Titans make Africa their stomping ground

How will Beijing react to the United States’ sudden enthusiasm in expanding its military presence in Africa? Will Chinese rulers take the word of America’s pro-administration theorists for it, that this has nothing to do with China per se but is entirely the result of growing US reliance on West Africa’s cleaner (both chemically and politically) petroleum and its security concerns in the Horn of Africa?

Or will China see it as nothing but another manifestation of US paranoia about the implications of China’s rise? Will Beijing read this to mean that the US intends to put another bolt into its speculated framework of “containment”?
It is easy to let the imagination run amok. Imagine a confrontation over Taiwan in 2015. Let’s say that by this time the US has obtained 25% of its oil (the current figure is 15%) from the massive offshore fields in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa, while China has obtained 32.5% (the current figure is 25%) mainly from Sudan, Chad and Angola.

This is an easy extrapolation to make given current developments on the ground. Strategically speaking, Africa will thus be split into two spheres of influence – an American west and a Chinese east. However, it is not this simple, as the US maintains the bulk of its security infrastructure in the east, and China’s recent investments in Nigeria mean it will have significant interests in the west regardless how such zones of influence map out in actuality. But for argument’s sake, let’s stick to a simplistic demarcation of Africa into two geopolitical hemispheres.

Two metaphors immediately spring to mind. The first is the partitioning of Africa by the great European powers before World War I. This is clearly nonsense, as that partitioning had the effect of eliminating competition – at least overtly – among the contending rivals.

The second and seemingly more appropriate analogy must be the Cold War. But what the Cold War teaches us about zones of influence seems dated in the presence of contemporary global politics. Thus were the US to collide with China over Taiwan, North Korea or Central Asia in the coming years, it is unlikely that proxy wars, after the fashion of Angola and Mozambique, would feature in the African context.

It is more likely, as hinted already, that petropolitics by that stage will unfurl a wider, more 21st-century spectrum of rivalry across Africa involving multiple players: multinationals, resource nationalists, ethnic factionalists, private armies and warlords, and international mercenaries, in no clear order of emphasis.

Asia Times