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A red carpet is rolled out in China for 48 African heads of state turning up in Beijing to sign business deals and celebrate a relationship founded on mutual profit and disinterest in one another’s domestic political arrangements. Thousands of miles away in Washington, the Bush Administration wonders (or, ought to be wondering) why it has been defeated in the diplomatic battle to isolate North Korea (it will rejoin talks with its nuclear capability now an established fact, and with the promise that the U.S. will discuss Pyongyang’s concerns over financial sanctions) — and is about to suffer the same fate over Iran, where the prospects for sanctions continue to dim. The connection between Beijing’s Africa fest and the U.S. diplomatic setbacks is not chaos theory, it’s the most under-reported story on the international front by a media caught up believing that the messy scuffles in Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow the defining battles of our age: Of far more profound consequence, as we are beginning to see, is the fact that China has its own foreign policy that involves the projection of power, mostly soft, well beyond its borders. It’s a geopolitics quite different from that of the United States, often at odds with it, and it offers nations in the global south choices that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. Remember, back then there was only one place you could borrow money, and the West wasn’t exactly in a hurry to buy your iron ore, copper, manganese and coal, or to extract your oil if that was going to cost it more than $20 a barrel.
Today, China is doing a whopping $50 billion in annual trade with Africa, investing all over the continent and offering those countries a model of international engagement quite different from one in which participation required reciting the catechisms of the IMF and backing the U.S. whenever the chips were down at the UN.
Although Washington seems mostly unaware of the dynamic — continuing to talk quaintly about “keeping the Chinese on board” for various U.S. projects to squeeze U.S. enemies as if China were still a provincial power whose only foreign policy concern was Taiwan — China’s geopolitics represents the fruition of the French foreign policy dream of a new “multipolarity” in the global system to contain and counter the influence of the U.S. “hyperpower.” The old assumption that China prioritizes its economic relationship with the U.S. remains true, but there are other priorities now, as well, ranging from competition for resources (particularly energy) to altering the geopolitical landscape away from the domination of international affairs by Washington and its often coercive policies.
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