OPINION & ANALYSIS
On the final day of US President Joe Biden’s Africa Summit, to which he invited most of the continent’s nations, Sputnik spoke with two experts on African politics about Washington’s goals in holding the summit for the first time in eight years.
Ivan Loshkarev is a specialist in the Horn of Africa at the Institute of International Studies and an associate professor in political theory at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MIGMO). He told Sputnik that Biden wanted to patch things up with Africa after four years of neglect by his predecessor, Donald Trump, including preserving the rapidly failing position of the West in Africa in general.
On the one hand, the Biden administration “wants to draw a radical line of demarcation between its own policies and those of the previous administration,” but on the other, he said, it is also driven by “the fact that not everything is going well for the Biden administration on other foreign policy tracks.”
“It is clear that the attempts of the Biden administration to impose their own version of resolving the failed situation around Ukraine failed. Since February, we have observed an option that the Biden administration has tried in every possible way to somehow direct in the right direction, but they have not yet succeeded, and the advancement of the Russian Armed Forces in Donbass testifies to this. In addition, the Biden administration was faced with a completely unsuccessful organized exit from Afghanistan, which was compared to the events in South Vietnam. And, accordingly, there is a need (for them) to then whitewash (their) image and find some foreign policy successes,” he explained.
At the same time, the Biden administration is “completely out of touch” with its Middle East allies, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which have begun pursuing a more self-interested foreign policy. SImilarly, Biden is struggling to convince South and Southeast Asian nations to “unambiguously take the side of the United States in the confrontation with China,” Loshkarev observed.
“The logic here is quite simple,” he said of the Asian states’ careful balancing act. “On the basis of such balancing, one can try, in any case, to bargain for bonuses from both sides. Washington doesn't like it. But, despite the visits of (US Vice President) Kamala Harris to Vietnam and Biden's recent summit with the leaders of the countries of the region, it was not possible to achieve any progress in the position of the countries of South and Southeast Asia. Accordingly, it remains possible for Americans to somehow grope for opportunities for foreign policy success in Africa, simply because that in all other regions of the world they can no longer achieve such success,” he said.
Returning to the Pre-Trump Path
♧ Loshkarev explained that former US President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy orientation meant a generalized withdrawal from the country’s commitments and engagement with many parts of the world, including Africa as both US Africa Command and US-directed economic programs were limited or pulled out of the continent completely. Even after Biden took office in 2021, it took his administration nearly two years to reverse some of that.
Loshkarev said that Biden’s goals in organizing the summit were threefold:
- Resumption of the continuity of US foreign policy with the methods first proposed during the 2009-2017 Obama administration, especially the “soft democratization” of the continent and engagement with business and youth spheres;
- Advancement of the anti-Russian agenda and attempting to consolidate support for anti-Russian resolutions in the United Nations, for example, as well as the conflict in Ukraine;
- To claim an “external policy success” that will draw attention away from its other policy failures both foreign and domestic, the continuing controversies around Hunter Biden, as well as the Democrats’ failure to hold onto the US House of Representatives or to significantly advance their position in the Senate in last month’s midterm elections.
“To be frank, American claims about Russia and China and their actions on the African continent are nothing new,” Loshkarev said. “Here it is necessary to recall that for most African countries, China is indeed the external economic partner. But in second place is India, the United Arab Emirates often, and these are some European states or the European Union as a whole.”
“Accordingly, putting forward some special role for Russia here, of course, is an exaggeration, because we are just starting to develop some industries, niches of cooperation with the continent,” Loshkarev said of Russia. “And so far, we cannot seriously compete with either China, or India, or even the United Arab Emirates. With regard to claims against China and the attempts of the Americans and, more broadly, westerners to undermine the credibility of Chinese investment or Chinese credit lines, it seems to me that this is an element of normal market competition. Here, Americans are simply afraid that China and, more broadly, the BRICS countries, can offer much more profitable products for the African continent compared to American and European ones.”
However, Loshkarev said there was a great contradiction between US rhetoric about African independence and the realities of its foreign policy, which is based on a belief “that the United States has some special responsibility for certain regions of the world, including Africa.”
“And what if the US does not show some activity in this region, then this region will, as it were, go to the opponents, adversaries or rivals of the United States, primarily China. And such an attitude can be called rather than neglect, but some kind of attempt to rationalize messianic ideas about one's own role in the world. By messianism, I mean here a complex of ideas about America's special place in this world, about that this is some kind of special social experiment, almost the most successful one, and that it is a beacon of freedom, democracy and some similar value orientations. Which is far from obvious given the domestic political situation in the United States,” the professor explained.
Saving ‘Françafrique’
The professor noted that a number of African nations were not invited to the summit. Those not invited have demonstrated an independence that the US “cannot like,” such as Mali, Sudan, Guinea, Eritrea, and Burkina Faso, including throwing off pro-European governments in coup d’etats.
Indeed, Abdoulaye Diallo, a columnist and activist from Mali, also told Sputnik that the Pentagon had “clearly expressed dissatisfaction with the partnership of Russia and China with Africa,” which has expanded in recent years to include Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic, among others.
“Africa today can choose anyone as its partner. Today, Africa is able to cope thanks to new partnerships, for example, with China, Russia, India and other countries of the world, which are ready to interact with many African countries in the framework of mutually beneficial partnerships,” Diallo explained.
“The US is afraid of losing face. They consider themselves the first in everything and want to control everything. Today they are afraid of losing this position. People are starting to discover the truth about partnership with the United States,” Diallo said. “Washington's attitude shows that, in the view of Americans, African states cannot choose their own partners. It is insulting, humiliating and shows contempt. This is insulting not only to African leaders, but to all Africans.”
By contrast, another country also considered by some to have suffered a coup - Chad - was invited to Washington. This, Loshkarev said, was due to a specific crisis facing an important NATO ally.
“The fact is that the collapse of French Africa, the so-called Françafrique, which is now actively taking place, is in many ways impossible without such a large state as Chad and also without such a state as Niger,” he noted, calling Chad the “key card in this house of cards.”
N’Djamena is the headquarters of France’s counterterrorism campaigns in the Sahel, and Niger is an important partner to the French wars as well as the host of a large US air base near Agadez.
“But if in the case of Niger the French and Americans maintain a large military presence in this country, which can stop any possible political or economic threats, then in the case of Chad there is no such military presence. And, of course, some kind of political support measures are needed here, which will make it possible to detain, stop or even reverse the collapse of the Françafrique - that is, the influence of the West, France and the United States, as allies of France - in Central and West Africa,” Loshkarev noted.
