Another Month Passes With More Appeals For the U.S. to Get Engaged in Africa… If For No Other Reason Than To Confront China

In what’s becoming something of a ritual in Washington, every month or so think tanks and news outlets publish a wave of commentaries imploring the Biden administration to jump-start an Africa policy with a simple message: get in there, do something, anything really, just get going.

And if boosting trade or enhancing national security aren’t sufficiently enticing, the commentaries invariably reach deep into the deck to pull out the China card.

How U.S. Commentaries on Africa Policy Use China to Entice Policymakers to Act

• THE ATLANTIC COUNCIL: “China is playing the long game in Africa and has strategically invested in infrastructure projects including railroads, ports, dams, and hydropower-generation sources. But these investments could be the warm-up act for China’s entry into fields traditionally dominated by the United States—namely technology and banking—where it aspires to compete with American heavyweights like Microsoft, Boeing, Google, and General Electric. Such game-changing moves would play into China’s larger ambition of unseating the US dollar” — Ambassador Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center (READ MORE)

• COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: “The United States cannot be complacent about China’s decades-long, multifaceted campaign for access and influence on the African continent. Major powers’ interests in Africa encompass everything from concerns about geostrategic maritime chokepoints to the continent’s greater integration into the global economy, the promise and the peril of Africa’s demographic transformation, and the power of Africa’s voice and vote in global forums” –– Michelle Gavin, senior fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (READ MORE)

• NEWSWEEK: “As China fully appreciates, Africa’s 54 nations have a major say in how multilateral rules are written, including those that will be critical for addressing climate change, nuclear proliferation, global health, trade and sanctions. African countries represent the swing votes in international fora from the WTO to the WHO and the U.N. It will be challenging to advance President Joe Biden’s multilateral agenda given China’s economic hegemony and unprecedented sway over Africa’s leaders” — Rosa Whitaker, president and CEO of The Whitaker Group (READ MORE)

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The post Another Month Passes With More Appeals For the U.S. to Get Engaged in Africa… If For No Other Reason Than To Confront China appeared first on The China Africa Project.

source https://chinaafricaproject.com/2021/05/26/another-month-passes-with-more-appeals-for-the-u-s-to-get-engaged-in-africa-if-for-no-other-reason-than-to-confront-china/