The Empty Storefront:

What a Lagos Market Says about the Fading American Soft Power in Africa

By Ebuka Ifeanyichukwu

There was a “Chinese must go” protest at the popular Trade Fair Market on September 15, 2026. Nigerian traders who specialize in distribution chains importing varied goods from China accuse Chinese wholesalers of undercutting their profits by selling directly to consumers. It wasn’t the first time. Similar protests have been held at various markets in different parts of Lagos. And while the grievance against the Chinese is not news, the timing, this time, is not.

The current protest is occurring eight months after Washington closed the agency that, for sixty years, was the most profound expression of American soft power in Africa. Beyond moralizing, the pattern of this coincidence is worth examining.

Renowned American political scientist Joseph Nye developed one of the most popular foreign policy vocabularies which remains relevant: soft power—the ability to make others fulfill your demands through attraction rather than force or payment. It is under this type of power that culture, values, and institutions are categorized. And so did foreign assistance, which Nye described as one of the most effective tools of durable influence through which the United States has maintained its global strength and reputation.

For proper nuance, the closure of USAID should not be immediately understood as a foreign policy error, but rather as an instance of a state rightly reassessing its instruments of power. Every nation reserves this sovereign right to reassess its strategies for foreign relations, including foreign aid. This correlates with subsequent Nye’s theory of smart power—which does not expect nations to employ the same mix of hard and soft power but carefully and consistently reassess whatever strategy it employs.

The pertinent question then is, has the recalibration which saw the shuttering of the USAID in Africa really served the interest of the United States? The smart power strategy as theorized by Nye emphasizes the need to blend hard and soft powers, having considered reliance on either alone as playing with one hand tied behind the back. The “peace through strength” strategy and its transactional companion— trade and rare-earth deals in place of grants and partnerships relates more with Morgenthau’s political realism and Kissinger’s realpolitik ideology. That is, interests and leverage above values and persuasion. The legitimacy of this strategy is not the object of discourse; rather, is this a brand of smart power or is it hard power renamed?

Most Sino-African analysts, when not shaming the dependency culture of African leaders, are quick to point out how China fills the vacuum left by the US in this regard. But that is not really the case. The immediate bridge builders filling the vacuum left by the USAID are ordinary citizens like 40-year-old Josephine Angev, going round different communities in Benue State, Nigeria, volunteering as “HIV champions” knocking doors and tracking down patients who lost access to treatment. The evident truth being that Beijing was never going to replicate the level of USAID commitment in Africa. China’s joint pledge of $4 million with South Korea pales in comparison with a $115 million single US cut. As one analyst captured, “running large aid programs is not in China’s DNA.” Thus, the pullback of American soft power did not simply create an opening for another competing superpower, but rather a hole for Africans to fill by themselves.

But while China fails in replicating the U.S. benevolence in Africa, they are in the front for her minerals. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which accounts for roughly 70 percent of global cobalt supply, as of March 2026, signed a new mining cooperation agreement with Beijing, thus strengthening Chinese grip on the rare earth trade. Thus, for China, USAID’s closure and the commensurate reduction of Washington’s influence in Africa comes as an effortless advantage to the Chinese in maintaining control of the mineral trade.

Although the US remains in the race for rare-earth deals with Africa, it pursues its interest using hard power terms. Thus, competing for extraction rights rather than utilizing the soft power strategy which made earlier partnerships possible.

This ceded terrain is most evident in the very programs designed for proactive terror demobilization. Before the cut, USAID ran strategic interventions in hotbeds like Nigeria’s Lake Chad Basin — Borno, Yobe, and the communities around them with a view to block Boko Haram’s recruitment pipeline. Through vocational training, livelihoods support for endangered youths, and trust-building among communities, incidents of terror are reduced without a single shot fired. In USAID’s own language, change involves strengthening trust between communities and government and thus leaving “less space for violent extremist groups to develop and operate.” Typical application of Nye’s thesis: attraction and legitimacy, situated as a counterterrorism mechanism.

With the West African region worsening as one of the deadliest global terror hotbeds in the testimony of General Dagvin Anderson, the loss of USAID support deals a great blow to the global counter terrorism effort in the region. As noted by the Council on Foreign Relations, the dismantling and retreat of USAID programming create a security vacuum which members of violent extremist organizations like JNIM, ISGS, and ISWAP are happy to fill. This runs counter to the exact objective which peace through strength policy seeks to achieve and proves the point that hard power built on nothing costs more in lives and leverage.

The critique of peace through strength, thus, is not that it is ill-thought and cruel, but rather that it may misread its own philosophical underpinning. Nye’s view was never soft power in exchange for hard power, but a blend of both, because they share a symbiotic relationship. Hence, a foreign policy that pursues interest in trade and terror demobilization with hard power, bereft of the supporting instruments, is fundamentally incomplete.

Thus, beyond Nye, Morgenthau, or the Council on Foreign Relations, the protest chants in a Lagos market symbolically litigates the age-long argument about what kind of power lasts. Attraction, once used, is difficult to regain. Regardless of whose name makes the lease of an empty storefront, the bottom line remains that it is still empty.

Published October 1, 2026