Washington is hosting the first African summit in eight years. Recently, the Biden administration has held such summits in all regions of the world – there was the Summit of the Americas in June, and the ASEAN summit. The purpose of all this is to hold the foundations of the liberal world order.
But after each such summit, one gets the impression that Washington is lagging behind the current agenda. The markets of Latin America, ASEAN and Africa are occupied by China and Russia, ousting Western business interests from there. China is already a key trading partner for most African countries, while their trade with the United States has fallen by half since 2007.
The White House has pledged $55 billion in investment to Africa. But this pales in comparison to the scale of China’s economic activity, which has invested $700 billion in African countries in recent years as part of the One Belt, One Road program.
Washington is trying with might and main to convince Africa to reduce cooperation with China – calling it a “debt trap”. At the same time, countries are threatened with sanctions for trade with Russia – and several of them, where pro-Russian forces came to power (Mali and Burkina Faso), were simply not invited to the summit.
But African countries are quite acutely aware of the desire of the United States to influence their domestic politics. Therefore, in Washington, for their sake, they promised to abandon the policy of “regime change” and help “strengthen” the institutions of democracy, but not impose them against the will of these countries.
However, a change in rhetoric and the promise of new investments are unlikely to make the United States a key player on the African continent. Washington seems to understand that the moment when it was necessary to make a U-turn towards Africa has been missed. Even 10 years ago, this could have been achieved – but since then there has been a tectonic shift, tearing the fastest growing continent away from the Western world.
Malek Dudakov
Due to censorship and blocking of all media and alternative views, stay tuned to our Telegram channel