Today’s New York Times reports that serious cuts in U.S. overseas assistance are being contemplated by Congress. Using our own economic woes as an excuse, many lawmakers deem it necessary to make cuts in programs they feel are not justified when so many remedies are required at home. Fair enough.
The question is how will lawmakers feel when the U.S. influence shrinks to nothing on the continent that is increasingly becoming an economic colony of China? How will those lawmakers respond to the cries for help from the millions of Africans living under corrupt regimes with absolutely no safety net to protect them from disease, starvation and despotism.
There is an absurd intellectual stance that wants to ‘naturalize’ African poverty, to blend it into the exotic landscape, to make it the ‘fault’ of Africans themselves. The historical fact is that contemporary African poverty, both in the economic and political sense, was created by the deliberate policies of European and American planners over the past 100 or so years. Be it the period of colonization, the Cold war or the structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund the roots of Africa’s current crisis can be found in the ‘rational’ decisions of the leadership of the West.
To abandon Africa now would not only be a moral crime but it would put us out of touch with a region that is gaining in strategic significance every day. Until private foreign investors can be lured to the continent, foreign assistance from the U.S. and elsewhere will have to be the bridge. To pull back from our commitments now would only further signal the decline of the U.S. as an international power and a force for good in the world.