Sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st century faces one great opportunity and two great dangers. And American foreign policy will profoundly affect each.

If America wants to constrain tyranny and prevent anarchy in ways that are both just and sustainable, it must resist the temptation of empire and embrace again a vision of international collaborative peacekeeping.

The cultivation of civic virtue in America depends on artists and entertainers who imaginatively portray the human condition, honestly question the American regime, and constructively represent embodied civic virtue—whether in World of Warcraft, The Wire, Scandal, or elsewhere.

More than a third of self-identified evangelicals support Donald Trump, who touts a false story about an American general executing Muslim terrorists with bullets dipped in pig blood. These numbers suggest that American evangelicalism has a serious discipleship problem when it comes to the ethics of war and peace, and the name of that problem is not pacifism.

For America today to truly be America, it must be the world’s leading proponent of human rights at home and abroad. It is when it answers this great national vocation (first glimpsed by the nation’s founders) that America most fully gives expression to what, in seed, it has been from the very start.

While I am an optimist with regard to global poverty alleviation, my optimism is sorely tested when it comes to my beloved birth continent, Africa.

Bad stuff will continue to happen around the world in 2016. But there are good reasons to be optimistic.

Gideon Strauss explains how Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works has changed his mind on how developing countries should shape trade policies.

African public theologians have, as their vocation, the study of the relation between religion and public life in Africa… so I presume their work will cast light on what Africans in general (or at the very least Africans actively participating in Christian churches) feel and think.

The next American president should shape the United States’ Africa policy in response to three questions: How can America help constrain Islamicist violence in the African Sahel? What can America do to help counter state collapse in the roughly 34% of Africa where there is no effective state control? How can American foreign policy best encourage economic growth in the rising parts of Africa (taking into account China’s growing presence in Africa)?