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Biden Visits Africa Too Little and Much Too Late
I read this morning that Joe Biden is fulfilling a “long-stated” promise to visit Africa, making the journey (finally) with scarcely two months left in his presidency. There’s something good to celebrate, namely a U.S.-backed initiative in Angola to develop a railway linking regions rich in critical minerals, such as copper and cobalt, with port facilities where these minerals can serve markets around the world, and, not insignificantly, customers here in the U.S. Moreover, the railway initiative offers an opportunity to wean Angola both from dependence on an increasingly left-wing South Africa and years of aggressive Chinese economic and political infiltration.
Of course, being Biden, he will also visit Angola’s National Museum of Slavery, and, one suspects, make the usual progressive nods in the direction of U.S. guilt for the slave trade — as if the largest component of the trade from Angola didn’t go to Brazil under Portuguese auspices, entirely unaided by American actors.
This kind of thing is in accord with other recent State Department woke initiatives in Africa, such as the promotion of LGBT values even when this is sharply at odds with local customs, values, and laws — respect for Africans only goes so far when it conflicts with the Democrats’ domestic political priorities. At the same time, we can’t seem to care about the brutal persecution of Christian communities.
Regardless of a presidential trip’s announced purposes, it’s easy to deride such visits as exercises in empty symbolism. For example, Biden’s cursory tour of the hurricane-stricken regions of western North Carolina — it’s hard to appreciate genuine suffering from a helicopter at two thousand feet. But sometimes symbolism matters and it’s doubtful that Biden’s current trip will do much to assuage the quite legitimate sense of neglect widely felt throughout Africa.
It seems that the only time we pay attention to Africa, at least sub-Saharan Africa, is when our neglect is penetrated by crisis. We developed positive ties in Niger and used them to both disrupt international terrorism and inhibit the flow of illegal immigration and then we threw it all away.
We stood around and watched as the Russians built naval ties to South Africa, and used the Wagner Group — and its GRU military intelligence-controlled successor — to spread Putin’s influence in multiple countries. As the story of the Angolan railway reminds us, Chinese penetration is everywhere, counterbalanced less by American foreign policy than China’s own heavy-handedness.
Yet Africa matters, and it matters more and more with every passing day. The economic arguments are obvious. While our first priority must be the development of mineral resources here in the U.S., the plain fact is that a full-throated commitment to U.S. economic prosperity — a commitment to “Make America (economically) Great Again” — would benefit enormously by tapping into Africa’s mineral abundance.
Preventing anti-U.S. terrorist groups from building safe havens similar to Afghanistan, the very thing we were trying to accomplish in Niger, also deserves our attention. An ounce of prevention, after all, is much better than something like a post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan cure.
However, by far the most important reason for a forward-looking and consistent engagement with Africa lies with the population tsunami that threatens the U.S. and Western Europe. Most estimates conclude that Africa’s population, which already stands at nearly 1.5 billion, will expand by a further billion in the next 25 years. A billion new mouths to feed, a billion new youths looking for useful work and meaningful lives, and among these, thousands upon thousands of the ambitious, the exploitive, the angry, and the corrupt.
We’ve already seen the signs. While we’ve viewed our own border crisis through a Latin American lens, we’re already seeing increasing numbers coming from Africa. There’s no reason to assume that the flood water already lapping up on the shores of Europe won’t pour over us as the tidal wave gains force in the coming years.
I am a strong proponent of building a wall along our border with Mexico, and I am an equally strong proponent of building disincentives to illegal immigration through employment restrictions, prohibition of remittances without documented legal status, and the arrest and deportation of illegals, starting with those who’ve committed violent crimes, but not limited to those. Illegal immigration, after all, is a crime unto itself and needs to be punished rather than rewarded.
But I am also a realist and I recognize that these measures, while necessary, will scarcely suffice in the face of the looming crisis. The mounting pressures will simply be too great. As I’ve noted previously, the Europeans have a moat more daunting than the Rio Grande in the form of the Mediterranean Sea, and yet the boats keep coming and landing and disgorging ever-increasing thousands of illegals. As long as there are those who see their interests served accordingly — and we’re not just talking smugglers, but also nations, like several North African countries and, in our own hemisphere, Venezuela — then the boats will continue to sail.
Are we going to sink them, opening ourselves to the charge of drowning innocent women and children, for such is the way that our own left-wing media and their political allies would react. The Europeans, understandably, have blanched at such a prospect and struggle with mounting the resources to intercept them at sea and escort them back from whence they came. We experienced similar challenges with Castro’s Mariel boat crisis.
We have some hard choices to make. We can ignore the problem and watch as, country by country, Africa is overwhelmed by its own fecundity and becomes a continent of “s*hole countries” similar to Haiti. We can stand aside as the worst of these descend into terrorist breeding grounds such as Somalia, threatening not only their neighbors but the wider world, ourselves included. We can watch idly as China compensates for its own resource deficiencies by colonizing the continent and turning it into a weapon against us.
There are no easy solutions, least of all to address an evolving, dynamic set of problems. But there are useful points of departure. First, we can dispense with the notion that we can buy success through foreign aid. Simply dumping money into underdeveloped nations has been tried, repeatedly, and it has failed with dismal regularity.
There will be projects worthy of support, such as the Angolan railway, but we have to be cautious and well-informed about where we spend our resources. Here again, we can’t achieve anything when our diplomacy consists of flying Pride flags outside our embassies and the occasional random presidential visit. We waste foreign aid because we don’t bother to inform ourselves about real needs and real possibilities, something that requires real, sustained involvement.
Moreover, our diplomacy must be “our” diplomacy. All too often our diplomats and area studies experts allow themselves to be captured by the interests of the countries they deal with, not by the country they represent. The corruption we must fear isn’t necessarily financial, but rather intellectual, representatives of the U.S. who have a greater affinity with the globalist view of Africa than with the needs of either average Africans or average Americans. We can’t get smart about giving Africans a reason to stay at home if our representatives are too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror.
We also need to understand that the key to economic development is order and stability. Where chaos reigns, corruption flourishes, and so does violent criminality. The need for order is so great, so fundamental to human existence — we live, after all, together in groups, rubbing shoulders with one another — that order always reasserts itself. However, absent genuine republican values — I use the term advisedly — the order that emerges is that of the strongman backed by armed thugs and angry throngs.
We can help with this, not by “building democracy” or by engaging in other similar fantasies, but by finding ways to work with the best among the African political leadership, rather than the worst. This, too, however, requires consistent engagement. Too often we simply stumble from one bum to another because we haven’t made the effort to learn who we’re dealing with. It also means understanding that the “best” aren’t necessarily exemplars of our own highest political ideals. It means recalling that “the best” is sometimes the enemy of an achievable “good enough.”
Donald Trump has a golden opportunity in the weeks and months ahead. We can have an Africa policy that reflects the values of Ilhan Omar and her ilk, one that reflects the feckless indifference of the outgoing administration. Or, we can start to build something enduring, something that will not only benefit Africa but, above all, benefit ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe.
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
State-Sponsored Biological Terrorism and Multi-Dimensional Warfare
Pete Hegseth v. ‘Sam Hanna’ and the Left’s War Against the Jews
Trump’s Election Sends the Swamp a Message
The post Biden Visits Africa Too Little and Much Too Late appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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