What happened
President Joe Biden arrived in Angola Monday for a three-day visit aimed at strengthening U.S. ties with Africa and countering China's dominance in the region. Biden is the first sitting U.S. president to visit Angola and the first to travel to sub-Saharan Africa since 2015. He promised to visit the region last year, but the trip was delayed, reinforcing "sentiment among some Africans that their continent is still low priority for Washington," The Associated Press said.
Who said what
Biden is meeting with Angolan President João Lourenco in Luanda today and speaking at the capital's National Museum of Slavery, but his visit to the country will "focus largely on the Lobito Corridor railway redevelopment," the AP said. The U.S.-funded regional rail project aims to move copper, cobalt and lithium — critical minerals for electric vehicles, clean energy and microchips — from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Western markets through the Angolan port of Lobito.
China, the "top player" in Congo, lost out to the U.S. in the Lobito Corridor project but signed an agreement in September to revive a "rival railway" to Africa's eastern coast, Reuters said. The U.S. is concerned about Beijing's "dominance of the global supply chain for minerals," The Washington Post said, but Biden's team was "reluctant to publicly frame" Washington's interest in southern Africa "as motivated solely by its larger competition with China."
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What next?
Biden will visit Lobito to see the rail project and end what's likely his final foreign trip as president at a summit Wednesday with leaders from Congo, Tanzania and Zambia.
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