Policing Africa: The Politics of Petroleum and the Africa Command
About this book
Fourteen years ago, China hosted the first of many Chinese African summits. In August 2014, President Barack Obama, accompanied by the Pentagon’s Joint Chief of Staff, welcomed fifty African leaders to Washington for the first US-African Summit. Despite many mixed and mutual interests, the cautious and deliberate US approach to engaging Africa emanates from an opaque history of the exploitation and the callous neglect of African issues of human rights, corruption, and justice in the continent. In more recent history, the United States is combating the transmission of HIV/AIDS, the containment of ebola in Liberia and Nigeria, and the Guinea worm disease. The United States is also combating the spread of religious and ethnic conflict, and the terror such conflict breeds. This renewed US focus on Africa is driven less by foreign policy altruism than it is by the continent’s economic dynamism, the prospects of demographic and economic growth, and the accelerated competition for access to China’s so-called “second continent,” where Beijing is rapidly building in African infrastructure and extracting African resources. President Obama pledged $37 billion to Africa in development aid, including funding for a modern communications grid. Much of this money will flow to the Pentagon’s African allies in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Liberia as well as to some of the continent’s most authoritarian regimes. Many African states are challenged by a combination of popular reform movements, ethnic animosities, and religious conflict. These challenges are exacerbated by economic inequality and governmental corruption, and will require the use of force to maintain the status quo.