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Joe Biden on Tuesday used the first visit to Angola by a U.S. president to promote billions of dollars of investments in the sub-Saharan African nation and speak at a slavery museum, where he’ll acknowledge the trafficking of humans that once linked the nations’ economies.
“The United States is all in on Africa,” Biden told Angolan President João Lourenço, who called Biden’s visit a key turning point in U.S.-Angola relations dating back to the Cold War.
Biden will visit the coastal city of Lobito on Wednesday for a look at the corridor’s Atlantic Ocean outlet.
The project also has drawn financing from the European Union, the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, a Western-led private consortium and African banks.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said the corridor’s completion is “going to take years but there’s already been a lot of work put in.”
That means much of it may fall to Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20.
Asked whether the project could proceed without support from Trump, Kirby said it was the Biden administration’s hope “that they see the value too, that they see how it will help drive a more secure, more prosperous, more economically stable continent.”
Kirby also insisted that the corridor was about more than simply trying to outpace Beijing geopolitically.
