The United States and China's Foreign Policy in Africa

What role should the United States play in Africa? This question was recently raised in the popular press because President Obama was visiting Africa. While that is an important question, the real question should be whether the United States should continue to allow China to play an ever more important role in Africa without it? That question is paramount because it also raises other issues. As Martin Jacques pointed out in When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin Press, 2012, "China's impact on Africa has so far been overwhelmingly positive. Indeed, it is worth asking the question as to where Africa would be without Chinese involvement: the continent had attracted little interest from the West since the mid-1970s and what aid it did receive was subject to the highly politicized conditions of the Washington Consensus. With the West having little to offer and the Soviet Union having disappeared, China stepped into what was in many respects a vacuum. Its positive impact has been felt in various ways." (425)

So if Jacque is correct about China's positive impact, what should the United States do to either help or hinder the process? 

The problem is that unlike China, the United States has no long term foreign affairs strategy for any issue, including China and Africa. Instead, the United States State Department simply puts out fires as best it can and the Intelligence Community is tasked with providing near real time analysis of current affairs instead of determining long range probability or historical awareness. 

The State Department policy seems to be that as long as peaceful talks continue, then no war will break out. As far as the State Department is concerned, that is a good thing because in most cases as long as everyone is talking, the status quo remains. Unfortunately, as we all know today, the status quo often means some very bad people remain in charge of countries until a popular uprising take place. Then the United States is seen as the bad guy because we helped maintain bad regimes at the expense of personal liberty within those countries. With or without our help, the lack of a long term United States foreign policy is producing headaches for the American people. Therefore, without a central long term United States policy in place to curtail China's ambitions in Africa anything done may actually make things worse for America. So what may eventually happen?

There seems to be two schools of thought on the issue. On the one hand, Jacques thinks that,". . . China's impact on the world will be as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater, and certainly very different."(20) On the other hand, John Ikenberry believes current international policies and ways of doing things may eventually absorb the Chinese attacks in much the same way that the Irish absorbed every invader in the last several hundred years. 

Either way, what is certain is that the main difference between the United States and China remains that the Chinese tend to plan for the long term, producing a multifaceted plan of peaceful and sometimes not so peaceful forms of world domination. By engaging in political arenas not currently dominated by the West the Chinese are hoping to export their own brand of politics and life before the West has a chance to fill the void. For the Chinese, it seems to be working. For the Americans, there seems to be no realistic way of stopping them. Therefore, if Jacques is correct, sometime in the next several hundred years, the Chinese way of doing things will be the new standard.

So the question remains, what if anything should the United States do to counter the Chinese in Africa? Nothing for now, at least not until the United States leaders develop a reasonable very long term plan to counter perceived Chinese aggression. Unfortunately, with our current government administration, that is unlikely to happen.