President Joe Biden has signaled he wants Africa to be a higher priority for American foreign policy. He has hosted two US-Africa Leaders’ Summits, promised to visit Africa himself, and sent both his wife and Vice President Kamala Harris to the continent.

The administration’s hypocrisy, though, undermines his outreach. Africans do not understand why Ukrainians deserve support against Russia’s siege and slaughter, but Tigrayans do not. While Biden pays lip service to religious freedom, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took Nigeria off the religious freedom watch list even as its president armed and transported Fulani Islamist militias to kill Christians in the country’s southeast.

While Biden speaks about human rights, he used the focus of the most recent Leaders’ Summit to relax, smiling with Africa’s worst offenders. Today, rumors swirl that Biden is willing to trade democracy and the sanctity of elections for a military base in West Africa.

Biden’s latest hypocrisy comes courtesy of the State Department. For nearly five months, sporadic fighting has raged in and around Las Anod [Laascaanood] the capital of Somaliland’s Sool district. At issue are demands issued by diaspora clan leaders to carve out their own state. The fighting has not occurred in a vacuum. It is Africa’s first China-Taiwan proxy war. Fighters the United States trained to take on the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Shabaab militia now fight alongside Al Shabaab against the Horn of Africa’s only democracy.

Enter Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Rather than side with Taiwan or democracy, his State Department effectively sides with China and those fighting alongside a terrorist group. On April 17, 2023, the State Department joined a European Union statement that called for a pause in fighting for negotiations and a renewed timeline for elections in Somaliland.

This is hypocritical on two levels. First, when Islamic State terrorists seized both Raqqa to be the capital inside Syria of its would-be caliphate and, subsequently, Iraq’s third largest city Mosul, the United States and its partners—both local and European—spared no effort to free the cities from the terrorists’ grip. There were no joint letters demanding ceasefires and negotiations with the Islamic State, nor did Washington or Brussels consider seriously allowing the Islamic State to remain in order to spare the casualties inevitable in recapturing the cities. I have visited both Raqqa and Mosul in the aftermath of their capture and the destruction was immense. To see Raqqa is to experience a flashback to Dresden at the end of World War II; Mosul was not much better.

Nor does the State Department or European Union give solace to Catalan separatists or their more violence Basque cousins. Would Spain adhere to an African Union demand that they stop arresting Catalan leaders or Basque terrorists?

What is truly over-the-top, however, is the chiding tone on Somaliland elections. It costs Somaliland $17 million to hold elections. These were on track for May until fighting forced diversion of funds. Somaliland has held multiple elections and, unlike in many African states, they are real and result in peaceful transfers of power between rival leaders. Contrast this with Somalia, which has failed to hold one-man, one-vote elections despite the US and European provision of more than $1 billion. By casting aspersions at Somaliland, it appears less the State Department is interested in democracy and more that it wants to distract from any substantive waste, fraud, and abuse investigation into its recent Somalia funding. Africans deserve to live terror free, and by the same standards of security that the rest of the world enjoys or aspires to achieve. Increasingly it seems that, for Biden, Black Lives Matter, except in Africa.

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