Secretary of State Tony Blinken was in Pretoria, South Africa today, involved in day-long activities, including a “Strategic Dialogue” with his Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor, who pulled no punches on key issues, before the big event of the day, which was the presentation of the Biden Administration’s “new” Sub-Saharan Africa Strategy.
Blinken bent over backwards to present it as a thoroughly new approach to Africa, one in which the United States “will do with African nations and peoples, not for African nations and peoples.” As a senior State Department official had explained a day earlier, “we’ll give them a seat at the table,” to work out problems together. However, Blinken let slip a few zingers that reveal that their “new” strategy is based on the same old axioms underlying the rotting trans-Atlantic financial system, and is intended, among other things, to counter Russia and China’s influence in the region.
The new strategy, according to Blinken, will be based on a collaborative effort, focusing on four priority areas: 1) openness, by which individuals, communities and nations “choose their own path"; 2) working with African partners to fulfill the promise of democracy; 3) working to recover from the devastation of COVID-19, laying the basis for “sustainable economic opportunity.” Infrastructure projects? Railroads? Dams? No mention of that; 4) the transition to green energy and combating climate change.
Green energy, Blinken promised, will “power economic opportunity.” Soon, he said, removing “10,000 cars” from Ghana’s roads could become a reality. That sounds like former President Barack Obama’s 2013 admonition to students in Soweto for Africans not to hope for cars or air conditioning, lest “the planet will boil over.” (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/29/remarks-president-obama-young-african-leaders-initiative-town-hall)
These four points are “at the heart” of the Biden administration’s Sub-Saharan Strategy, Blinken boasted, promising that the United States will “not dictate Africa’s choices. Neither should anyone else.” But, of course, “the United States and the world will look to African nations to defend the rules of the international system that they’ve done so much to shape. These include the right of every country to have its independence, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity respected, a principle at stake now in Ukraine.” Whose rules?
Yes, any nation can choose its own path, its own model, Blinken said, and without naming it, attacked the Belt and Road Initiative. “We’ve seen the consequences when international infrastructure deals are corrupt and coercive, when they’re poorly built or environmentally destructive, when they import or abuse workers, or burden countries with crushing debt.”
As for democracy, no African nation likes authoritarianism, Blinken asserted, so better to look to the very select Summit of Democracies that Biden organized soon after he took office and the African Leaders Summit that the U.S. will host this December. This is the way to “build momentum” around democracy, he promised.
Blinken otherwise raised initiatives already presented to the world community that failed to address the pressing issues of debt, hunger, and COVID-19, including his own Global Food Security Ministerial boondoggle held at the UN earlier this year, and he, of course, blamed Russia at every opportunity for world hunger. He promoted Biden’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure, a pathetic alternative to the BRI, and the G20’s Common Framework for Debt Relief and various other programs organized under the aegis of the IMF and World Bank incapable of solving the problems of developing nations.
Blinken concluded by telling his audience that every one of the priorities he presented had been “championed by Africans first.” It’s doubtful that Africans would have envisioned the future of zero growth, austerity and enforced backwardness that is the actual content of this “new” program. (https://www.state.gov/vital-partners-shared-priorities-the-biden-administrations-sub-saharan-africa-strategy/ )
