keep Kyiv free.

Energy abundance also enriches, and saves, individual lives. It means more children drinking safe water in Nigeria and Sudan, fewer women breathing harmful wood smoke in rural India, and more parents elevating their families with better paying jobs in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Former Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo likely spoke for billions of people in the developing world when he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2021 that “our citizens cannot be forced to wait for battery prices to fall or new technologies to be created in order to have reliable energy and live modern, dignified lives.” Helping them to fulfill aspirations of access to modern energy sources would, as I have showed in previous work, make billions of lives better while winning hearts and minds in the process.

Washington is uniquely positioned to lead energy poverty alleviation efforts, since the United States has the greatest comprehensive global competitive capacity in energy production. To be sure, this is not the case in every potential energy value chain. Wind and solar are already dominated by China, whose industrial policy has yielded massive overcapacity relative to demand. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds to chase those manufacturing sectors would be poor fiscal stewardship.

The United States should instead take advantage of cheap and low-security-risk Chinese basic hardware, such as solar panels, and for other, more security-sensitive items, such as control systems and the inverters that change direct current electricity into alternating current, require a separate edition that is manufactured in the United States, Canada, or Mexico and which runs audited, open-source software with verified datalink and internet connection hardware.

In other critical areas that comprise much larger sectors of global energy supply now, such as oil and natural gas, the United States is extremely competitive. In 2023, it accounted for about 16 percent of global crude oil production and approximately 25 percent of natural gas production. The shale boom that lifted U.S. production to these levels offers a critical, and apropos, historical lens because what started as a fundamentally domestic enterprise in the mid-2000s ended up achieving transformative energy security impacts far beyond U.S. borders. Europe’s ability to withstand Russian gas coercion during the first phases of the Ukraine war by surging imports of U.S.-produced LNG testifies to this reality.

Parts of Africa and Ukraine each have major gas development potential that could be accelerated with injections of U.S. firms’ capital and expertise and yield mutually beneficial partnerships. One way to begin facilitating such interactions literally requires the stroke of a pen: changing the Treasury Department’s “Guidance on Fossil Fuel Energy at the Multilateral Development Banks” so that instead of stifling natural gas development in the global south by discouraging foreign investment, it encourages it.

Doing so would open the landscape for public capital providers such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to help de-risk the gas-fired power plants and pipeline projects needed to get gas molecules to market in energy-hungry countries with indigenous gas resources. These demand signals and infrastructure would in turn catalyze drilling and production of gas. These steps can catalyze a virtuous cycle in which developing countries accelerate their own economic growth and reduce energy poverty.

U.S. producers, manufacturers, and financiers are also well positioned to shape the development and deployment of new, low-emission, resilient, and secure baseload energy resources from geothermal and next-generation nuclear. Both sectors leverage unparalleled domestic U.S. expertise in subsurface geology, advanced manufacturing, and the marriage of technical expertise and financial prowess that is needed to achieve terawatt-sized scale-up.

Depending on the reactor size, each gigawatt of need is likely to require somewhere between three and 70 small modular reactors, or SMRs, each of which is likely to cost $70 million or more. With a global addressable market that is easily in the hundreds of gigawatts—including in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—the opportunity is enormous. China and Russia already operate SMRs and are also vying to be the energy supplier of choice for many of these areas, a reality that must invigorate U.S. competitive spirit. To boot, meeting the emerging nuclear opportunity is not just an U.S. venture but an allied one—Australian and Canadian uranium and Japanese and South Korean construction, steel, and forging capabilities will also be critical. Advanced geothermal can also strongly compete in many of the same markets as nuclear, particularly in East Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

To unlock nuclear and geothermal opportunities, the Trump administration should take three key steps. First, the Defense Department should consider becoming an anchor customer for SMRs and advanced geothermal—starting in Alaska. An open competition should be used to select the most appropriate technology at the lowest cost and highest safety and scalability, with the incentive of being able to serve one of the world’s largest energy-consuming entities.

Second, the administration should consider seeking supplemental funding for the International Development Finance Corp. (DFC). DFC was established in 2019 and is the U.S. government’s development finance institution. It partners with private capital to invest throughout the developing world and strategic locations in sectors including energy, health care, critical infrastructure, and technology. DFC backing can potentially help facilitate exports of U.S. firms’ advanced nuclear reactors and geothermal systems. To ensure congruence with core U.S. national interests, DFC should be encouraged to prioritize project financing for areas with the highest combination of strategic competition and energy poverty.

Third, the administration should launch an Indo-Pacific energy geoeconomics initiative. Electricity and fuels are a critical competitive domain, and the United States should leverage its competitive advantages across the clean and reliable energy sources and technologies it excels at: LNG now and, with the right approach, advanced geothermal and modular nuclear in the near future.

Writing 67 years ago, U.S. Sen. Hubert Humphrey noted that “[o]ur reserves of food and fiber, and our ability to produce such commodities in abundance, are resources to be prized; to be used boldly and imaginatively, and not be dribbled away.” Substituting “energy” for “food and fiber” makes the statement as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1958.

Energy offers opportunities for the United States to do well for itself, improve lives in allied and partner countries, and short-circuit its adversaries’ attempts to corrode and damage a global architecture that has delivered unprecedented prosperity and well-being over the past 80 years. An energy abundance agenda can help underwrite human betterment, peace, and security. The United States can pursue it in a fully bipartisan fashion. And most importantly, the work starts now, at home.

Amid rising concern about China’s and Russia’s growing influence in Africa and corresponding apprehension about the United States’ capacity to hold its own in the region, President Donald Trump’ executive order pausing all U.S. foreign assistance funded by or through the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has certainly muddied the waters further.

Whether or not the legal challenge to the directive is ultimately successful (a U.S. federal judge has ruled that the president “overstepped his constitutional authority”), the apparent determination of the Trump administration to make all foreign assistance align with “U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda” suggests that we are entering a new era with new rules of engagement in both U.S.-Africa relations and U.S. development assistance in Africa.

This shift presents an opportunity for African countries to reset their relationship with foreign aid as well as rethink the moral and philosophical underpinnings of African development.

Most of the immediate reaction to the presidential order has focused on the implications for U.S. geostrategic interests in a region where, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Washington seems to be on the back foot. Seen from this perspective, shuttering USAID signals an intention to retreat when the United States should be pressing forward and seeking to remain in the good books of its allies.

It also suggests a readiness to surrender the diplomatic initiative to geopolitical competitors such as China and Russia as well as a coterie of middle powers—including Turkey and the United Arab Emirates—that sense an opportunity in Africa.

Furthermore, critics have argued that dismantling USAID is self-defeating, especially insofar as it signals U.S. abandonment of the soft-power approach that has seen the country make gains in the battle for hearts and minds that is invariably part and parcel of international diplomacy.

Both of these criticisms have merit. With an average annual disbursement of about $23 billion annually since 2001, USAID has been the face and vehicle of American soft power since its establishment at the height of the Cold War, supporting initiatives in areas including vaccination and HIV prevention programs and support for civil society groups. It stands to reason, then, that the ripples from its evisceration will reverberate far and wide.

Likewise, the most likely beneficiaries in Africa will be China and Russia. Over the years, and more so since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, neither has been particularly shy in its objective of going toe-to-toe with the United States in Africa.

If their immediate aim is to curtail the U.S. footprint in the region, the long-term goal is unmistakable: to undercut the Western alliance with a view toward maligning liberal democracy—as Moscow’s reported instigation of coups across the Sahel, plus its continued material and moral support for the various juntas, attests.

Similarly, China’s celebrated Belt and Road Initiative and the growing number of Confucius Institutes scattered across the continent (as of July 2020, 61 of them had been established in 46 countries) are nothing but a smokescreen for the spread of Beijing’s preferred ideology.

However, it remains to be seen whether either has the financial muscle or, significantly, the appetite to cover the anticipated shortfall from the U.S. withdrawal of aid.

Despite all these criticisms, the most important consideration in all of this is how African countries themselves react and, crucially, whether they see the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID as an opportunity to accomplish two related objectives: first, to rethink Africa’s relationship to foreign aid, and second, to pose some basic questions about African development and the role of external assistance in instigating it. In other words, how can African countries make the best of a less-than-ideal situation?

Total aid to African countries since 1960 is calculated to be in excess of $2.6 trillion. While foreign aid, especially aid for humanitarian purposes, has no doubt saved many lives, worries about its unwitting negative impact on recipient countries cannot be disregarded. While economist William Easterly has shown that more often than not it tends to go to the wrong people, Georgetown University’s Ken Opalo has argued that it both robs countries of “the chance to cultivate policy autonomy” and helps prop up and prolong the lives of otherwise unsustainable political regimes.

Indeed, aid inflows into specific sectors of the African economy (the health care sector is a prominent example) has resulted in the near-total disappearance of the state from such sectors. In cases where the state is historically derelict, aid programs that take over its statutory duty as payer for services rendered effectively ensure that the state no longer has an economic stake.

While it may be true that none of this was intended, it does nothing to change the fact that reliance on aid often ends up poisoning the state-society compact in recipient countries, making the state less and less accountable even as both state and society depend more and more on a range of external agents.

Recurrent accusations regarding the systematic mismanagement of some of these funds—leveled not only by traditional critics of the aid regime but also, in some instructive cases, by aid groups themselves—raise the specter of foreign aid unwittingly bolstering the very elites it aims at undermining through support for pro-democracy efforts. The more autocratic the regime in question, the darker the underlying implications.

A related issue is the contested status of nongovernmental organizations, which are, at their best, indispensable vehicles for the circulation of transnational democratic social norms and, at their worst, elite contraptions with scant organic connection to society at large. Over the years, several African governments have enacted laws aimed at bringing NGOs to heel.

Rethinking their role in the aid-development nexus at this juncture would be a useful entree into a broader and much-needed conversation on the social impact of NGOs within the larger politics of civil society, taking into account the ever-present cleavage between popular needs and elite preferences in much of postcolonial Africa.

Beyond the nitty-gritty of specific policies is the philosophical and moral dimension of Africa’s protracted quest for development. While the authenticity of much donor solicitude for Africa can hardly be faulted, legitimate questions remain about whether the region can truly achieve a breakthrough under the current epistemological regime—a cornerstone of which is foreign aid—and whether continued reliance on foreign aid in fact puts the continent in permanent jeopardy.

This is not so much to deny the obvious benefits of foreign assistance, particularly humanitarian aid, as to indicate that over time, reliance of the type witnessed in a significant number of African countries is likely to create a kind of path dependence that may be difficult to overcome.

Far from being a new insight, the danger of aid inducing dependence—whether by weakening local capacity, eroding governmental accountability, or strengthening despotic governments against their citizens—has been the staple of scholarly and popular commentary on Africa’s developmental challenges over the years. The writings of George Ayittey, Dambisa Moyo, Graham Hancock, and Robert Calderisi have been particularly instructive in this regard.

Whether or not Trump’s foreign aid freeze is overturned by the courts, the move itself affords a historic opportunity for a serious reassessment of the role of foreign aid in Africa and a consideration of deeper moral and philosophical questions pertaining to the continent’s economic development.

As former Liberian Works Minister W. Gyude Moore noted in a recent Semafor article, “There is no future for an Africa that opts to outsource its ambition.” While genuine concern has been expressed about the potential impacts for Africa of the dismantling of USAID, the chance for a root-and-branch reassessment and reform is one that the continent itself cannot afford to miss.

While USAID’s closure will have many painful consequences across Africa, it is also an opportunity to open a new chapter in U.S.-Africa relations, one in which, because it is founded upon mutual respect, the possibility of success is not directly correlated to the amount of cash involved. For African countries that have long clamored for trade over aid, it can be the prelude to a golden age of African agency.

Trump has unintentionally given Africa an opportunity. The continent has nothing to lose by seizing it.