My Take | EU, US losing battles for Africa and Latin America to China
Developing countries showing they prefer investment and infrastructure development over the West’s moralising hypocrisy and badmouthing
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, it suddenly dawned on European leaders that they relied too much on supply chains for critical minerals from China. So they scrambled to Africa to try to invest and build independent supplies of their own.
Now they are surprised that their investments and high-level contacts with key African countries have lagged far behind the Chinese. Moreover, Africans are not terribly welcoming. The Europeans wonder why.
Over in South America, China has become the main trading partner and a key foreign investor with the majority of countries in Uncle Sam’s own backyard. Beijing has been expanding contacts, influence and power in a region long dominated, economically, politically and militarily by the United States.
By contrast, retiring US President Joe Biden brought with him to the Apec meeting in Peru nine Black Hawk helicopters for its war on drugs in the country, along with a donation of used trains for Lima’s metro system.
A promise of economic revival and even greatness or more war on drugs, American style; if you were President Dina Boluarte, which one would you choose?
But what’s worse is that while South American leaders were celebrating the port’s opening, the incoming Donald Trump administration has already threatened to take action against it, with a suggestion of a 60 per cent tariff on all goods passing through the port.
One rationale – and Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to Trump, certainly doesn’t mince words – is that the success of the Chancay port would embolden other South American countries to develop even closer ties with Beijing.
Trump’s nominated secretary of state Marco Rubio, a hardliner, is set to treat South America much like Cuba, with a big stick and few carrots.
Twenty-two Latin American and Caribbean countries have signed up to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. In Africa, 52 out of 54 countries have joined it.
But what about Chinese debt trap diplomacy and neo-imperialism that the West, but especially the US, have warned them against?
Perhaps those South American and African leaders are all idiots. Or else they can tell realities from Western hogwash. Who knows?
Remember a video clip of an interview between Hage Geingob, the late president of Namibia, and a former president of the German parliament that went viral online last year?
“What’s your problem with that?” Geingob asked. “Every time a Westerner comes, it’s all about the Chinese.”
A 2022 supply chain deal between the EU and Namibia – which is rich in many critical minerals – was billed at the time as a breakthrough, followed by similar deals with the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies most of the world’s cobalt, copper-rich Zambia and Rwanda, which is also rich in multiple critical minerals and metals.
Germany constructed its first concentration camps and committed its first genocides against the indigenous Hereros and Namas in Namibia during the first decade of the 20th century. They were precursors to the Nazi horrors. Leopold II of Belgium was directly responsible for the torture and murders of millions in the Congo.
Imaginary Chinese imperialism looks more like a projection by the West of its own crimes.