President Trump’s administration is wise to China’s play for dominance in Africa and is overhauling U.S. foreign aid programs to fight back, national security adviser John Bolton said Thursday.
“Great power competitors, namely China and Russia, are rapidly expanding their financial and political influence across Africa,” Bolton told the Heritage Foundation. “They are deliberately and aggressively targeting their investments in the region to gain a competitive advantage over the United States.”
Bolton plans to counter those “predatory” tactics through a restructuring for U.S. foreign aid programs, so U.S. dollars flow to “key countries and particular strategic objectives.” The plan reflects Bolton’s customary distaste for “ineffective” United Nations institutions, but the former U.N. ambassador likened it to the American reconstruction of Europe after World War II.
“We need to make adjustments to address the pressing challenge of great power competition and to correct past mistakes in structuring our funding,” Bolton said. “In developing our strategy, we are revisiting the foundational principles of the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan furthered American interests, bypassed the United Nations, and targeted key sectors of foreign economies rather than dissipating aid across hundreds of programs.”
Any discussion of strategic Western engagement in Africa might evoke memories of 19th-century colonialism, an accusation even more likely to surface in the context of renewed “great power competition” in the region. Bolton confronted that criticism explicitly by identifying Russia and China as the neocolonialist powers in contrast to a relatively benign United States.
“The United States — although our adversaries, for decades, have called us an imperial power — we’re probably the least imperial great power in the history of the world,” he said. “But that’s not the view of some of the great powers we are competing with in the world today.”
China has staged some of the most dramatic uses of foreign funding to gain power, Bolton suggested, greased by “bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.”
Zambia’s struggle to repay debts to China could result in the Communist power taking control of the national power company. Likewise, in Djibouti — a small East African nation that sits at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean — China could collect on their debts by taking over a shipping terminal not far from an American military base.
Bolton warned that “the balance of power” around those key shipping lanes “would shift in favor of China” if that takes place.
“We are not among those powers that pursue dollars for dependency,” Bolton insisted. But China has launched an initiative “very systematically designed to tilt whole regions of the world — and particularly mineral-resource-rich areas — in China’s direction. This is a very important point for the United States and the West as a whole to wake up.”
While President Trump has drawn criticism for his reported disrespect for African nations, Bolton argued that his “transactional” reputation could prove useful.
“If it’s a little straight-talking among friends on what’s beneficial on both sides, you’re much more likely to get a successful outcome than pretending that it’s a one-sided relationship,” he said.
But that starts with U.S. policymakers abandoning their view of Africa as a charity case that lacks broader strategic significance.
“Africa is incredibly important to the United States,” Bolton said. “If we didn’t understand it before, the competition posed by China and Russia, among others, should highlight it for us, which is why I do think this is a potential turning point in American understanding of what’s in stake for us — not just for Africa, but for the United States in African affairs.”
