By Adagbo Onoja
Imagining Africa under Donald Trump as he took power today for another four years as president of the United States of America should be the most legitimate of all concerns. Africa’s actorness in global politics is still the weakest in whichever metrics of power considered, be it structural, institutional, discursive or coercive. Subsequently, it is still the most dictated to actor by its Others. These defining features of African actorness have historical explanations which, in turn, explains why the continent’s future under a Trump is worth critical unpacking.
In any case, Africa’s future would still be a subject of concern and analytical attention even if a Trump were not coming to judgement. Not if the world is at a juncture that could be tense even at the best of time. The last great power security competition led to two world wars. The world is at that moment again, with a multiplicity of rising powers basically bandwagoning against the United States if we are conceptualising BRICS in the language of neorealists in international relations.
AU Headquarter Building, Addis Ababa
The argument here is that whether Africa needs or needs not to fear Trump 2. 0. depends on the outcome of what is clearly a rupture in American foreign policy right now. Two tendencies are clashing in the American lens on the world. One is Trump’s grand rhetoric of ‘Making America Great Again (MAGA) and what has even been the theory and practice of American foreign policy. Taking note of that confrontation is all that is possible now because the contingent nature of social dynamics will keep embarrassing the enterprise of prediction in the social sciences. A lot will depend on variables no one, including Trump, can determine how they play out in the dynamics he is promising to trigger from January. Why might MAGA be cited as clashing with established American view of the world?
Most analysts of MAGA track it back to 2004 when the late Samuel Huntington argued for a restoration of the essential America in the book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Huntington did not disagree with America being a nation of all-comers. But he asserted ownership of America by the White, Anglo-Saxon elements which category he claimed were being overwhelmed and displaced or were facing such risks along with their core values. Earlier on in ‘Clash of Civilisations?’ – he advised the United States to stop meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and peoples in the name of human rights, withdraw to its shell and fortify to defend Western ideals. MAGA cannot be understood other than a re-figuration of the Huntington imaginary as captured in his last two books mentioned above. The implication is that Trump/MAGA constitute a critique and break with American foreign policy history.
It does because what I have called established American lens on the world is what foremost political scientist, Prof. David Campbell has captured in his Writing Security: American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity as the practice of differentiation implicated in the confrontation between the (national) self and the Óther and their modes of figuration (P. 99). Published initially in 1992 and revised in 1998, the book has remained almost referential. But, before Campbell arrived at this analysis, American political scientist, Michael Desch, said in an essay titled “America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy” that American foreign policy suffered from “deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion” which quickly turn occasional shadows crossing its path into monsters, paint such enemy monsters in satanic terms but with no idea what to do if the ‘enemy’ were “either bigger or different.” (P. 13).
Both Desch and Campbell are united in the argument that this is precisely how the world ends up with the range of threats the US has defined from time to time, be it the Cold War or its ‘everywhere war’, otherwise known as Global War on Terror, to name the two most involving examples of America’s “evangelism of fear” in the name of foreign policy. The book’s demonstration of how the actual Cold War emerged from a flurry of scary metaphors of world communism, turning the “long telegram” – the cable from George Kennan, the US ambassador in Moscow on the situation on ground – into a framework for confrontation remains a classic of interpretivism.
What the foregone points at is the imperative of factoring in this broader outline rather than any checklist of what will happen to Africa or what will not happen to it. At a time like this, the most revealing indicator of the direction any actor in the world is heading is the language game of the concerned political leaders, military commanders, diplomats, leading academics and the media. These are the rule writers of world politics and they accomplish that task by circulating power through language or words. As Nietzsche postulated long ago, the words we use are never innocent but inherently complicit in an agenda of overpowering and conquering. The language trending now in global politics is still Trump’s war cry of MAGA. It is crucial to observe how he negotiates the boundaries MAGA delineates, where he differs and where he abandons it altogether depending on how other actors react.
Even in and of itself, without further contextualisation, MAGA comes with a bodyguard of questions. What greatness has America lost? How was the greatness lost and how might the project of restoring this greatness sit with the burning desire of America’s global Others to be great too?
Africa’s centrality in the world under MAGA is not an issue in debate. What any observer can consider an unfailing signal is the language of “Africa rising” and the battleground it has already delineated Africa into in American calculus on the one hand and China (and certainly other rising powers) on the other.
What is missing is the African self-definition and the figuration and deployment of that sense of collective self to discipline Africa ‘s negotiation with its Others. Unless that’s done, Africa will remain unable to do what some of its philosophers are asking it to do and which is to think the world from Africa. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to be high on the agenda of African leaders. Decolonial warriors across the world are working hard on that problem but the process would certainly move faster if it were to become an AU Commission’s research campaigning theme. But, will it?
