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3 Titans make Africa
their stomping ground By Bright B Simons,
Evans Lartey and Franklin Cudjoe
ACCRA, Ghana
- Last month, the administration of US President
George W Bush gave itself about 18 months to
establish a unified military command for the
entire African continent save for those parts of
North Africa, notably Egypt, vital to America's
strategic Middle East goals.
The US
diplomatic machine in Africa was thus revved up to
ensure a successful rollout of the plan. Recent
events, not helped by
former
ambassador John Bolton's antics at the United
Nations, may cause some to dismiss the efficacy of
US diplomacy to
achieve anything beyond elite acquiescence. But
those who think so would do well to recall
America's long-standing ability to ingratiate
itself with supposed "inferiors" when the
geopolitics is right.
As everyone knows,
having been served with daily reminders for many
months now, China too is on a diplomatic offensive
across Africa. A crucial component of that
diplomacy has to do with military cooperation.
So assuming that these campaigns are no
blips on the radar and that both superpowers are
equipped to be successful in the diplomatic
struggle, what will follow from that in terms of
actual practical results on the ground?
How will Beijing react to the United
States' sudden enthusiasm in expanding its
military presence in Africa? Will Chinese rulers
take the word of America's pro-administration
theorists for it, that this has nothing to do with
China per se but is entirely the result of growing
US reliance on West Africa's cleaner (both
chemically and politically) petroleum and its
security concerns in the Horn of Africa?
Or will China see it as nothing but
another manifestation of US paranoia about the
implications of China's rise? Will Beijing read
this to mean that the US intends to put another
bolt into its speculated framework of
"containment"?
It is easy to let the
imagination run amok. Imagine a confrontation over
Taiwan in 2015. Let's say that by this time the US
has obtained 25% of its oil (the current figure is
15%) from the massive offshore fields in the Gulf
of Guinea off the coast of West Africa, while
China has obtained 32.5% (the current figure is
25%) mainly from Sudan, Chad and Angola.
This is an easy extrapolation to make
given current developments on the ground.
Strategically speaking, Africa will thus be split
into two spheres of influence - an American west
and a Chinese east. However, it is not this
simple, as the US maintains the bulk of its
security infrastructure in the east, and China's
recent investments in Nigeria mean it will have
significant interests in the west regardless how
such zones of influence map out in actuality. But
for argument's sake, let's stick to a simplistic
demarcation of Africa into two geopolitical
hemispheres.
Two metaphors immediately
spring to mind. The first is the partitioning of
Africa by the great European powers before World
War I. This is clearly nonsense, as that
partitioning had the effect of eliminating
competition - at least overtly - among the
contending rivals.
The second and
seemingly more appropriate analogy must be the
Cold War. But what the Cold War teaches us about
zones of influence seems dated in the presence of
contemporary global politics. Thus were the US to
collide with China over Taiwan, North Korea or
Central Asia in the coming years, it is unlikely
that proxy wars, after the fashion of Angola and
Mozambique, would feature in the African context.
It is more likely, as hinted already, that
petropolitics by that stage will unfurl a wider,
more 21st-century spectrum of rivalry across
Africa involving multiple players: multinationals,
resource nationalists, ethnic factionalists,
private armies and warlords, and international
mercenaries, in no clear order of emphasis.
Prudence will suggest that we be immensely
cautious, therefore, in making clean-cut
projections of likely scenarios as to the nature
of the evolving Sino-American competition over
African oil. The situation is characterized by
various murky security interests, is in constant
flux, and is by no means even the cardinal feature
in the landscape of Africa's growing oil
importance. We would dismiss the Taiwan
simulation, then.
We should be similarly
restrained in our bid to piece together disparate
trends to obtain a comprehensive picture of how
oil relates to global rather than local security
concerns for the world powers under discussion.
Often oil has been equated to power, but not
technology, infrastructure or industrial
diversification, although these are equally
significant in strategic terms.
For
instance, Chinese oil firms' request to have
Beijing station troops in Sudan may have been
impelled by calculations that this approach is
more cost-effective and reliable than engaging
Western private security firms to protect oil
installations. It also underlines the fact that
just as there are no world-class Chinese
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