America Is at War Again. Russia Is Bleeding Out. China Is Watching. Africa Is Paying the Bill for All Three.

Three Powers, Three Trajectories

The global order is being reshaped in real time by three major powers pursuing fundamentally different strategies with fundamentally different cost structures. Understanding those strategies honestly, without the diplomatic softening that makes analysis comfortable but less useful, is the starting point for understanding what Africa is navigating.

The United States has been the world's dominant military and financial power for the better part of a century. That dominance has been maintained not only through alliances and institutions but through the direct application of military force across multiple continents over multiple decades. Korea. Vietnam. Grenada. Panama. Iraq in 1991. Afghanistan. Iraq in 2003. Libya. Syria. And now Iran. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes across Iran, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several other Iranian officials. The war has already killed thirteen US service members, an American airman is missing in action after an F-15E was shot down over southwestern Iran, and the US has struck more than eleven thousand targets.

The pattern across these interventions is consistent. The United States enters conflicts with overwhelming military advantage and unclear exit conditions. It achieves its immediate military objectives, often at significant cost, and then confronts the structural reality that military dominance does not automatically produce the political outcomes it was deployed to achieve. As the CFR's Michael Froman observed, paraphrasing Kissinger on asymmetric conflict: Iran wins if it does not lose. The United States loses if it does not win. The Iraq parallel is already being drawn by the analysts who observed Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule in 2003: you break it, you own it. The Strait of Hormuz, functioning before the strikes, is now broken.

Russia's trajectory is different in its mechanism but similar in its outcome. Since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been absorbing costs at a rate that its pre-war economic position could not sustain indefinitely. Western sanctions have reduced its access to the technology, financial systems, and industrial inputs that a modern economy requires. Its military has consumed equipment, munitions, and personnel at rates that have exposed the limits of its defence industrial base. Its international relationships have narrowed, with most of the world's economies either actively hostile or carefully distanced. In Africa, Russia has pursued influence through security arrangements, Wagner and successor group deployments across the Sahel and Central African Republic, and arms relationships with specific governments. These arrangements generate political leverage with the governments they support. They generate instability in the broader regional environments where they operate, and they do not deliver the infrastructure, investment, or supply chain integration that generates the durable economic influence that Russia's African engagement is supposed to produce.

China has spent the same period doing something different from both. While the United States has been absorbing the fiscal, reputational, and human costs of successive military engagements, and while Russia has been consuming its economic and military reserves in Ukraine and its diplomatic capital globally, China has been building. Trade corridors. Infrastructure financing. Supply chain positioning. Processing and refining dominance in critical minerals. Manufacturing scale that no other economy approaches. Vessel tracking showed that in the early days of the Hormuz closure, the limited shipping traffic continuing through the strait consisted primarily of ships flying the flag of Iran and its major trading partner China. While the global economy scrambles for alternatives and absorbs the shock of the Hormuz closure, China's energy relationships and its positioning within global supply chains give it more options than most.

The Hormuz Closure and What It Reveals About Africa's Position

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is the most direct and most immediate demonstration of what it costs Africa to be a price-taker in a global energy system it does not control.

The IEA has characterised the disruption as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Iran's closure has disrupted 20 percent of global oil supplies and significant liquefied natural gas volumes. Parts of Africa have already faced supply disruptions, and governments are implementing measures to reduce consumption. The UN aid chief has called for exemptions for humanitarian supplies to transit the strait, warning that supplies were not reaching areas of key need in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa grapples with higher fuel and fertiliser prices that exacerbate food insecurity, even as the conflict opens opportunities for oil, gas and infrastructure investment. The fertiliser dimension is particularly acute. Most African agricultural systems depend on imported nitrogen fertilisers whose production requires natural gas and whose supply chains run through or near the disrupted Hormuz corridor. A fuel price shock and a fertiliser supply disruption arriving simultaneously at the start of a planting season is not an inconvenience. It is a food security event.

Aviation has been significantly disrupted due to the closure of airspace on key flight corridors between Africa, Asia and Europe. For Tanzania, whose aviation sector Uchumi360 documented growing at 24.3 percent annually with Air Tanzania expanding to new international routes, disrupted air corridors and spiking jet fuel costs arriving in the same period as the investment surge is attempting to build connectivity infrastructure is a macroeconomic complication that no domestic policy can fully buffer.

Ethiopia's situation illustrates the compounding effect. Ethiopia's economy faces severe price shocks as it relies heavily on imported refined petroleum, sourcing the vast majority of its fuel from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. A country that has invested heavily in its own airline, its industrial parks, and its agricultural export capacity faces a structural vulnerability that all of that investment does not address: its fuel supply runs through a chokepoint it does not control, in a conflict it did not choose, started by a power whose strategic decisions were made without reference to Ethiopian interests.

This is the Africa premium in its most direct form. Not the credit rating premium that AfCRA is being established to challenge. The geopolitical premium: the additional cost that African economies pay for every decision made by major powers in regions thousands of kilometres away, because African economies have not yet built the domestic energy production, regional refining capacity, and strategic reserves that would insulate them from those decisions.

America Weakening: The Cost Structure of Perpetual Military Engagement

The assertion that America is weakening requires precision to be analytically useful rather than simply provocative.

The United States remains the world's most powerful military force, the issuer of the global reserve currency, and the anchor of the international financial system. These are not small things and they will not disappear on a short horizon. But military power and geopolitical influence are not the same thing, and the pattern of America's military engagements over the past twenty-five years reveals a cost structure that is generating diminishing returns relative to the influence it purchases.

Prior to the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, President George W. Bush sought and received congressional resolutions authorising the use of military force, with extensive public debate. By contrast, Trump's decision to go to war in Iran without a vote or even debate in Congress creates both constitutional problems and political challenges. The institutional erosion of the deliberative processes that gave American military engagements their democratic legitimacy is itself a form of weakening, distinct from military capability but consequential for the durability of the influence those engagements are supposed to produce.

Much of the Iranian political and military leadership is dead, but what has emerged is leadership change, not regime change. The objective of regime change, which Trump administration officials listed among the operation's goals, has not been achieved despite the assassination of the Supreme Leader and the destruction of more than eleven thousand targets. Iran has a new Supreme Leader in Mojtaba Khamenei and has demonstrated, as Froman noted, that with a handful of projectiles it can effectively close the strait by creating a chilling effect on shippers and insurers.

The fiscal dimension of American military engagement is the most directly relevant for Africa. Every hundred billion dollars the United States spends on military operations in the Middle East is a hundred billion dollars not available for the infrastructure investment, development finance, and supply chain diversification programmes in Africa that would generate a different and more durable form of influence. The Prosper Africa initiative, the Lobito Corridor investment, and the DFC's critical minerals programme are all real and valuable. They are also modest relative to the scale of Chinese infrastructure investment across the continent over the past two decades, and they are competing for Washington's attention and fiscal capacity with a military engagement that is consuming both at significant pace.

Russia Consuming: The Arithmetic of a Strategy That Costs More Than It Returns

Russia's engagement in Africa is real, active, and consequential in the specific contexts where it operates. The Sahel's turn toward Russian security partnerships, the Central African Republic's reliance on Wagner successor forces, and the diplomatic relationships that Russian arms sales and security cooperation have maintained across multiple African governments represent genuine influence that should not be dismissed.

But Russia's African influence is structural weaker than it appears because it is built on provision of a service, security, that generates leverage only as long as the service is being provided and the security situation requires it. Security relationships that depend on continued instability to justify the security provider's presence are not stabilising relationships. They are dependency relationships whose continuation requires the continuation of the insecurity that motivated them.

More fundamentally, Russia cannot offer African governments what they most need for long-term development. Infrastructure at scale. Manufacturing investment. Technology transfer. Supply chain integration. These are the instruments of durable influence, and Russia's capacity to deploy them has been severely constrained by the economic consequences of the Ukraine conflict and the Western sanctions regime that followed it. A Russia that is managing its own economic stress, diverting industrial capacity to military production, and navigating the diplomatic isolation that the Ukraine conflict has generated cannot simultaneously be a credible development partner for African economies seeking the infrastructure, industrial investment, and technical capacity that structural transformation requires.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Russia is spending influence in Ukraine faster than it is accumulating it in Africa. Its African relationships are maintained through security provision and political positioning that generates leverage without generating development. And the economic base from which its African engagement could eventually expand into something more durable is being consumed by the cost of the conflict that is simultaneously the primary instrument of its European influence projection.

China Accumulating: The Compounding Logic of Economic Positioning

Against the backdrop of American military engagement and Russian economic consumption, China's strategy in Africa reads as something different in both its character and its cost structure.

China has not been passive during the Iran war. Vessel tracking showed that limited traffic continuing through the Hormuz strait in the early days of the closure consisted primarily of ships flying Chinese and Iranian flags. China's energy relationships and its diplomatic positioning give it access to supply that most other major economies are scrambling to replace. Its strategic petroleum reserves, its pre-conflict stockpiling, and its diversified energy supply relationships mean that it enters the post-Hormuz period with more flexibility than its competitors.

More importantly, China's fundamental strategic position in Africa is not affected by the Iran war in the way that American and Russian positions are. Chinese infrastructure built across the continent continues to function. Chinese supply chains continue to move African minerals into Chinese processing facilities and Chinese manufactured goods into African markets. Chinese trade relationships continue to generate the commercial integration that is the primary mechanism of Chinese influence. None of this requires the Hormuz strait to be open. None of it depends on the outcome of the Iran conflict. It is embedded in the economic architecture of African development in ways that geopolitical events in the Middle East do not disrupt.

The compounding logic is what distinguishes China's model from its competitors. American influence in Africa depends on the continuing credibility of American commitments and the continuing willingness to deploy American resources in support of those commitments. Every military engagement that consumes American resources and credibility without clear success reduces the currency of American commitments elsewhere. Russian influence depends on the continuing provision of security services that require continuing instability to justify. Chinese influence depends on the continuing function of trade relationships, infrastructure, and supply chains that generate compounding economic integration over time regardless of what else is happening in global geopolitics.

The Iran war is accelerating this divergence. The Atlantic Council notes that the conflict opens opportunities for oil, gas and infrastructure investment in Africa, even as it exacerbates existing vulnerabilities. The countries positioned to capture those opportunities are those with capital available for deployment and relationships already established in African energy and infrastructure markets. China meets both criteria. The United States is fiscally and strategically consumed by a military engagement whose costs are still accumulating. Russia is structurally incapable of the investment scale required.

What Africa Can Do With This Moment

The convergence of American strategic distraction, Russian strategic consumption, and Chinese strategic accumulation creates a specific and time-limited opportunity for African governments that is distinct from the general leverage argument Uchumi360 has made across the critical minerals and trade architecture analysis.

When the dominant power is consumed by military engagement, its attention and resources are diverted from the commercial and diplomatic competition where African leverage can be exercised. When a competing power is accumulating influence through economic positioning, it needs African cooperation to do so, and that need is negotiating leverage. The window in which African governments can extract better terms from Chinese infrastructure financing, processing requirements, technology transfer, and supply chain participation is wider when China needs African cooperation to consolidate its position before American attention and capacity return to the competition.

The Hormuz crisis simultaneously makes Tanzania's domestic energy development more urgent and more valuable. A country with domestic gas production, hydropower capacity, and the LNG development that is currently under negotiation has more energy security than one entirely dependent on Hormuz-corridor imports. Every month the crisis persists strengthens the domestic case for the energy investments that Tanzania's development agenda already justifies on purely economic grounds.

The Lobito refinery gap that Uchumi360 documented in its analysis of Botswana and Zambia's refining equity stakes looks even more significant in the context of a Hormuz closure. East Africa's absence from regional refining infrastructure is not just a development finance gap. It is a strategic vulnerability that the current crisis is making measurably expensive in real time, in the form of fuel price increases, fertiliser supply disruptions, and aviation cost shocks that are being absorbed by East African households and businesses right now.

The Bottom Line

Africa did not start the Iran war. It did not close the Strait of Hormuz. It did not choose the geopolitical competition between the United States, Russia, and China that is reshaping the global order. But it is absorbing costs from all three of these developments simultaneously, in the form of fuel price shocks, food security pressure, aviation disruption, and the compounding vulnerability that petroleum import dependency creates when the world's most important oil chokepoint is closed by a conflict on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

The structural argument that Uchumi360 has developed across this entire month of analysis converges on a single point that the Iran war makes undeniable. Africa's exposure to decisions made by others, in capitals it has no influence over, about conflicts it has no stake in, is not a temporary condition that development will eventually resolve. It is the direct consequence of a structural economic position, at the bottom of global supply chains, dependent on imported energy, without refining capacity, without strategic reserves, and without the industrial complexity that buffers against external shocks, that requires deliberate structural change rather than simply more growth.

America will eventually withdraw from Iran, as it has withdrawn from every previous military engagement, with the costs absorbed and the lessons debated. Russia will eventually reach the limits of what its depleted economic base can sustain in Ukraine and in Africa simultaneously. China will continue accumulating, with or without competition. In each scenario, Africa's structural position, its exposure to the costs of others' decisions and its limited capture of the value its resources generate, remains the constant unless African governments use the windows that geopolitical disruption creates to build the domestic energy capacity, the regional industrial integration, and the negotiating coordination that would make the next Hormuz crisis, and there will be one, land differently on African economies than this one has.

That is not a distant ambition. It is the analytical conclusion of everything Uchumi360 has documented across East, Central, and Southern Africa.

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Sources: Public sourced Intelligence on 2026 Iran War Documentation. UK House of Commons Library US-Israel-Iran Conflict Briefing, March 2026. US Congressional Research Service, US Military Operations Against Iran's Missile and Nuclear Programs, March 2026. Council on Foreign Relations, Taking Stock of the War in Iran, April 2026. Brookings Institution, After the Strike: The Danger of War in Iran, March 2026. ACLED Middle East Special Issue March 2026. Bloomberg, Iran War Hormuz Closure Oil Shock Analysis, March 2026. Al Jazeera, Strait of Hormuz Closure Oil Price Reporting, March 2026. CNBC, Oil Gas Prices Iran War Hormuz Analysis, March 2026. Atlantic Council, How the Iran War Could Shift Energy Policies Around the World, March 2026. Wikipedia 2026 Iran War Fuel Crisis. US Congress Iran Conflict Strait of Hormuz Commodity Impact Report.

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Uchumi360 covers business, investment, and economic policy across East, Central, and Southern Africa.