As US election fever sizzles, pressure mounts to spread the militarist mindset deeper and wider.
African agenda: Clinton (right) visiting a clinic in a suburb of Cape Town. — Reuters
THE
heavy-duty globetrotting of
Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State
was bound to take in
Africa sooner or later. Now it has done so with as
much gusto and relish as a new colonial carve-up of the continent.
This
was the “dark continent” before it was “discovered” by the white man,
before the African could succumb to Western maladies from various
illnesses to the “structural adjustments” imposed by Western-controlled
multilateral lending agencies.
And Africa today is the continent
that Washington sees
China moving into. How could the world’s sole
superpower let that go unchallenged, particularly when the moves come
from the world’s fastest rising power?
China is seeking natural
resources for its growth, scouring the earth from South America to
Africa and anywhere else with potential. The US, coming from behind in
Africa, wants to get even and then pip China at the post.
Just what that means in real policy terms, or how that can benefit US interests, would have to be determined later.
So
Clinton goes to nine countries in 11 days, posing with
Nelson Mandela
in South Africa and holding hands around campfires and singing
Kumbaya from Benin, Ghana, Kenya and Malawi to Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan and Uganda.
All
of it made for good diplomacy and even better feel-good US news copy.
However, some analysts observe that the US just does not have the funds
to fulfil its African pledges.
Predictably, Washington denied
this was in competition with China over Africa. And like all such
official denials, it was as good an unofficial confirmation as any.
Clinton’s
African agenda was formally based on the White House white paper “US
Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa” produced just weeks before. This
policy document aims to strengthen democracy, boost growth, promote
peace and security, and encourage development.
Clinton asserted
that the US had had a long history in Africa (before China), and it had
been there for all the right and good reasons. But whether China is in
the picture or not, US policymakers have a problem in credibly claiming
both altruism and a long history in Africa.
Such claims of early
US engagements typically neglect mentioning the slave trade from the
late 15th century. This notorious denial of human rights through massive
human trafficking involved the kidnap of countless African men in their
prime over centuries by Europeans who sold them to Americans, setting
back African development for generations.
Abraham Lincoln
reputedly fought a civil war to end slavery only in the 19th century.
That showed how embedded slavery had become in the New World, requiring a
civil war to abolish.
Yet even this stain on
Western history was
predated by several decades by Admiral Zheng He’s three voyages to
Africa in the early 15th century. These were Chinese trading missions
that came to barter goods, not to extract vital human resources in a
criminal fashion.
Later,
Ronald Reagan’s administration
infamously did business with the international pariah state of
apartheid
South Africa, while branding Mandela a terrorist leader. When
questioned, Reagan called it “constructive engagement” to excuse his
collaboration with a racist Pretoria.
Other US experiences
elsewhere in Africa resulted in gross corruption and denial of human
rights. From Rwanda and Somalia through Zaire (
Democratic Republic of
Congo), Equatorial Guinea and Ethiopia to Egypt and Libya today, the
positive gains are not as rosy as they have been advertised.
More
lately, the Obama administration overturned 10 years of hard work
internationally by abruptly dumping a global arms trade treaty at the
United Nations. Both legal and illegal arms and munitions supplies have
devastated the developing world, notably Africa, which continues to lose
thousands of lives and more than US$18bil (RM56bil) a year through
armed conflict.
Clinton’s asides on China’s African presence come amid general criticism of
Beijing’s modus operandi
when doing business in Africa. China stands accused of not placing
conditions on its African hosts before proceeding to deal with them.
To
those intent on demonising China, however, Beijing can never win: it
will be condemned whatever it does or does not do. If China were to
impose political conditions on business deals, those who now complain it
is not doing so will again be the first to complain.
There is a
historical record for reference: once, an ideologically rampant China
offered inducements to factions in developing countries to support their
domestic communist movements.
Beijing has wisely refrained from
such preconditions. Should China still offer such inducements, if only
to make its own Communist Party or government look good?
Would it
really be better if China exerted pressure on its trading partners or
investment destinations to do what it considers important for its own
values and objectives? To do so would be China’s equivalent of imposing
US conditions on the developing world.
Some countries have also
been guilty of offering “aid programmes” that hire their nationals as
expatriates in the country supposedly aided. In contrast, China is said
to hire African nationals for work on infrastructure projects it builds
in Africa.
This provides local employment, while the
infrastructure once built will remain in those countries to produce a
multiplier effect for development through improved transportation for
trade, investment, tourism and the distribution of educational
opportunities and healthcare facilities.
Unlike the US variety,
Chinese aid, trade and investment come with no strings attached, no
crippling IMF or World Bank conditions, no military industrial complex
supplying weapons to one side or the other, and no promises or threats
of destabilisation, subversion, invasion, occupation, war or “regime
change”. And Western critics pick on Beijing for that.
African
analysts cite these as reasons why Africans will welcome China’s
presence more than a competing US presence. China’s business deals come
without the extra baggage of self-righteous preachiness and
ideologically loaded value judgments.
Like the rest of the Third
World, Africa may want to get as much as possible from both China and
the US. So, in practice, it will not be a question of one suitor or the
other.
But if Africa on its own is such a compelling case for
renewed US interest, with China not a factor at all as officially
claimed, why did Washington take so long to get interested? US
policymakers must know that the official narrative of a rising Africa is
not quite accurate.
To a degree, the Obama-Clinton act over
Africa has also resulted from Mitt Romney’s presidential challenge. A
leading US specialist on China, Prof David Shambaugh, finds that the
Romney campaign is building a foreign policy team based largely on
George W. Bush advisers.
This team sees China as a “global
competitor” over Africa, and which despite some diplomatic platitudes in
the preface, is relying heavily on greater military power. Lethal
fallout may yet land in other regions from a superpower tottering in
West Asia through teetering in South Asia on the way to Obama’s “pivot”
in East Asia.
US presidential campaigns traditionally focus on
domestic issues, but China and Africa are now generating a buzz among
Americans online. Obama may also win a second term, but Romney’s
influence on the campaign trail and Republican pressure in Congress may
yet set the tone for US-China relations to come, to impact inevitably on
East Asia as a whole.
Behind The Headlines By Bunn Nagara The Star
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