When Global Trade Becomes a Weapon

“Today, everyone recognises that trade is as much a security issue as an economic one.”

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde made this comment in February 2026, while addressing the Munich Security Conference.

Although she was speaking about Europe, her words matter profoundly for Africa.

The continent’s 54 economies face a three-way tension that has no easy resolution.

Firstly, they must stay integrated enough with the world economy to grow. Secondly, they must pull back enough to protect themselves economically against the deliberate weaponisation of external dependencies. Weaponised interdependence is the use of a country’s position within global economic and technological networks as a tool of political influence or coercion against other countries. And thirdly they must remain open enough to diversify beyond commodities – which account for more than 60% of total merchandise exports in 45 African countries – if they are to build lasting prosperity and reduce their vulnerability to commodity price shocks.

As an economist who studies African trade and development, I don’t believe the answer to weaponised interdependence is retreating from the global economy. The real challenge for Africa is navigating this tension between interdependence, economic security, and diversification rather than simply choosing one objective and abandoning the rest. This will be one of the continent’s most important policy tests in the years ahead.

How interdependence became a weapon

To see why this tension is so difficult to navigate, it helps to understand what has changed. When the world economy was governed by shared rules and norms from the 1990s to the 2010s, deeper economic integration had some benefits. Countries that plugged into global supply chains and attracted foreign capital grew faster. Interdependence was an asset.

That is no longer the case. We have entered a new era that is being shaped by the deliberate use of chokepoints – economic and geographic areas that underpin the interdependent global economy – as instruments of coercion. In 2025, China imposed sweeping export controls on rare-earth elements, inflicting pain on importing countries deeply integrated with its mineral supply chains. The United States has repeatedly deployed the dollar and advanced semiconductor technology as weapons against adversaries.

The consequences can be sudden and severe. In early 2026, Iran disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz – the world’s most important geographic chokepoint, carrying roughly 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas on any given day, with no alternative routes.

African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda – each sourcing more than half their petroleum imports from the Middle East – faced an immediate and unexpected surge in energy costs. Their fiscal positions were ill-equipped to absorb it.

Fertilizer and food prices followed. Financial markets roiled and remittances from diaspora workers in the Gulf region to highly dependent economies such as the Comoros, Gambia, Lesotho and Liberia fell sharply.

The timing was particularly painful. Africa had just achieved its fastest growth in a decade – 4.5% in 2025, according to the IMF. The World Bank has revised this down to projected regional growth of 4.1% in 2026.

Today, the world that made integration so attractive is now vulnerable to deliberate weaponisation by external actors pursuing geopolitical objectives.

The three-way tension, unpacked

The tempting response to weaponised interdependence is to reduce it. Yet history shows that retreating from economic integration can be costly. The protectionist wave of the 1930s – when countries raised trade barriers and turned inward – contributed to the collapse of global trade and deepened the Great Depression.

Integration is not merely a risk. It is a source of the prosperity that makes resilience worth building in the first place.

The World Bank projects that non-resource-rich African countries will have per capita incomes nearly 20% above their 2014 levels by 2026. Abandoning engagement to reduce vulnerability would mean sacrificing the growth needed for long term stability and economic security.

Worse, if African countries attempt to reduce their vulnerability independently, their exits from shared global markets lower the value of these markets for those who remain. That encourages further exits, in a self-reinforcing spiral. This dynamic is already playing out in other countries. US “Buy American” policies have prompted the EU to advance similar “Buy European” measures. Economists call this the “fragmentation doom loop”.

In addition, building alternative supply chains domestically is costly for exiting countries. Replacing established international production networks requires significant investment and can raise costs for businesses and consumers. The IMF has warned fragmentation would reduce incomes and everyone ends up worse off.

Diversification and economic security also pull against each other. Economic diversification would involve shifting African economies away from commodity extraction towards a broader private sector, and spreading trade relationships across multiple partners. It is essential both for long-term prosperity and for reducing exposure to commodity price shocks.

For example, Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire, which diversified away from commodity dependence, are projected to have per capita incomes more than 45% above their 2014 levels by 2026.

By contrast, Angola and the Republic of Congo, which remained heavily dependent on oil exports, are projected to have per capita incomes more than 25% below their 2014 levels. They have still not recovered a decade after oil prices collapsed.

Natural resources alone generate around 62% of Africa’s GDP, according to the African Development Bank. Moving beyond that concentration requires both diversification and deeper integration which provides access to foreign investment, technology transfer and larger markets.

But deeper integration is precisely what creates the vulnerabilities that great powers have learned to exploit. The US-China rivalry and the Iran crisis have made this plain. The goal of diversification cannot be pursued without the openness that creates security risks. This is a genuine structural tension that policy must navigate.

Strategies for managing the three-way tension

The resolution of these tensions does not lie in choosing one objective and abandoning the others. Three strategies, pursued in combination, can advance all three goals at once.

Pursue security collectively, not unilaterally. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the continent’s most important instrument for avoiding the fragmentation doom loop. An integrated continental market of 1.4 billion people:

• creates the scale needed to attract diversified foreign investment
• gives African countries the collective bargaining power to negotiate with great powers from a position of greater strength
• enables the development of intra-African supply chains that reduce dependence on external actors, without sacrificing the gains of integration.

In the current environment, the AfCFTA is no longer primarily a trade liberalisation project. It is a security strategy.

Make partner diversification targeted. Not all trade relationships carry equal risk. The goal is to engage more strategically in the global economy by expanding trade and investment ties across a broader range of partners, particularly in sectors where multiple suppliers and markets exist. This reduces dependence on any single country and limits the ability of one partner to use economic ties as a source of leverage.

Build indispensability in critical supply chains. The most durable form of economic security is not reducing dependence on others – it is ensuring that others depend on you. Africa holds genuine chokepoint positions in several minerals critical to clean energy technology. Here are some examples.

The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for roughly 65% of global cobalt production. South Africa dominates platinum-group metals. Guinea holds the world’s largest bauxite reserves. Zambia is a major copper producer and Zimbabwe is one of the world’s largest lithium producers.

The indispensability strategy means building on this: processing cobalt in the DRC rather than exporting raw ore, developing platinum beneficiation in South Africa, and building battery supply chain infrastructure around existing mineral wealth.

Done well, this simultaneously advances diversification (moving up the value chain, away from raw commodity exports), strengthens security (creating dependencies that deter coercion), and deepens integration on Africa’s own terms.

The Hormuz disruption of early 2026 was a warning. It demonstrated that the vulnerabilities created by decades of open integration are real, that external actors are willing to exploit them, and that the consequences for African economies can be swift and severe. But the answer is not withdrawal. Africa’s growth story has been built, in part, on engagement with the world economy. The task is to make that engagement more resilient.

Jonathan Munemo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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