National Interest

by Wesley Alexander Hill

    China’s investment in the East African nation has slowed, but it still remains the dominant investor.

    US-China competition has been escalating globally over the last 15 years and is likely to intensify as the race for rare earths and prime geopolitical real estate continues. Chinese influence in Africa has waxed and waned. During the 2020s, the continent’s enthusiasm for Beijing generally cooled. Yet, American policymakers seem unable to make considerable gains despite this tidal shift.

    Afrobarometer found that in 2014–15, 63 percent of Africans viewed China’s influence very positively and a slim plurality viewed the Chinese model of economic development as superior to the West. A decade later, 23 percent of Africans believe the Chinese model of development is superior. However, this isn’t a shift toward outright hostility, but toward qualified skepticism. The China-Africa honeymoon is over.

    This declining enthusiasm matters. It undermines Beijing’s claims that its developmental model is inherently different or superior. Africans increasingly seem interested in what China can provide rather than what China represents. This is vital because geopolitical influence does not disappear simply because public admiration declines.

    However, the end of a honeymoon does not mean divorce is inevitable or even foreseeable. Chinese influence is changing. Beijing is lending less money for enormous infrastructure projects while Chinese companies remain active as contractors, investors, traders, manufacturers and operators. The emphasis is shifting from sovereign financing toward routine commercial relationships. China’s economic presence can therefore remain substantial even as its public appeal weakens.

    Kenya provides an unusually useful case for understanding this transition. If you were betting money on an outpost of Chinese influence in the 2020s decades ago, you probably wouldn’t have picked Kenya. During the Cold War, Kenya was a Western partner in East Africa. Its neighbors pursued socialist experiments of varying intensity. Ethiopia embraced Marxism-Leninism under the Derg while its Somali rival also courted Soviet support. To Kenya’s south, Tanzania partially emulated high-Maoism by pursuing Ujamaa. Kenya followed a different path, maintaining a broadly pro-Western orientation and developing a capitalist economy.

    Nothing in Kenya’s history made Chinese influence inevitable or predictable, unlike in other African cases such as Angola, Tanzania, or Zimbabwe. That makes its subsequent relationship with Beijing especially revealing. Kenya did not inherit a political structure that compelled engagement with China. Its leaders entered the relationship largely clear-eyed, motivated by economic interests rather than ideological affinity.

    Economic penetration began during the mid-2000s, when Kenyan leaders increasingly looked toward Beijing for infrastructure, trade, construction and investment. The relationship initially had little to do with geopolitics. China could build things Kenya wanted built and Kenyan governments could accept Chinese participation without adopting Beijing’s political system.

    Then came the violence.

    The disputed 2007 presidential election produced widespread violence. More than 1,000 people were killed, hundreds of thousands were displaced and international pressure mounted for accountability. The world feared another Rwanda and in the first case of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine in action, a Western-brokered compromise and pressure led the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into the situation in Kenya. At this early stage, optimism abounded and it seemed that the international system could be legally proactive.

    The ICC’s first prosecution began under the authority of its founding prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo. Ocampo pursued cases against six prominent Kenyans, including future presidents Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. The cases collapsed embarrassingly and avoidably without convictions, turning into a circus. The ICC’s own subsequent review was damning. It concluded that Ocampo’s leadership was heavy-handed, that decision-making had become overly concentrated and that investigators were pushed toward predetermined targets rather than letting evidence determine whom to prosecute.

    The ICC’s failure in Kenya was paramount. If the ICC had shown restraint and been selective in whom it indicted, or if it had pursued prosecutions more vigorously, the outcome would have been better. Instead, the entire liberal democratic project and Western influence got the worst of both worlds: Western ideals were seen as weak and hypocritical and they became increasingly unpopular.

    In 2013, two political figures Ocampo had named as under investigation won the Kenyan presidential election and they didn’t forget it. Uhuru Kenyatta became president, with William Ruto as his deputy. The ICC retained theoretical authority, but its leverage inside Kenya vanished. Kenyatta soon snubbed the West and traveled to Beijing and then Moscow for his first state visits beyond Africa, where he signed a series of agreements with Chinese officials establishing a comprehensive cooperative partnership. This was a critical inflection point not just for Kenya, but for Africa. China leveraged an existing economic relationship, overcame a historically pro-Western orientation and became a politically useful alternative to the West.

    The ICC’s failure alone did not cause Kenya to embrace China. Beijing had been gaining ground for years. Western governments had been slow to recognize that economic relationships in Africa could become instruments of geopolitical influence. Washington and European capitals frequently treated development, governance and commercial engagement as separate policy categories while China did not.

    Beijing understood that infrastructure creates political relationships. It also understood the appeal of unconditional sovereignty in a continent so recently marred by colonialism and uneven economic relationships. Chinese officials could offer financing and construction while promising that Kenya’s internal political arrangements were its own concern. The contrast with Western governments was increasingly obvious to Kenyan leaders facing international scrutiny.

    Chinese influence consequently exploded as the ICC became increasingly unpopular within Kenya. The Standard Gauge Railway became the physical manifestation of this shift. The first phase connecting Mombasa and Nairobi cost roughly $4 billion, with 90 percent financed through China’s Export-Import Bank. China Road and Bridge Corporation carried out construction. The railway opened in 2017 and became the flagship infrastructure project of Kenya’s Vision 2030 development agenda. The project embedded Chinese companies, financing, equipment, technical expertise and contractual relationships within the commanding heights of the Kenyan economy.

    Yet influence eventually produces its own backlash. Kenya found that infrastructure could be expensive even when desperately needed. The SGR struggled to produce the economic returns originally envisioned, while the broader debt burden constrained Nairobi’s fiscal choices. China’s willingness to continue financing extensions also declined. The planned railway expansion toward Uganda stalled for years after Beijing’s appetite for additional lending fell as Belt and Road 2.0 emerged.

    Belt and Road 2.0 and its constrained fiscal choices didn’t make Chinese private-sector activity evaporate. In March 2026, Kenya revived the SGR extension using a new financing model. In June, Kenya signed a $1.2 billion agreement with China Road and Bridge Corporation to expand Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. In late June 2026, Kenya switched servicing Chinese debt to renminbi. China is Kenya’s largest bilateral creditor.

    Kenya’s ability to renegotiate also reflects Chinese missteps. Beijing overinvested in projects whose economic returns were less certain than initially assumed. Nairobi gained leverage because Chinese creditors had reasons to preserve the value of existing investments. But this opportunity and Kenya’s experience should not be mistaken for Chinese weakness.

    Kenya has also demonstrated that African states do not necessarily want to choose between Washington and Beijing. In March, while Ruto (who succeeded Kenyatta and was elected president in 2022) was negotiating for Chinese infrastructure assistance, Kenya continued negotiating a separate trade agreement with the United States. Ruto defended his engagements as necessary to expand Kenyan exports and reduce the country’s trade imbalance with China.

    That is the strategic environment Washington faces. If America is serious about countering Chinese investment, the Kenyan case is instructive. International action in a swing state must be either decisive or absent. Half-measures that inflame passions and serve political calculations inherently favor Beijing’s near-total apathy toward domestic politics. The ICC experience demonstrates the danger.

    Washington and its European partners cannot expect political pressure to produce strategic alignment without offering a credible economic alternative. Lecturing governments about governance while Beijing offers infrastructure is an unforced error. Chinese officials do not need to persuade leaders that China’s political system is superior. They only need to demonstrate that Chinese companies can build what is needed.

    The United States therefore needs an independent investment fund that gives the State Department something more useful than another policy paper. The State Department should have a development instrument that can promise tangible economic benefits when geopolitical circumstances demand them. It should support infrastructure, energy, minerals, technology, logistics and industrial development when a partner country is deciding between competing external powers.

    Dismantling USAID and gutting American development institutions through DOGE were mistakes. Yet Washington can still salvage the strategic logic behind foreign assistance by creating a more geopolitically aligned “Department of Aid.” Such an institution would not need to outspend China everywhere. It would need to recognize where spending matters.

    Kenya shows why. China’s influence can wane without disappearing. African enthusiasm can decline while Chinese companies remain entrenched. Governments can renegotiate contracts with Beijing while dependency on China endures. Political relationships can cool while commercial ties deepen. Kenya may be able to renegotiate with China. Whether America can offer Kenya, or anyone else in Africa, meaningful alternatives that actually change the balance of power remains to be seen.