Near the end of an Associated Press report on Vice President Harris’ visit to Africa this week, John Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, was quoted saying this:
John Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, said this past week that African leaders are “beginning to realize that China is not really their friend.”
“China’s interests in the region are purely selfish, as opposed to the United States,” he said. “We are truly committed to trying to help our African friends deal with a spate of challenges.”
Kirby’s comment is an example of the mindset that explains why the U.S. struggles to improve its relationships with so many other states in Africa and elsewhere in the world. It is this mixture of self-righteousness, arrogance, and a patronizing attitude toward the other states that keeps alienating other governments instead of giving them reasons to want to cooperate with Washington. It is never a good idea to tell other governments what their real interests are, and it is usually a mistake to lecture them about their dealings with other states.
Kirby’s implication is that African leaders have previously been foolish or duped into thinking that China is their “friend,” but he suggests that they are wising up now. Claiming that African leaders are “beginning to realize that China is not really their friend” is remarkably condescending and insulting. African leaders are obviously able to understand that outside major powers are self-interested, and they would know as well as anyone else that there are no “real” friends in international politics. Even states with a long history of good relations are not really friends, but they have enough interests in common that they are able to work together constructively for their mutual benefit.
Then there is the insulting pretense, or delusion, that the US isn’t motivated by selfish concerns and wants to “help our African friends” out of some general benevolence. To cite just one example of how ridiculous this is, the US wasn’t so interested in helping our “friends” with access to vaccines at the height of the pandemic. Washington has tended to neglect their concerns and interests except when they can be shoehorned into either the “war on terror” or “great power competition.”
One of the biggest recurring problems in US relations with African states is the tendency to view them as means to some other end, and African governments are understandably wary of being used by great power rivals as part of a contest that will not benefit them. Pretending that the US is there to help “our African friends” while China is just out for its own selfish ends is not credible, and no African government is going to buy what the White House is selling. If the US wants to improve relations with African governments, it needs to stop insulting their intelligence and show them the respect that is owed to equal partners.
Read the rest of the article at SubStack
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
