Ademola Araoye

Ademola Araoye

Navigating the labyrinth of foreign and security policy in a relatively stable environment, even in the context of the normal anarchic eco-system of the universe of states, is challenging enough. In national constituents and interest-based competing strategic aggregations that constitute the global system, the management and terms of interactions with the system begins at this basic level with a clearly defined institutional center for the formulation, articulation and the actuation of the interest of the state. The same process applies to the development of commonly shared interests of coalitions in their studied and calibrated relations with other actors in the system. That is consistent with the expectation in politically demarcated entities with entrenched monistic location of power that defines the state as a sovereign entity. The national interest, in democratic settings, is derived from a distillation of a broad and nuanced consensus forged out of often competing contradictory impulses in the complex interplay of diverse interests of domestic forces with significant leverage in the national process. This is particularly germane in structurally heterogeneous states as in most of Africa. However, in planning these strategic bargaining, each sovereign unit is guided by known variations and predicable givens of the system and its constituent aggregates. What is known and unknown by each state actor impacts the potency of its policy formulation and the efficiency of the machinery of its interest articulation in the dynamic global universe.

Meanwhile, in spite of its anarchic character, interactions by state actors in the external environment are governed by universally acknowledged guidelines underpinned by established conventions, axioms, norms, protocols as well as ethics. Ethics, in particular, reflect the evolved sensibilities of humanity at each point in time. Even in the universe of the men in long dark overcoats bearing cloak and dagger, there are rules! These important guardrails may or may not be codified in formal treaties and conventions such as the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 18 April 1961 or the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations or even the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. There are many other conventions regulating conduct in relation to specific matters.

These together provide universally agreed directives on the expectations in the management of specific aspects of inter-state relations. They also mediate the games that nations play that are essentially undertaken in the context of a fluid dynamic of the structure of the global order. That order is defined as the distribution of power in the system. The interactive process, often collaborative and potentially adversarial, revolves around hegemonic forces and an assumed hierarchy of powers that reflects alignments to the preeminent elite states. Trump and the rise of ultra-nationalism in the United States of America have thrown these conventions, protocols and operative understandings of the international system into serious doubt. Without these guardrails, the whole calculus of conventional inter-state relations has been transformed into chaotic anarchic environment unmediated by any protocols.

The serious diminution of the core values of the international order that is integral to ultra-nationalism must be of grave concern to Africa. The continent has been on the tangential rim of the circuits of consequential elite power in global affairs. It ranks lowest in the hierarchy and is traditionally consigned to the role of an expendable pawn. The Barrack Obama administration deployed that to an embarrassing hilt in its relations with Africa, including its kinetic activism in the calculated elimination of Mohammed Gaddafi to protect strategic American interest. Accordingly, the system dynamic has been historically skewed against Africa. The evolution of the international system today, in particular the rise of ultra nationalist Trump United States of America is a major development with significant consequences for the global system. It is even worse in a further derogation of the status of the African continent, which with only one or two exceptional states, is appallingly deficient across all meaningful indices of sovereign statehood. Most African states are deconsolidated political entities with scant domestic legitimacy. A paralyzing inefficiency that is consistent with the known limitations of Africa in creatively navigating evolved contemporaneous incendiary uncertainties can be assumed. This challenge is embedded in its historically contrived comprehensively weak collective and state institutional capacities. In effect, as states and as a continent, Africa is unable to constructively articulate its interests at all levels of interaction across the global system. With the rise of ultra-nationalism and the deliberate depreciation of a philosophy of global humanism as a secondary pivot directing the marginal amelioration of the impact of realist pursuit of the interest of powerful elite actors, Africa’s situation has worsened. In particular the realignment, or even total retrenchment, of long established interests of the United States, hitherto in concordance with established protocols, and the unilateral recalibration of America’s conceptual framework for traditional relative constructive interaction with the external world are reflexive of the almost traumatic domestic environment within the United States itself occasioned by the return of Donald J. Trump to the White House.

In the face of these extirpations, internal forces in the United States are confused and grappling with how best to manage or rein in the radical deformations instituted by the Trump administration. Democrats in the Senate have resorted to engaging psychologists to advise on coping strategies in countering authoritarian behavior from Trump and his Republican cronies on legislative committees. The evolved situation constitutes a major complication in further undermining even the parlous state of current levels of contemptuous tolerance of elite states for the African continent and its evidently careless leadership. The main avenue for advancing elite-state driven and funded policy of residual humanism to Africa and vulnerable global constituencies to mitigate the full impact of the hurtful realpolitik of the global system has already been vigorously assaulted by the Trump ultra-nationalist administration. Multilateralism has been denounced. This slide in humanitarianism has massive negative implications for the African continent that is a major beneficiary of humanitarian intervention as well as the containment of humanitarian health disasters and politically induced catastrophes often resulting from irresponsible political cultures that are pervasive. For instance, in December 2024, President Joseph R. Biden announced the provision of more than $1 billion in additional humanitarian assistance by the United States to address food insecurity and other urgent needs of refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and affected communities in 31 African countries. This funding, according to sources within the United States government, was announced during President Biden’s visit to Angola. The package includes nearly $823 million through USAID – of which more than $202 million is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation – and nearly $186 million through the U.S. Department of State. Further, at the U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit in 2022, President Biden reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to African leaders to accelerate progress toward achieving food security, including addressing the immediate and acute food insecurity crisis through humanitarian assistance. According to United Nations, Africa is the region with the largest percentage of the population facing hunger. The UN data dismally highlights that one in five Africans – almost 300 million people – faced hunger in 2023. Also, the U.S., in the Biden era, pays 26.15% percent of all United Nations peacekeeping costs instead of the earlier 27%. Assuming the current 2024-2025 peacekeeping budget of $5.9 billion, decreasing the U.S. contribution rate by just 1 per cent would result in a budget deficit of of roughly $47 million for peace keeping exercises each year. On 21 December 2023, the UN Security Council of the United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution that creates a framework for the global body to fund peace operations led by the African Union (AU). In effect, the United States indirectly funds the operations of the African Union. Changes to effect deep engagement of the United States under Trump administration would have momentous consequences for Africa. Notwithstanding expected setbacks in United States humanitarian aid delivery to Africa that seemingly are inevitable, the evolution of the structure of the management of the global economy, especially the consolidation of BRICS, coupled with incipient political evolution in patches of Africa may serve as bulwark against the continent being completely overwhelmed by the latest deformations in global relations. The tenets of ultra-nationalism, in validating a philosophy of accentuated predation, imposes feeding on the weak by the strong. As expected, the Trump administration has already suspended aid, including humanitarian aid, to such agencies as the World Health Organization (WHO), while at the economic level, declaring war against BRICS and all its partners threatening the preeminence of the United States dollar as the sole currency for international transactions

Meanwhile, the evolved complexity of the radically deformed global strategic template, as already observed, has been impacted by the rise of ultra-nationalism in Western and Central Europe as well as parts of South America, specifically Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. Cumulatively, they heighten simmering tensions within the global system. A right-wing nationalist, law-and-order advocate, with a military background, Bolsonaro came into office on a wave of populist antiestablishment indignation. Like Trump, following the interregnum in between electoral defeat and resurgence, Bolsonaro still has a toxic visible presence in Brazilian public sphere. This is so even as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the current president of the South American country.  In Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a far-right and right-wing populist political party. The AfD is against integration of Europe, and opposes immigration into Germany. AfD openly focuses on Islam and migration, seeing Islam as alien to German society. Some of the party’s rhetoric has been reminiscent of the era of the Nazis. The AfD is classified in the same political family as France’s far-right National Front and Austria’s far-right Freedom Party – as well as the populist, anti-Islam Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders. Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK’s anti-EU party Ukip, took part in their 2017 election campaign. It is known that Nigel Farage is Trump’s favorite candidate as the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The spread of ultra-nationalism, most visible in Central Europe, has reached a deafening and system-disruptive crescendo in the Donald. J. Trump phenomenon in the United States. The evolved murky international environment is expressed in the radically transformed strategic template characterized by the ascendance of ultra-nationalism across the Western hemisphere. In the emerged global scenario, Africa has limited options as currently structured and especially with contestations around the direction of the most beneficial continental alliance for insulation or protection from anticipated eruptions. Ultra-nationalism in the United States has profound implications for the world. In Africa, the threat of ultra-nationalist policy from the United States and Western Europe is revealing of the unsustainable illogicality of the current political construction of Africa.

Meanwhile, ultra-nationalism has been a virulent philosophy in a long while. Before now, nationalism had propelled global history through a first destination in the birth of the nation state. It has its foundations in the success of Napoleon in brutally imposing the French language on conquered people while integrating their territories into the French Republic. The concept of assimilation practiced by the French in its colonies in black Africa was a milder form of the extreme brutality of earlier expressions of French nationalism. Notably its policy of “outre mer” failed miserably in Algeria due to determined resistance of Algerians to subordination to an alien culture and principality. Along the same lines, countries, such as Germany and Italy were formed by forcefully uniting various regional states to forge a common “national identity”.  The wide latitude granted for the creation of nation states through impositions and via blood and sweat were consistent with the state of human sensibilities through to the end of World War II. Accordingly, Leon Baradat has argued that nationalism calls on people to identify with the interests of their national group and to support the creation of a state – a nation-state – to support those interests. Indeed, the same principle validated the struggle for independence by colonial peoples after World War II, but conditioned on an evolved logic of an incipient recognition of all people as possessed of a common dignity that defined the whole of humanity. Under those terms the state was not sacrosanct. Irked by the Trump phenomenon, California has commenced the constitutional procedures prescribed to separate from the United States of America.

Ultra nationalism begins at the fringes of the norm and its extremist tendencies are associated with the periphery and the most banal of the human community. Often ultra-nationalism is congregated outside the confines of mainstream of society, and the state. Tragically, ultra nationalism, through exploitation of the institutional weaknesses, permeates into structures and institutions of the state as to eventually pose a threat to stability of the state and the generality of the infected human society, both internal and external to the state. In Germany, the neo-Nazis appropriated de facto tacit permission for their actions, by intensifying their attacks against the structures and institution of the state. The failure of the state to check the intrusion into society of the terror along the margins of society meant that the state was handicapped to eliminate this kind of behavior. In contemporary times, Tomáš Rafa tracing the rise of the far right ultra-nationalism in Central Europe, observed that the first far-right marches in Slovakia took place in villages, but then the extremists started organizing them in cities and eventually in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Through unchecked incremental advances Slovakia lost its public space to ultra-nationalists. The main features of ultra-nationalism include exploiting cleavages in society as well as historical antipathies to advance hatred. Where there are deep historical problems between nations ultra-nationalists poke into them to sow discord. So, in Central Europe, Slovaks don’t like Hungarians, Czechs don’t like Slovaks, Poles dislike Germans. They all despite blacks. Paradoxically, although ultra-nationalists are willing to overcome any differences and tensions, they unite to fight against the perceived or constructed common enemy, be it Syrian refugees, Muslims, homosexuals, or Romani in Central Europe, or immigrants, blacks and Latinos in the United States. In Europe, ultra-nationalists reject the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and work to weaken their structures. They want to undermine the system of unity and European solidarity. The same applies to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States that seeks to undermine the United Nations and its humanitarian and developmental agencies and NATO. The rise of ultra-nationalism in the United States with the undisputed leadership of President Trump has the same broad contours and features of the European variant of the virus. Except that given the preeminent stature of the United States in world affairs, the impact of the rollback of global sensibilities around the commonality of basic human interests implied in ultra-nationalism poses a threat to the stability of the human order. Already, the notions of anarchy and chaos have begun to feature prominently in elite discourse of the politics of the United States.

In this context, the true state of Africa’s placement in relation to the global order is defined by the structural infirmities of 55 mostly unviable entities possessed of mythical statehoods. The structural deficits are compounded by pervasive ideational incongruences derived from historical neo-colonial impositions, the sharp bifurcations across the continent associated with competing contrapuntal world views and orientations as well as entrenched paradigms of assured stunted growth and multi-dimensional underdevelopment. These have militated against constructive adaptations of the states, sub-systems and the African continent as a whole to overcome its existential nightmares. The continent, despite the periodic hypes around one supposedly transformative Agenda or another, has thus largely failed in developing institutions and mechanisms for rational policy distillations or to institute formidable strategic compass to negotiate efficiently in the given hostile environment dominated by elite state actors. Unfortunately, this has been the situation even at the best of times. Paradoxically Africa has long operated outside the framework of the established conventions of proper states. Africa has no predictable institutional centers of rational policy modulation and thus efficient policy processes, both at the state and the continental levels, for the formulation, articulation and the protection of the “national, or better still, a continental interest”. This critical role is ultimately appropriated by the egomaniac collectivity of persons of the head of state who deploy the state to satiate their whims. The whimsical choices at the apex are more often than not informed by personal interests and long term political conveniences to protect projected ascendance of biological scions to the privatized throne of the state. The same iniquitous personal interests of heads of states has derailed the vision of a continental political union in preference for any mechanisms or long winded processes, however irrational, that do not dismantle the personal fiefdoms of the many irreplaceable and infallible god fathers imposed on the people of the continent. The much proclaimed contempt of the external universe to Africa and its people is much justified.

However, the conventional mode is giving way in places and this may constitute the saving grace for Africa in the tribulations that is descending on global humanity. The changes are captured as follows in Post-Colonial Statehoods in the Global Order: The emergence of South Africa as a post-liberated state transformed the strategic template of Africa. The activism of the new South Africa informed and provided leadership to the beginnings of the radicalization of security and economic policies of a number of African states in relation to the international system. With strong institutions, notwithstanding its significant domestic setbacks since liberation, South Africa has emerged as the nucleus of a radical orbit of African states seizing opportunities presented by the turbulence in the evolution of the global order to recalibrate Africa’s locus and role in the international system. South Africa’s highly politically conscious political elite, a robust culture of opposition to the ruling African National Congress, a radicalized labor force, and a history of close association with the global ideological Left have undergirded massive transformations of values of unprecedented scale in Africa. This is exemplified among others in South Africa’s unambiguous position on the War in Gaza. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blasted Israel for attacking the civilian population in Gaza amid its war with Hamas. Ramaphosa called Israel ‘oppressive and apartheid’. He also termed Israel’s ground invasion in north-Gaza as genocide. Most African countries, with compromised leadership could make no such declaration. Value transformation with a revolutionary impact in the direction of state and continent-wide policy, that deviates from the pre-liberation normative on the continent, has been instrumental to the orientation of South Africa’s foreign and security profile. South Africa’s highly activist character in its interaction with the rest of a largely conservative universe of post-colonial African states is also shifting the paradigm from the often prostrate character of Africa on the global stage. This has accentuated more radical assertiveness by a cluster of consolidated states on the continent. These have set the stage for a restorative restiveness in Africa expressed in what a concerned United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as an “epidemic of coups’. The coup d’etat in the Republique du Niger in the Sahelian region, the locus of the epidemic in West Africa, presents an interesting focal episode to interrogate the new restlessness on the African continent.

Finally, the changes in the global order facilitated transformations in Africa. The imperative to build friendship, carry forward the BRICS spirit of openness, inclusiveness and win-win cooperation, and boost BRICS cooperation was highlighted at the Fifth BRICS Media Forum that was hosted by Xinhua News Agency with the theme “Building BRICS consensus, promoting global development”. The online and offline conference outlined.an Action Plan that noted that considering that the world was going through turbulence and transformation, the pursuit of peace and development, fairness and justice, democracy and freedom was imperative. Accordingly, a win-win cooperation had become all the more vital. The action plan urged media organizations in the BRICS countries to play their role as bridges to generate strong synergy to ensure a high-quality BRICS partnership and strengthen the mechanism of the group. BRICS media was admonished to work together to counter fake news, clarify fallacies, reject “doom and gloom”, and oppose smear campaigns, according to the action plan.

The economic dimensions of the reshuffling of the structure of geo-political planetary realignment was highlighted as proceeding along with the military dimension. The notion of a new partnership of nations, based on consultation, cooperation and collective action, especially through international and regional organizations has been promoted by BRICS. The cluster of restless African states with radical orientations that have also accepted a need to diversify relations away from traditional neo-colonial Western Europe would seem to be better placed to resist any untoward impositions by the ultra-nationalist administration from the United States or the West. Having divested politically and economically from Western Europe and developed tangible relations with alternative poles of global power in Russia and China, there is a line of defense against state bullying, however tenuous that defense may be. These few African states are more likely to take advantage of the emerging models of funding bilateral trade through the use of national currencies that sidelines the dollar. The concept has been promoted by BRICS. Instead of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, BRICS and partner states would gravitate toward the Shangai based New Development Bank that supports public or private projects through loans, guarantees, equity participation and other financial instruments. Moreover, the NDB cooperates with international organizations and other financial entities, and provides technical assistance for projects to be supported by the Bank. But the structure and balance of Africa’s trade with the United States would still present significant challenges in the short to medium term.

Given the turn of events in the United States, the emergence of BRICS and the timing would now seem visionary. The dynamic engagements of the BRICS timeously challenge the dominant paradigm of the United States-directed global economic governance in which Africa is in subordination. BRICS may be perceived as the flip side of the turbulence at the level of the search for superiority in raw power through realignments of the global strategic template. Before BRICS the attempt by Muammar Gaddafi to establish a common African currency to drive African emancipation had been sabotaged by the dominant West. It was a major consideration for the West’s inspired ouster of Gaddafi. Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails revealed that NATO’s goal in destroying Libya was to prevent Gaddafi from unifying Africa and introducing the African gold dinar. BRICS expresses the impact of changes in the dominant value systems, including enhanced consciousness across the South. These new realities pose challenges to the continued integrity of old Western-dominated institutions. As Francis Fukuyama notes, when the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. However, he notes further, that those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change. The values on which BRICS is anchored and its emerging operational protocols are antithetical to the conception and operations of the United States-led World Economic Order and worse still, by the vision of the ultra-nationalist White House. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the industrialized beneficiaries of the skewed global structure had been going through not merely a crisis but a worldwide economic revolution, which had been making itself felt at the same time that the economic system had been hit by a cyclical crisis. The many structural changes brought about by this revolution created new rules of the game and necessitated a new modus operandi for all the primary players in the world economy.” BRICS is partly a response to the paralyzing crisis of the global economic order that would be further deepened by the chaos of a global economy under the suffocating strictures of global ultra-nationalism.

For Africa, critical thinking is crucial for survival in the emerged treacherous terrain. If current noxious developments wake up the continent to reassess its irresponsible historic lethargy toward political unification and provides an incentive to mobilize the will to embrace radical orientations to new possibilities demanded by its contemptuous status in the affairs of humanity, the rise of ultra-nationalist Trump America would have generated a useful impetus toward constructive regeneration of a trajectory to the wholesomeness of black humanity. The implacable determination to keep the current configuration of Africa in the face of vastly unfavorable systemic transformations with implications equivalent to shifts in tectonic plates can only further mortgage the future of yet unborn generations of black humanity.

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