African countries are currently reeling from the impact of the tariffs imposed by U.S President Donald Trump's administration. We live in an increasingly multipolar world, in which US dominance of trade and finance has been diminishing year by year.
Even if building a new financial architecture is far from a simple task, Trump’s tariff tantrums are an opportunity in disguise: setting in motion a process that has long been discussed but never treated as urgent until now.
Many countries will suffer from the immediate impact of lost dollar revenues, but we should resist the trap of defending a deeply extractive system that has inflicted a crippling combination of high foreign debt, underinvestment and climate calamities upon countries in Africa.
