Why a strong relationship with Tanzania remains squarely in the American national interest
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee has advanced a bipartisan bill, led by Senators Ted Cruz and Jeanne Shaheen, to reassess the United States’ relationship with Tanzania. It responds to real concerns about the conduct of the October 2025 elections and their violent aftermath, and those concerns deserve a serious answer. But the response that best serves American interests is a recalibration of the relationship, not a breakup.
Tanzania is undoubtedly an important strategic partner to Washington. The country sits astride one of the world’s most consequential maritime corridors, with a coastline of more than 1,400 kilometres along the Indian Ocean and an exclusive economic zone on the trade routes linking Africa to the Gulf and Asia. As competition for these waters heats up, particularly during the Iran war, the United States has been deepening its security cooperation. In February 2026 it handed over a newly built naval maintenance facility to the Tanzanian navy in Dar es Salaam, aligned with the AFRICOM-led Exercise Cutlass Express. Tanzania was also one of only three nations to send troops to the stabilisation mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When others hesitated, Dar es Salaam deployed.
Then there are the minerals on which American industry increasingly depends. Washington has designated nickel and graphite as strategic, and Tanzania’s Kabanga nickel project, operated by the New York-listed Lifezone Metals and backed by the US Development Finance Corporation, is moving toward a final investment decision, alongside the large Mahenge graphite development. The logic is shrewd. Beijing has already shown that it will treat raw material dependence as a lever of coercion, including in its recent trade negotiations with Washington. Tanzania, as a reliable alternative supplier, provides the US with a strategic hedge. The same is true of energy.
Tanzania’s offshore gas reserves, totalling some 47 trillion cubic feet, and its 42 billion dollar liquefied natural gas project, with ExxonMobil among the consortium partners, would offer global buyers an alternative to Gulf supply at a moment when chokepoint risk has become a permanent feature of the market.
Commerce is following the strategy. Two-way trade in goods and services reached a record 1.4 billion dollars in 2024, more than a fifth higher than the year before, and American development-finance and export-credit agencies have been backing Tanzanian projects. It is worth noting that these agencies, the Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank among them, are precisely the institutions the bill, as first introduced, would have cut off.
The Senate Committee has acknowledged this and, amidst its rebuke for post-election unrest, continued to make the case for engagement with Tanzania. The bill which advanced is markedly more nuanced than first proposed. The blanket suspension of security assistance was dropped. Sanctions were narrowed to the existing Global Magnitsky framework, which is individual and discretionary rather than sweeping. The updated legislation will acknowledge demonstrable steps towards democratic reform, rather than just the final product. Most telling of all, the bill now contains a national-interest waiver allowing the Secretary of State to preserve the financing relationship outright. Congress, in other words, built its own off-ramp. It legislated for cooperation, not for severance.
These are canny decisions, because the alternative would be self-defeating. Disengagement would cede Tanzania’s strategic value to the United States’ biggest competitors. The bill itself instructs the administration to assess Chinese and Russian inroads in Tanzania, an implicit admission that retreat carries a strategic price. Tanzania is no longer a mere recipient of aid, and the United States is not its only suitor. A policy that isolates Dar es Salaam would accelerate the very realignment it is meant to forestall.
None of this ignores the real concerns which the bill raises about democratic backsliding. But Tanzania has begun to move. President Samia Suluhu Hassan established an independent commission of inquiry into the post-election unrest, chaired by former Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, who previously served as Chief of Prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It gathered evidence from thousands of citizens and presented its findings in April 2026. Government sources have indicated that criminal investigations will follow. The President has also committed to reviving the long-stalled drafting of a new constitution within her current term. These are the first steps in a process but offer far more than other regional governments, like Uganda, have attempted. They are more likely to succeed with sustained American engagement.
That is the spirit of the diplomacy already under way. After meeting Tanzania’s foreign minister this week, the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Allison Hooker, said the two had discussed “concrete steps to preserve religious freedom and freedom of expression, and finalize commercial deals that deliver real benefits for both our countries.” That is the right model: hold the line on principle while advancing a mutually beneficial relationship.
The United States has every reason to expect better of a valued partner, and none to discard one. A dependable friend astride a critical sea lane, atop minerals the American economy needs, and willing to send soldiers where others will not, is not a liability to be managed at arm’s length. It is an asset to be cultivated. The Senate has wisely left the door open. The administration should walk through it.
