Economic & Geostrategy War Powers: The new scramble for Africa United States
Posted January 13, 2009
If a New Great Game in progress in Asia, there is also a new "scramble for Africa" by the great powers. The National Security Strategy of the United States of 2002 declared that the "fight against TERRROR World" and the need for U.S. energy security required of U.S. increase their involvement in Africa and called for a "coalition of the willing" to establish security arrangements on the continent.
Shortly thereafter, the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany and responsible for U.S. military operations in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased its activities in West Africa, focusing on countries with significant production or reserves oil in or around the Gulf of Guinea (roughly, the Ivory Coast to Angola). The U.S. military command for Europe now spends 70% of his time to African affairs, when they were still an insignificant part in 2003.
As noted by Richard Haass, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his preface to the report published by the Council in 2005 under the title More than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach to Africa [More Than Humanitarianism : A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa]: "At the end of the decade, sub-Saharan Africa may become a source of U.S. energy imports as important as the Middle East." The West Africa has some 60 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Its oil, low sulfur, sweet crude is much appreciated by the U.S. economy.
The agencies and the U.S. suggestion boxes provide a barrel of oil in five entering the world economic circuit in the second half of this decade will come from the Gulf of Guinea and the share from the Gulf of Guinea in U.S. imports will increase from 15 to 20% in 2010 and 25% in 2015. Nigeria already supplies 10% of oil imported by the USA. Angola provides 4% and its share is expected to double by the end of the decade. The discovery of new reserves and the expansion of oil production are doing to other countries in the region of major oil exporters, including Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, Cameroon and Chad. Mauritania became an oil exporter in 2007. Sudan, bordered by the Red Sea to the east and Chad to the west is a major oil producer.
Currently, the main permanent U.S. military base in Africa is that established in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, which allows the United States control of strategic sea route through which a quarter of world oil production. The Djibouti base is also near the Sudanese pipeline (the French military have long been a significant military presence in Djibouti and an air base in Abeche, Chad near the Sudanese border). The Djibouti base allows the U.S. to dominate the eastern end of the broad band across the African oil, which is now seen as vital to their strategic interests - a broad band Higleig pipeline from Port Sudan (1600 km) in the south-east to Chad-Cameroon pipeline (1000 km) and the Gulf of Guinea in the west. A new position of operations advanced in Uganda gives the U.S. the possibility of control of south Sudan, where the largest home of Sudanese oil.
In West Africa, the U.S. military command for Europe has now established a forward operating posts in Senegal, Mali, Ghana and Gabon, as well as Namibia, bordering Angola, South - which involve the improvement of airstrips, storage reserves and essential fuel and agreements (with local governments) for the rapid deployment of U.S. troops. In 2003 was launched a counterterrorism program in West Africa and in March 2004, U.S. Special Forces were directly involved in a military operation with Sahel countries against the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) which appears on the list of terrorist organizations compiled by Washington. The U.S. Command for Europe is currently developing a program of coastal security in the Gulf of Guinea Guard called Gulf of Guinea.
It also provides for the construction of a U.S. naval military base in Sao Tome and Principe, which according to the U.S. Command, could compete with the naval base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon is is now moving aggressively to establish a military presence in the Gulf of Guinea that will control the western part of the Trans-African Highway Oil and vital reserves of oil have been discovered. Operation Flintlock ( "pistol"), a military maneuver of launching, in 2005 involved 1,000 members of U.S. Special Forces. Next summer (2006) Command for Europe will conduct maneuvers of its new rapid reaction force to the Gulf of Guinea.
Here, the guns after the trade: the major oil companies and U.S. West are caught in a race for West African oil and demanding security. The Wall Street Journal of April 25, 2006, the U.S. military command for Europe is currently working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to extend the influence of U.S. companies in Africa as part of an "integrated U.S. response. "In this economic race to African oil resources, the former colonial powers, Britain and France are competing with the U.S.. But the military, they work closely with the U.S. to secure Western imperial control over the region.
The escalation of U.S. military presence in Africa is frequently justified by the need to combat terrorism and to counter growing instability in the oil region of Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2003 Sudan has been ravaged by civil war and ethnic conflict concentrated in the Darfur region, south-west (where much of Sudan's oil), which led to countless human rights violations and killings by militias linked to the government of the people of the region. Attempted coups have taken place in the new petro-states of Sao Tome and Principe (2003) e of Equatorial Guinea (2004).
Chad, led by a brutally oppressive regime protected by a security apparatus and intelligence supported by the U.S., has also experienced an attempted coup in 2004. A successful coup took place in Mauritania in 2005 against the strong man supported by the U.S. Maaouiya Ould Taya. In Angola, civil war has lasted three decades - caused and fueled by the U.S., which together with South Africa, organized the terrorist army led by Jonas Savimbi of UNITA - until the cease-fire that followed the death of Savimbi in 2002. In Nigeria, hegemonic countries in the region, the prevailing corruption, revolts, and organized theft of oil, with significant shares of oil production in the Niger Delta that are siphoned off - up to 300 000 barrels per day in early 2004 . (16) The emergence of an armed insurrection in the Niger Delta and the potential conflict between the Muslim north and non-Muslim south are major sources of U.S. concern.
So there are constant calls, with a flood of dubious justification, to "humanitarian interventions" U.S. Africa. The report of the Council for Foreign Relations More than Humanitarianism insists that "the U.S. and its allies must be prepared to take appropriate steps to act" in Darfur, Sudan, "including sanctions and, if necessary, military action if the Security Council was blocked from doing so. "Meanwhile, the idea that the U.S. military could be brought before long to intervene in Nigeria has been highly agitated among the luminaries and expert circles. The correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly Jeffrey Taylor wrote in April 2006 that Nigeria had become "the largest failed state on earth," and that a further destabilization of that state or its passage under the thumb of radical Islamic forces would endangered "the large oil reserves that America has vowed to protect. If that day happens, it would give the signal for a military intervention far more massive than the Iraq campaign. "
But advocates of U.S. grand strategy agree that the real issues are not the African countries themselves and the welfare of their populations but oil and the growing presence of China in Africa. As the Wall Street Journal wrote in "Africa is emerging as a strategic battleground" ( "Africa Emerges as a Strategic Battlefield"), "China has made Africa a front line in its pursuit of greater global influence, tripling trade with the continent, which rose to $ 37 billion over the past five years, locking energy resources, concluding trade agreements with regimes like Sudan's and educating future leaders in African universities and Chinese military schools "
In More than Humanitarianism, the Council for Foreign Relations described the main threat as coming from China: "China has altered the strategic context in Africa. Across Africa today, China is gaining control over natural resources, eliminating the major Western suppliers of construction projects of infrastructure and providing soft loans and other incentives to improve advantage in the competition. "China imports more than one quarter of its oil from Africa, primarily Angola, Sudan and Congo. It is the largest foreign investor in Sudan. It has provided Nigeria with large subsidies to increase its influence and has sold fighter jets. The greatest threat in terms of major U.S. strategists, came from low loan rate of $ 2 billion to Angola in 2004, which has allowed Angola to resist IMF demands that remodels its economy and society along neoliberal criteria.
The Council for Foreign Relations, all this only aggravates the threat to Western imperialist control of Africa. Given the role of China, wrote the Council in its report, "the U.S. and Europe can not consider Africa as their turf, as the French once saw francophone Africa. The rules are changing as far as China seeks not only to access resources, but also to control production and distribution of resources, and perhaps to position themselves to get priority access to these resources, becoming more rare. The Council's report on Africa is so concerned with combating China through the U.S. military expansion in the region that involves none other than Chester Crocker, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs of the 'Reagan administration, who expressed his "melancholy nostalgia for the days when the U.S. when the West was the only influential powers and could pursue their goals ... with hands free. "
What is certain is that the U.S. empire has expanded to parts of Africa in the rapacious search for oil. It could result in devastation to the peoples of Africa. Like the old scramble for Africa, this new race is a struggle between great powers for wealth and plunder - not for African development or well-being of its people.
John B. Forster
