Howard W. French
After my first book came out in 2004, I received a surprise phone call from an assistant to former United States Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, asking if I would meet with him to talk about Africa. Sitting together in his executive’s office at Citibank’s headquarters in Manhattan, he averred that if Al Gore were to win that year’s presidential election, he could return to a leading position in government, and he wanted to know if there was one initiative Washington could take to engage with Africa, what would I suggest?
This was a tall order, not least because I had not been told of his question in advance, but also because American diplomacy toward Africa has been marked for decades by a bipartisan failure of imagination—by neglect and by drift.
If I had to stick to one thing, as he insisted, my suggestion to Rubin was that the United States launch a higher education initiative for Africa that would bring thousands of students from across the continent to American campuses for free or deeply subsidized college or graduate school education, with the proviso built into their visas that they would not be eligible to remain in the U.S. for a fixed period of time after their degrees. This would help ensure these newly trained young people would take their skills back to their home countries.
This little moonshot of mine was premised on the idea that America is always at its best when it does good while doing well. Africans trained at top American schools in the sciences, in business and economics, in journalism and in law could powerfully contribute to the momentum already underway in much of the continent for meeting the immense educational needs of rising generations of young people. And in the process, the United States’ connections to the continent whose people and whose labor ultimately made the Americas an economically viable part of the West would deepen, as well.
My next non-fiction book didn’t come out until a decade later, but a great deal had already changed in the world, and perhaps nowhere more than in Africa. This was reflected in the new book’s very title, which explored the rapid migration of as many as a million people from China to various parts of Africa and spoke of it as that country’s “second continent.”
In the time between those two books, the United States had not only failed to implement anything remotely like my education proposal for Africa. It had, by and large, failed to find any other creative or impactful way of engaging with the African continent that would break the stale mold of the post-Cold War era, which has only allowed it to see Africa as an arena of terrorism, corruption and disease. Between 2003 and 2015, in the meantime, the number of African students studying in China had increased 26-fold, surpassing the numbers for both the United States and Britain, and now trailing only France. Lest one imagine this as a one-way street or paternalistic act of charity,some studies have shown that African newcomers to the U.S. have the highest rates of academic achievement of any immigrant group.
Three years after my look at China-Africa relations, my most recent book came out, this one about China itself, and its title, too, “Everything Under the Heavens,” was meant to be suggestive. China is now, albeit very belatedly, finally being recognized as a country with truly global ambitions—and one with the energy and political will to match. Like any big power, China’s actions stem primarily from an impulse to strengthen its own position and promote its own national interests. But as only the most successful powers manage to do, China has quickly mustered some strong value propositions that make other governments want to draw closer to it.
The United States is in dire need of new, positive-sum approaches to the world.
This merely starts with China’s recent calling as a builder of immense infrastructure projects, beginning in Africa in the 1990s but now nearly spanning the world through its huge Belt and Road Initiative. Add to that now a more intangible infrastructure: that of the internet and advanced mobile networks, in which its national champion, Huawei, has emerged as a global leader. As Washington is finding to its chagrin, other countries are eager to sign up with Huawei despite purported security risks, because its products are cheap compared to the Western alternatives, and because they are available right now. For a growing number of states, though, there is an additional reason. Far from worrying about China spying on them, they want to learn from China how to spy on their own populations. This isn’t how we normally think of soft power, but like it or not, that’s exactly what it is.
For decades, the United States was better than any other nation in putting forth value propositions that made other countries want to broaden and deepen their ties and associations with it. These were so effective that even when other governments wished to keep America at arm’s length, their people continued to feel an irresistible attraction.
That is changing with dizzying speed now. Just last month, a senior official at the State Department invoked a supposed “clash of civilizations” between the United States and China, promoting a tacitly racialized view of the world in the deluded belief that it would rally support in the West and beyond for Washington. “This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before,” Kiron Skinner, the director of policy planning at the State Department, said at an event in Washington. “It’s also striking that this is the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian,” she added.
Remarkably, the comments put China in the position to lecture the United States on what it has often taken as its own franchise: universal values. “We should hold up equality and respect, abandon pride and prejudice, deepen our knowledge about the differences between our own and other civilizations, and promote harmonious dialogue and coexistence between civilizations,” came the reply from the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
The decline in America’s value proposition is not, as some are tempted to believe, simply a matter of the Trump administration and its bumbling, go-it-alone policies, though. Under President Barack Obama, there was no shortage of rhetoric about the ideals of democracy and openness and respect for human rights, which have long drawn both admiration and emulation from peoples in far-flung corners of the world. But under Obama as well as other recent presidencies, there had been a failure of both energy and imagination about how to engage the world beyond a limited set of affluent, traditional allies. Beyond the preaching of virtues, or in the best of times, the setting of a positive example, in other words, the United States has been failing at offering ways of helping others to solve big, practical challenges of development and gain in material prosperity. It is as if the country has grown exhausted and inured to these very questions.
Some seem to think that cautioning others about the perils of engaging with China is enough, but they are mistaken. The United States is itself in dire need of new, positive-sum approaches to the world. And still for now, but not forever, others remain eager to hear them.
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