[Q&A] Clinton or Trump: how will the new U.S. president respond to China’s engagement in Africa?

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden are the duo behind the China Africa Project and hosts of the popular China in Africa Podcast. They’re here to answer your most pressing, puzzling, even politically incorrect questions about all things related to the Chinese in Africa and Africans in China. If you want to know something, anything at all… just hit them up online and they’ll give it to you straight:

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Dear Eric & Cobus, I have been closely following the U.S. president election over the past year and I have been wondering if you think U.S. policy towards Africa will change and how either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will respond to what the Chinese have been doing in Africa for the past few years?

-        Tony from Nairobi via LinkedIn

Dear Tony, thankfully this seemingly endless presidential campaign will finally be resolved in just a few short weeks. Although it is far more entertaining to consider what a Donald J. Trump presidency would look like, I share the opinion of a growing number of observers who regard his chances of actually winning the election to be somewhere between zero and none. So, for the sake of brevity, I am going to focus my comments on what a future Hillary Clinton presidency will look like in terms of Africa-policy and specifically how she might perceive China’s engagement on the continent.

One reason so many foreign leaders were so nervous about the rise of Donald Trump was that he had no track record they could refer to in an effort to anticipate his future foreign policy. With Clinton that is definitely not the case. From her roles as First Lady, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State and co-founder of the Clinton Foundation we have a rather comprehensive insight into both her worldview and her actual policy positions regarding Africa during her time in power.

The irony that the U.S. is constantly warning Africans of the neo-imperial ambitions of the Chinese is just laughable.

For Africa, well, there’s good news and bad news. In contrast to her rival, she actually knows something about Africa and its politics. There is no question about her competence with regards to understanding the issues that range from poverty to healthcare and political reforms. So it should come as a relief to all of us that the United States will likely have a leader that has at least a basic understanding of African history, economics and social issues (one should never take that for granted in U.S. politics).

The bad news is that Clinton’s worldview regarding Africa is decidedly anchored in the 20th century. Just by evaluating her public statements, it is apparent that she consistently frames African Affairs within one of two contexts: 1) aid or 2) terrorism. Clinton, like her former boss Barack Obama, struggle mightily to see African issues in more nuanced terms, which should not come as a surprise given how low Africa is on the White House’s foreign policy agenda, a sad fact that will likely continue into the new administration.

Washington’s unwillingness to make Africa a foreign policy priority, as China has clearly done, will no doubt feed the steady erosion of U.S. influence in the region. With the White House consumed by its own domestic affairs and its foreign policy bogged down in the Middle East, African leaders will likely continue to reduce their level of engagement with the United States as other countries including China, Russia, India and Japan among others step up their game on the continent.

So when it comes to what we can expect from President Hillary Clinton, well, in my estimation it will likely be more of the same of what we have seen over the past eight years of Obama’s feeble Africa policy.

Clinton, for her part, has a dismal track record with regards to her understanding of China’s engagement in Africa. In a 2011 interview on Zambian television, when she was Secretary of State, Clinton darkly warned against a new era of Chinese “colonialism” in Africa, drawing on an unsophisticated, simplistic narrative of the PRC in Africa. Then, the following year during another African tour, she threw yet more shade towards the Chinese by suggesting that Washington was a far more responsible partner for Africa compared to Beijing: “America will stand up for democracy and universal human rights even when it might be easier to look the other way and keep the resources flowing."

This, of course, is a lie as evidenced by Washington’s 2015 praise of Ethiopia’s “democracy,” the decades that the US looked the other way from Nigerian human rights violations so long as it need to import West African crude or its guilt-driven policy of ignoring anti-democratic crackdowns in Rwanda under president Paul Kagame…. the list goes on and on. The reality is that the United States, including during the period when Clinton was Secretary of State, simply does not have the moral leverage to lecture the Chinese or anyone else for that matter about supporting tyrants in Africa while Washington itself keeps one eye on its own narrow foreign policy objections and the other focused on natural resources.

Finally, the irony that the U.S. is constantly warning Africans of the neo-imperial ambitions of the Chinese is just laughable. Lest we not forget, it is the United States that currently has military operations in at least four African nations (Ethiopia, Djibouti, Mali, Uganda) and it was the US drive at the United Nations to use military force to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi which ultimately led to one of the world’s newest and potentially dangerous failed states.

Listen, I’m not here to criticize the Americans as a way of defending the Chinese or supporting Gaddafi, who got the fate the he deserved. I just resent the duplicity that defines so much of U.S. policy in Africa where American officials, most notably Hillary Clinton herself, will talk about democracy, human rights and transparency and yet so often employ policies that have exactly the opposite effect. The bottom line is that the U.S. is no different than any other country who uses aid and diplomacy in pursuit of its own national interests.

So when it comes to what we can expect from President Hillary Clinton, well, in my estimation it will likely be more of the same of what we have seen over the past eight years of Obama’s feeble Africa policy and I am very doubtful that in this increasingly anti-Chinese climate in the U.S. that Clinton’s views on China’s presence in Africa will have evolved much either.

·       Eric

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