The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - What Are China and Russia Doing in Africa? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

*This video was recorded during my backpacking trip through Yosemite in the end of July. China and Russia seemingly enjoy having their fingers in the African pie, but what are they doing there? And should we be worried? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/what-are-china-and-russia-doing-in-africa

Hey, everybody. Peter Zellian here coming to you from just above Sister Lake. That's Volunteer Peak in the background. I am finishing up my high country diverse from Rock Island Lake to Do Lake to here. Then back on the trail for, you know, an hour than another traverse. Anyway, going through the Ask Peter Forum, we've had a question come in about what I think about everything that the Russians and the Chinese are doing in Africa specifically. And it kind of falls into the three general category. Let's sort of the Chinese. First, We've got the old stuff, the one belt one road stuff, where the Chinese basically came in and said, we'll build this piece of infrastructure or a building or whatever it is for you.

And it's free, and we just ask you to be our friends. Well, a few years later, the Chinese came back. It's like, oh, when we said free, what we really meant is this is a loan and you have to start paying us back right now. And they were laughed out of the room in a lot of places. So a lot of these projects were things that the locals didn't need or can't operate themselves. And once the Chinese actually started demanding payment, a lot of this stuff just fell into disrepair. So I don't really, I'm not concerned about that. There's a couple exceptions here and there, but only a couple.

How much did the Chinese waste on this? I don't have a specific number for Africa alone, but on a global basis, we're talking easily north of the trillion US. It's not the dumbest thing we've seen the Chinese government do. But it's certainly one of the things the Chinese government has done that is really, really dumb that the rest of the world has gotten all open arms about. Anyway, let's see, what's next? The second big thing are the minerals acquisitions that the Chinese are doing in Africa.

This is all stuff that from a technical point of view is pretty easy. They're not doing any deep offshore oil, for example, because they don't have the technology to do it themselves. But in these, these are much more real, if that's the right term. And the Chinese are getting manganese and cobalt and copper and all the rest. A couple things to keep in mind about this. It's not that this is not real. very real. But whenever you see the Chinese spending $4 billion for something that's only worth $1 billion, it's not just about resource acquisition. It's about capital flight. It means that

someone in the Chinese bureaucracy has figured out a way to get a lot of cash out of the country and disguise it as investment. So this is real investment. It is actually taking minerals and bringing them back to China. Whether it's cost effective needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. I'd argue that probably half of them are not. But there is a bribery and corruption effect in play here that you can't overlook when you're looking at everything else. The third issue are the Russians,

very different sort of strategy. What the Russians are doing is taking Wagner or their paramilitary group, sending it over there and literally kicking over the Ant Hills. The goal here is not to provide stability. The goal is to enact regime change. and then as a bonus, the new regime, whatever that happens to be, typically gives the Russians a gold mine.

They're not interested in other types of mineral extraction because gold is just easier to smuggle, and that's how the Russians are getting around sanctions these days. They're literally flying planes full of gold to places to pay for things that they can't get otherwise. The place where the Russians have been most successful with this is the Sahel, that area that's just to the south of the Sahara, just to the north of the wetter areas like Nigeria,

or Congo. So you're talking like Mauritania, Mijie, Chad, those kind of places. There are a number of them have had coups in the last few years, especially since the Ukraine War started, and it's ejected what used to be a lot of French influence into a much

lesser degree American influence. The Americans were there to fight kind of the final chapter on the war and terror. The French were there because it was their old colonial holdings. Anyway, the territory here is pretty much worthless. I mean, you're talking about something that's barely a step above desert, even before you consider things like climate change, which suggests that the Sahara is going to be

marching south here for a while. The problem, of course, is that when you take an area where the state was weak and you destroy it, you turn an entire band of Africa into a stateless zone. And the last time the world was a little obsessed about a stateless zone. It was Afghanistan. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that the next al-Qaeda is going to form here. The next major terror attack is going to erupt from this area. But it's a very similar series of conditions. You have a light population that can't fend for themselves. You've got warlords who basically are running amok and knocking over with Russian help,

anyone who might want to impose a little order on the area. So, you know, of the three categories, this is probably the one with the lower dollar amount attached, but probably the highest transcontinental significance. So three different, very different circumstances going on here, all with different outcomes. Okay, see you next time.