Bottom Line
- The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War left US foreign policy adrift until the rise of China in the early 2000s. This has been especially evident in sub-Saharan Africa where China’s footprint has increased dramatically.
- The US-China rivalry has often shaped US-Africa policy in ways that are detrimental to US-Africa relationships.
- The United States has not offered a sufficiently concrete alternative to Chinese investment in African infrastructure development.
- China’s domestic economic problems have opened the door for the United States to change the influence dynamics in Africa if the government is willing to step up to the plate.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 there was a brief period in the United States where people envisioned the
unipolar world, where the United States was the sole remaining superpower with unchallenged supremacy globally. Not everyone envisioned this in the same way. Some, such as US diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick, thought that the United States should learn to “be a power, not a superpower, and revert to the status of a normal nation,” while columnist Charles Krauthammer declared the United States the “unchallenged superpower tasked with laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” What all seemed to agree on was that there was no longer a superpower challenger to the United States. Threats would be diffuse and likely based on cultural differences rather than ideology, but they could be managed. In many ways, though, US foreign policy in this immediate post-Cold War period was in flux.
China Replaced the Soviets as the New Bogeyman
That all began to change between 2000 and 2010, when the People’s Republic of China began its global economic ascension and its
challenge to American dominance in the international order. The ensuing rivalry, while not in the nature of the ideological and military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, has increased tensions between the world’s two largest economies, and nowhere is it more evident than in
sub-Saharan Africa, where the People’s Republic of China has supplanted the United States and the European Union as a trading partner. China has increased its presence in sub-Saharan Africa in investment, trade, cultural, and security sectors, and is dominant in acquisition of the continent’s natural resources and in export of Chinese goods and services. Between 2001 and 2020, for example, China’s merchandise trade with the region surpassed both the United States and the European Union, with 25.6 percent of the trade compared to 10 percent for the United States and 8 percent for the European Union. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global development strategy involving infrastructure development and investments in Europe, Asia, and Africa, have in Africa led to Chinese companies dominating
infrastructure construction projects. In 2020, for example, 31 percent of such projects in Africa valued at $50 million or more were built by Chinese firms, an increase from 12 percent in 2013. Western firms, which were responsible for 37 percent in 2013, only had 12 percent in 2020. In 1990, American and European companies had 85 percent of construction .
