Skip to main content

TRUMP THREATENS TO FORCE AFRICA TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE US AND CHINA




By Gren Ford, GLOBAL RESEARCH:
The Americans wager that they can exercise veto power over African political alignments by force of arms, through AFRICOM’s massive military infiltration of the region.

“The ‘West’s’ political economies are spent forces, incapable of either keeping up with China’s phenomenal domestic growth or of competing with China in what used to be called the Third World.”

Donald Trump last week trotted out his war dog, National Security Advisor John Bolton, to growl and snarl  over China’s attempts to “gain a competitive advantage” in Africa through “predatory” practices that supposed include “bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive” to Beijing’s global schemes.

On 13th December, US National security adviser John Bolton laid out the new strategy in remarks at the Heritage Foundation, saying the U.S. will now choose its African partners more carefully. He took special aim at China, accusing it of wielding “bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.”
Image: AP.


Bolton gave his speech at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, a place that specializes in crafting social policies that appeal to white supremacist majorities within the U.S. domestic order. He could be confident that the Heritage audience knows little about the actual state of the world, holds facts in low regard, and gives less than a damn about Africa. There was no need for Bolton, the man with the comic mustache, to make sense with this crowd, so he didn’t even try.

The net effect of China’s investments in Africa, said the nonsensical Bolton, has been to “stunt” Africa’s economic growth. Only blocks away from the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, the staff and officers of the International Monetary Fund — the guys that actually do hold much of Africa and the developing world “captive” with loan structures and political conditions that stunt the ability of governments to serve their people — had quite a different assessment of China’s impact on the African continent, whose dramatic growth coincides with Beijing’s rise to number one investor.

China actually increased its contribution to the growth of sub-Saharan African exports, which helped cushion the impact on sub-Saharan Africa growth during the Great Recession.”

“Access to new markets for its raw materials has spurred Africa’s exports, which quintupled in real value over the past twenty years ,” the staffers wrote in their inhouse IMFBlog . “But maybe even more importantly, sub-Saharan Africa’s trade engagement with China and other new trading partners has reduced the volatility in its exports. This helped cushion the impact of the global economic crisis in 2008 and 2009, when advanced economies experienced a deep economic deceleration, and thus curbed their demand for imports. At the same time, China actually increased its contribution to the growth of sub-Saharan African exports, which helped cushion the impact on sub-Saharan Africa growth during the Great Recession. On the import side, access to cheap Chinese consumer goods, from clothing to mopeds, has boosted African living standards and contributed to low and stable inflation.”

China and its “command economy” fared far better than the rest of the world in coping with the “American disease” – the near melt-down of capitalist financial markets in 2008-09 – and thus was able to provide Africa and its other trading partners some respite from the chaos and near collapse that enveloped the West. Most importantly, the Chinese offered what even the Americans concede is a “no-strings” arrangement, attaching no political conditions to their loans and projects.

“China was able to provide Africa and its other trading partners some respite from the chaos and near collapse that enveloped the West.”

To be sure, China’s voracious appetite for raw materials to fuel its own miraculous growth is central to its global trade strategy. But the folks at Bloomberg, the American oligarch-owned financial network, testify to the broad and deep character of China’s African trade and investment policy.

“Although securing access to natural resources is surely one of China’s goals, its investments in Africa go beyond extractive industries,” wrote Bloomberg opinion columnist Noah Smith , in September of this year. “The sectors receiving the most Chinese money have been business services, wholesale and retail, import and export, construction, transportation, storage and postal services, with mineral products coming in fifth. In Ethiopia, China is pouring money into garment manufacturing — the traditional first step on the road to industrialization.”


There is no question that China’s deep penetration of African markets has caused lots of dislocation of existing African enterprises, or that China’s policy of importing its own workforces to staff major projects is cause for resentment among Africans in need of work. It is also true that Chinese entrepreneurs have flooded the nooks and crannies of many African economies, sometimes crowding out real or potential local small businesspeople. But it is generally agreed that China’s trade policies in Africa are not coercive or marked by “bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive,” as Bolton alleges. Rather, as Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) lead organizer Ajamu Barakawrites in this week’s issue of BAR,

“China provides African states a modicum of space  to exercise more effective national sovereignty than had ever been afforded them by the European colonial powers that carved up and unmercifully exploited African labor and land.”

“Although securing access to natural resources is surely one of China’s goals, its investments in Africa go beyond extractive industries.”

As if Africa and the world need to be reminded, it was European colonialism that robbed Africa of people and resources for hundreds of years. Colonial powers claim the right to exclusively exploit the material and human resources of colonized peoples, to treat whole regions of the world as national property. The U.S., as the world’s premier white settler state, assumed the mantle of protector of the international white supremacist order after World War Two, from which it emerged as the top industrial power. In the 21stcentury, however, the U.S. imperialist overlord has been crippled by the accumulated contradictions of late stage capitalism and its own hyper-corruption and racism-induced cognitive incapacities (of which Bolton and Trump are prime, almost farcical examples).

The simple, yet earth-shaking truth is: the United States and western Europe lack the capacity to mount investments in Africa that are conducive to the continent’s economic and social development. The same applies to Latin America, where China is the number one trade and investment partner. The “West’s” political economies are spent forces, incapable of either keeping up with China’s phenomenal domestic growth — which should be seen as Beijing’s re-assumption of its historical status as the center of the world economy — or of competing with China in what used to be called the Third World. The system is collapsing at its imperial center, the United States, which is incapable of investing in its own crumbling infrastructure.

“It is generally agreed that China’s trade policies in Africa are not coercive or marked by ‘bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive.’”

The United States does not have an Africa problem, it has a capitalism problem that is made more acute — at home and abroad — by its deep history of white supremacism and insular ignorance. U.S. elites wish they could muster the “soft power” to effectively penetrate and dominate the economies of Africa, Latin America and central, south and southeast Asia, but U.S. power is instead diminishing, daily. Except for the dollar’s artificial status as world reserve currency, the U.S. is no longer an economic superpower; it can only intervene decisively in global affairs by force of arms and military intimidation. China is truly a global economic superpower, capable of credibly launching a multi-continental Belt and Road (and maritime) new order in industrial production and trade – not a socialist order, but one that is far more equitable and voluntary than the western, neocolonial model — which it is offering to Africa.

“The U.S. is no longer an economic superpower; it can only intervene decisively in global affairs by force of arms and military intimidation.”

The United States offers only “more guns, more bases and more subversion,” in Ajamu Baraka’s words. Since the inception of AFRICOM, the U.S. Military Command in Africa, in 2008, Washington has placed its strategic bets on dominating Africa by converting the continent’s military class into servants of U.S. empire. The Americans wager that they can exercise veto power over African political alignments by force of arms, through AFRICOM’s massive military infiltration of the region. U.S. strategic thinkers are wagering that, should African nations become too enamored of the Chinese economic model, Washington can call on its dependent African war dogs to create regime change, or to sow chaos and genocidal warfare, as Uganda and Rwanda have been doing in the Democratic Republic of Congo for a generation.

John Bolton, a truly freakish example of the American that is always eager to annihilate non-white people, is threatening to exercise that U.S. military veto in Africa, with his warning to the natives not to get too close to the Chinese (or Russians — he threw them in the pot for good measure). That’s the meaning of his warning that the U.S. will now choose its African partners more carefully; it implicitly threatens to put some regimes and social movements on an enemies list. Bolton’s threats to curtail U.S. “foreign aid” have far more military than economic weight, since most U.S. “aid” is military, or contingent on military cooperation with AFRICOM.

“China is truly a global economic superpower, capable of credibly launching a multi-continental Belt and Road (and maritime) new order in industrial production and trade.”

U.S. “economic” assistance is hopelessly entangled with mandates that Africans contract with American corporations whose services are so vastly overpriced as to be worse than useless for national development. But such is also the case on the American domestic scene, where late stage capitalism cannot build even one mile of high-speed rail, while China has constructed 15,500 miles of ultra-modern railway, and is extending these veins of trade and communication throughout Eurasia.

African civil society will have to choose between a U.S. alignment that over-arms the continent’s militaries for the benefit of Euro-American multinational corporations, or takes advantage of China’s offer of structural development with no strings attached and a multiplicity of markets and investors — the freedom to shop around for partners in progress. John Bolton and his boss, being professional racists, are boorishly forcing the issue on Africa, but the Democrats offer the same dead-end deal, only in more diplomatic language.

“Late stage [US] capitalism cannot build even one mile of high-speed rail, while China has constructed 15,500 miles of ultra-modern railway.”

This is not a peculiarly African dilemma, or even strictly a problem of developing nations. U.S. elites have no program for their own citizens other than endless austerity and war. The corporate oligarchy is incapable of remaking the U.S. national infrastructure, despite the fact that tools for national regeneration are available and have already been deployed, during the Great Depression. Their only vision is of capitalist “creative destruction” devoid of security for the masses of people, and to prevail against foreign threats to their global dominion by force of arms. They have now weaponized the dollar through sanctions against everyone that disobeys U.S. foreign policy dictates, including putative U.S. allies.

If, in the end, bullies and abusers have no friends, then we are close to the end of U.S. imperialism.

Comments

POPULAR NEWS FROM THIS SITE:

CUBA CLAIMS CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS FIDEL CASTRO'S SON.

The suicide note left by Fidel Castro’s eldest son has rocked the Cuban nation this week, with the most astonishing revelation being the claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was his half-brother and the son of the late Fidel Castro. The handwritten note left by Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the eldest of Fidel Castro’s children, appears to confirm the longstanding rumor in Cuba that Fidel Castro fathered Justin Trudeau after a public tryst with Margaret Trudeau in 1970. “ Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning ,”  Cubadebate website reported. The death of the high-profile government nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, stunned the nation, however it is his “ explosive ” suicide note that has set tongues wagging in Havana. Amid a wide-ranging barrage of compl...

PRESIDENT RAMAPHOSA'S SON TO MARRY UGANDAN EX-PRIME MINISTER'S DAUGHTER.

Kampala, UGANDA: Former Uganda Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi is set to become an in-law at the Mahlamba Ndlopfu, the home of the new President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa. John Patrick Amama Mbabazi, SC (simply known as Amama Mbabazi , born 16 January 1949) is a Ugandan politician who served as the ninth Prime Minister of Uganda from 24 May 2011 to 19 September 2014. Image: NP. Mbabazi’s niece, Ms. Bridget Birungi Rwakairu who he raised after her father was killed in the 1980s, will soon be exchanging vows with the South African First Son Mr. Andile Ramaphosa, Mbabazi’s family announced yesterday. The wedding will be preceded by a traditional function known as “Okushaba” which will be held this weekend at Mbabazi’s home on Saturday. 36 year old Bridget Birungi Rwakairu is daughter to Shadrack Rwakairu and Peace Ruhindi. Rwakairu was murdered in 1983 by the UNLA soldiers just five years into his marriage with Mrs Ruhindi. In a statement, Mbab...

JOSE MOURINHO ANNOUNCED NEW TOTTENHAM HOTSPURS COACH.

London, ENGLAND: Former Chelsea and Manchester United boss Mourinho has signed a contract until the end of the 2022-23 season. "The quality in both the squad and the academy excites me," said the 56-year-old Portuguese. "Working with these players is what has attracted me." Spurs chairman Daniel Levy said: "In Jose we have one of the most successful managers in football." Tottenham reached the Champions League final last season under Pochettino but lost to Liverpool in Madrid. The Argentine, who was appointed in May 2014, failed to win a trophy in his time in charge of the north London club with Spurs' last silverware being the League Cup in 2008. Levy added: "He (Mourinho) has a wealth of experience, can inspire teams and is a great tactician. "He has won honours at every club he has coached. We believe he will bring energy and belief to the dressing room." Mourinho still lives in London and won three Premier League...

MALARIA VACCINE PROVES HIGHLY EFFECTIVE IN BURKINA FASO.

A vaccine against malaria has been shown to be highly effective in trials in Africa, holding out the real possibility of slashing the death toll of a disease that kills 400,000 mostly small children every year. The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months. The hunt for a malaria vaccine has been going on the best part of a century. One, the Mosquirix vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, has been through lengthy clinical trials but is only partially effective, preventing 39% of malaria cases and 29% of severe malaria cases among small children in Africa over four years. It is being piloted by the World  Health  Organization in parts of Kenya, Ghana and Malawi. The Oxford vaccine is the first to meet the WHO goal of 75% efficacy against the mosquito-borne parasite disease. Larger trials are now beginning, involving 4,800 children in four countries. Prof ...

A 26-YEARS-OLD WOMAN ADOPTS 14 AFRICAN ORPHANS.

London, ENGLAND: A young British woman has become mum to a staggering 14 Tanzanian children she met after volunteering in an orphanage on her gap year. Letty McMaster, 26, was just 18 years old when a month-long trip volunteering at an orphanage in Africa changed her life forever. She ended up staying for three years to support the children she had met, and when the orphanage shut down, Letty took in nine youngsters who would have been left homeless. Seven years on, she lives with the children after becoming legal guardian to them ALL - as well as five more kids she met on the streets or at a safe house she runs. Letty McMaster. Letty, from Tunbridge Wells, Kent,  said:  "These children are my whole life, I raise them all on my own and they keep me going through the long hours of juggling everything. "I'd always had in mind that I wanted to help street children so my family and friends weren't surprised but I never expected to end up doing all this. " I am the pa...

SOUTH AFRICA'S RICHEST WOMAN OFFERS 1.4 MILLION RAND REWARD FOR ZUMA'S SON & GUPTA.

One of the South Africa's richest women Magda Wierzycka is offering R1.4 million of her own money to help authorities track down and arrest Ajay Gupta and Jacob Zuma’s son Duduzane who are understood to be fugitives. The CEO of Sygnia Group and former head of institutional business at Coronation Fund Managers and former CEO of the African Harvest Group is adamant that this is a reward and not a bounty. “A bounty is a concept of hunting for people. The idea here is that people keep their eyes open and report Duduzane [Zuma] and the Guptas if spotted  to the authorities so there is an arrest. This is not people hunting for criminals and people taking law into their own hands “I don’t believe that they are walking around in shopping malls. There are people hiding them, there are people shielding them. From my information I know that they are protected by bodyguards, they and their families and anybody else who might be sheltering these people can assist. It is an ap...

MICHAEL JACKSON SLEPT IN THIS GAS CHAMBER IN HOPES OF LIVING 'FOREVER'

Jackson swore by the machine, saying he took 'several long naps' inside the chamber with the hopes that he'd 'live to be at least 150'. He said the chamber made him feel like 'a new person' California, US: This is the oxygen chamber Michael Jackson famously used to combat the ravages of time - uncovered by DailyMailTV gathering dust in the back of a warehouse. The King of Pop posed for a now-legendary photo showing him lay inside the $100,000 glass chamber in 1986. He was quoted at the time as saying:  'I'll live to be at least 150.' Now, just days after the 10th anniversary of Jackson's death, DailyMailTV found the blue machine hidden away in a shipping container at a warehouse in southern California . The Sechrist 2500B hyperbaric oxygen chamber (HBO) has ended up at a company called Hyperbaric Modular Systems, which specializes in the alternative treatment. This is Michael Jackson's hyperbaric oxygen chamber...

NETFLIX KILLING DSTV IN SOUTH AFRICA COULD COST THOUSANDS OF JOBS.

South Africa is a leading video entertainment and internet company, MultiChoice has warned that if communications authority of the country proceeds with heavy-handed regulations for the pay TV market, it could cost thousands of jobs in South Africa. ICASA (The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa) is a independent regulatory body of the South African Government, established in 2000 by the ICASA Act to regulate both telecommunications and broadcasting sectors in the public interest. ICASA will hold public hearings on an inquiry into subscription television broadcasting services from 7-11 May, and MultiChoice has briefed the media on the feedback it will put forward. The company will argue that ICASA must not go overboard with the regulations, and that whatever it implements should apply to the whole pay TV sector – including services like Netflix. “Right now, it looks as though ICASA is focused only on what pay TV used to be, but it is moving from ...

CAR STOLEN BY KENYAN EX-MINISTER FOUND ABANDONED.

Nairobi, KENYA: A classic Mercedes Benz stolen from a showroom in Nairobi by former minister Paul Ngei has been found in a deplorable state. Photos of the car which were shared on social media showed it mounted on stones and without wheels, its bonnet wide open and its paint cracking up. The Mercedes Benz 300SEL registration number KNM 190 was a premium car in its heyday. Paul Joseph Ngei (18 October 1923 – 15 August 2004) was a Kenyan politician who was imprisoned for his role in the anti-colonial movement, but who went on to hold several government ministerial positions after Kenya became independent. Paul Ngei walked into the famous car showroom in Nairobi (DT Dobie) in the 1970s and drove away with the vehicle never to return or pay for it. At the time of its release, it was the world's fastest four-door car and when Ngei was pushed to pay for the vehicle, he would always refer the agents to State House and ask them to send the bill there. The rogue minister drove the car for m...

LARGEST SINGLE MASS CHILD SACRIFICE IN HISTORY DISCOVERED.

Lima, PERU: Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed what is believed to be the largest single mass child sacrifice in history. The bodies of 227 victims, aged between five and 14, were found near the coastal town of Huanchaco, north of Peru's capital Lima. The children were believed to have been sacrificed over 500 years ago. The discovery comes barely a year after  200 child victims of human sacrifice were found  at two other sites in the country. Archaeologists told AFP news agency that some of the bodies in this latest collection still had hair and skin when they were dug up. The children show signs of being killed during wet weather, and were buried facing the sea, meaning they were probably sacrificed to appease the ChimĂș's gods. It is unclear in which year the incident took place. The ChimĂș resided along Peru's northern coast and were one of the region's most powerful civilisations. They reached prominence between 1200 and 1400 before being conque...