China and 'Our African Friends'

It is this mixture of self-righteousness, arrogance, and a patronizing attitude toward the other states that keeps alienating other governments.

Near the end of an Associated Press report on Vice President Harris’ visit to Africa this week, John Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, was quoted saying this:

John Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, said this past week that African leaders are “beginning to realize that China is not really their friend.”

“China’s interests in the region are purely selfish, as opposed to the United States,” he said. “We are truly committed to trying to help our African friends deal with a spate of challenges.”

Kirby’s comment is an example of the mindset that explains why the U.S. struggles to improve its relationships with so many other states in Africa and elsewhere in the world. It is this mixture of self-righteousness, arrogance, and a patronizing attitude toward the other states that keeps alienating other governments instead of giving them reasons to want to cooperate with Washington. It is never a good idea to tell other governments what their real interests are, and it is usually a mistake to lecture them about their dealings with other states.

Kirby’s implication is that African leaders have previously been foolish or duped into thinking that China is their “friend,” but he suggests that they are wising up now. Claiming that African leaders are “beginning to realize that China is not really their friend” is remarkably condescending and insulting. African leaders are obviously able to understand that outside major powers are self-interested, and they would know as well as anyone else that there are no “real” friends in international politics. Even states with a long history of good relations are not really friends, but they have enough interests in common that they are able to work together constructively for their mutual benefit.

Then there is the insulting pretense, or delusion, that the U.S. isn’t motivated by selfish concerns and wants to “help our African friends” out of some general benevolence. To cite just one example of how ridiculous this is, the U.S. wasn’t so interested in helping our “friends” with access to vaccines at the height of the pandemic. Washington has tended to neglect their concerns and interests except when they can be shoehorned into either the “war on terror” or “great power competition.”

One of the biggest recurring problems in U.S. relations with African states is the tendency to view them as means to some other end, and African governments are understandably wary of being used by great power rivals as part of a contest that will not benefit them. Pretending that the U.S. is there to help “our African friends” while China is just out for its own selfish ends is not credible, and no African government is going to buy what the White House is selling. If the U.S. wants to improve relations with African governments, it needs to stop insulting their intelligence and show them the respect that is owed to equal partners.

As Chris Olaoluwa Ògúnmọ́dẹdé pointed out last month, the U.S. has some bad habits when it talks about African countries’ relations with China:

One such bad habit U.S. officials have continued to display since the launch of the U.S. strategy is the tendency to characterize Africa’s relations with China in patronizing terms, particularly when it comes to old tropes about Chinese debt.

Kirby’s remark about how African leaders are realizing that China is “not really their friend” is exactly this sort of patronizing treatment, as if these leaders can’t assess and balance the risks of doing business with China on their own without help from Washington. In Kirby’s original briefing remarks, he brings up the debt issue, too:

They get these loans — high interest, can’t pay them.  China says “Hey, bill is coming due.  So I guess I’m going to take this and this and this from you.”  And that’s starting to happen across the continent. 

Ògúnmọ́dẹdé explained why U.S. complaints about Chinese lending are so misguided:

As African governments frequently point out, they turned to Beijing for development financing not because they don’t understand what’s being offered, but because of relatively favorable loan conditions that Western creditors balk at matching. Washington regularly pays lip service to African industrialization and private sector development, but it has mostly failed to offer viable alternatives to more affordable Chinese credit.

So in addition to using clumsy and insulting rhetoric, the U.S. also doesn’t do much to back up all its talk. While Kirby may say that the U.S. is “truly committed” to helping, the U.S. doesn’t deliver that much except for military assistance and some humanitarian aid. The U.S. spends at least half of its time lecturing African governments about why they shouldn’t work with China, and then it fails to offer workable alternatives for these governments to consider. Before the U.S. gets carried away congratulating itself on what a good “friend” it is to African countries, it might want to start making a concerted effort at being a reliable partner.