Africa as Potential Enemies of America and NATO?
Phil Butler, New Eastern Outlook, June 17, 2024 —
How is it we never realized what NATO is all about? How difficult is it to understand that such blocs and alliances constitute a “Reich” or a realm by definition? Looking at the language and actions of NATO nations in the past decades, how can anyone wonder why the Russians saw fit to protect their “western flank?” In particular, recent comments from American General Michael Langley, Commander of US Africa Command, help us understand better. The world, you see, is a strategic war game being played out traditionally. Look at Africa as Four-Star General Langley does, as the Pentagon and Washington do, and our foreign policy wreaks of old-world imperialism. Anyone, or any nation outside the borders of NATO, is the enemy.
To wit, the head of US Africa Command warned Congress recently that Russia is aggressively working to expand its footing among African countries, leaving several “at the tipping point” of falling under its influence. To quote the commander of all U.S. forces in Africa directly:
“[A] number of countries are at the tipping point of actually being captured by the Russian Federation as they are spreading some of their false narratives across Libya and from a strategic answer piece, access and influence across the whole Maghreb.” That is NATO’s southern flank. We need to be able to have — maintain access and influence across the Mahgreb, from Morocco to Libya.”
Fortress NATO!
Southern flank. Eastern flank. These are military terms for strategic manuever, defensively and offensively—the strategies, ideologies, and core beliefs behind hint at something far more deadly or sinister. The American hegemony is, in fact, a Fourth Reich. I’ll explain later in this paper.
Moving on, the excellent general then goes on to beat his well-decorated Marine Corps chest about how America’s National Guard’s cooperative effort on the continent is unparalleled. The boss of AFRICOM says that America has a significant advantage over Russia and China on the continent. According to the story from CNN, he and the National Guard Bureau Chief, Gen. Daniel Hokanson, have been laying out a plan for “the rest of the decade” to develop “more strategic partner programs across the continent.” And, of course, this was all laid out by the General before the U.S. Congress to get more funding for the military.
Meanwhile, Russia and Mali just started constructing the largest solar plant in West Africa. In other Russia/Africa news, a recent memorandum of understanding of human rights cooperation between Russia and Senegal is both a milestone and a strange irony. Isn’t this the job of the United States of America and its allies in Europe? Human rights, you know, like the rights of those bombarded Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere) crying in pain? This is another tangent, so let’s move on and talk of good soldier boys working for big, big, big corporations is more fun than wide-eyed gazing at genocide.
Digging deeper, it took me thirty seconds to ferret out what America has been doing on the African continent for the past half century. I first discovered a 1978 U.S. Government Accounting Office document (PDF) outlining America’s plans for increased military aid to Africa. Digging deeper, it’s interesting that former President Jimmy Carter put a ceiling on arms exports from the U.S., but somehow, sales still climbed. As an aside, entities like the Aerospace Industries Association (AlA) even created in-depth reports to show how few killing devices America was sending off to places like Africa. One point made in this biased report tells us a lot about how American policy and profit got so intertwined with the death dealers. At one point, the authors argued how selling guns created jobs back home and strengthened U.S. strategic and political policy worldwide.
“Positive arguments for military exports include the strengthening of U.S. allies and other ··friendly·· countries, together with maintenance of U.S. influence abroad. Military exports, therefore, can further U.S. foreign policy goals.”
The report goes one better by including a graph that shows U.S. military export orders tripled between 1970 and 1978. They even argued that sending weapons all over the planet lowered the cost of current and future weapons! Don’t trust these guys to babysit for you. That’s my best advice. Oh, and by “these guys”, I mean the heads of companies like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, Grumman, L3 Technologies, and others of the notorious military-industrial complex. Moving forward, the snowballing trend of arms sales and security policies is peaking today. Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? Well, few reading this will know what AFRICOM is. A big part of America’s African imperial endeavors revolved around, is arms sales. Not Russian arms sales or military involvement, but American and NATO profiteering and quit conquest. AFRICOM even has a program for such. Quoting directly from this report from the command’s website:
“Foreign Military Sales allows the U.S. to sell, grant, or lease U.S. defense articles, services, and training to partners, providing a cornerstone of engagement and cooperation with regional partners to build partner capacity, and invest in future stability and security.”
Who’s the Real Death Dealer?
To get a better picture of what the United States is doing compared to Russia, China, and all the other arms exporting/consuming nations, a report (PDF) from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI issued a trends report for international arms transfers for 2023. The report paints a fair picture of the United States shipping more arms worldwide than Russia, France, China, Germany, France, Italy, and the UK combined. Yes, you read correctly. As of 2023, the Western alliance has eclipsed the Russians and the Chinese in selling arms. Since the Euromaidan coup, Germany has been stocking Ukraine at a breakneck pace.
Returning to the African situation and Russia vs. neocolonialist politics, we find the U.S. State Department announcing proudly the approval of a billion-dollar arms deal with Nigeria. The agency also released the news that sales of U.S. military equipment to foreign governments in 2023 rose 16% to a record $238 billion. So, Washington has no qualms about stoking the market for the elites running the big and little wars all over the globe. But it’s those pesky Ruskies trying to take over Africa from the hegemony. By the way, Russia’s biggest arms customers are India, China, and Egypt. And, while Russia is the biggest exporter of arms to Africa, the country’s exports have traditionally been about half of what France, China, and the U.S. export to the continent. The United States has primarily focused on Middle East sales, making up over half of all the arms exports to that region.
Returning to my original premise of blocs of states forming what is essentially a “realm,” or, as Hitler and the Nazis referred to it, an empire. In German terms, NATO can be associated with the word Königreich, which literally means the “realm of a king.” However, there does not need to be a king for the ideology of empire and expansive ambition to exist. Historians have long discussed something called Suzerainty, which has to do with civic and state autonomy, foreign relations, and vassal states like Ukraine are now. Many historical prootypes serve as examples for both the EU and NATO. However, what’s necessary for this report is how Western political, business, and military leaders converged and how they operated in the same the British East India Company, or the “kingdom” of Israel, did from 1200 to 600 BC when the Hittites, Egyptians, and Assyrians were suzerains (vassals) to the Israelites. Aha! And Western reporters and lecturers worry and wring hands over Vladimir Putin’s relentless references to history!
Unholy Empires
I am not alone in asserting its existence on the reality, reason, and reach of NATO as an entity of this Fourth Reich. Author and historian Simon Heffer wrote that Germany’s economic power, boosted by the European financial crisis, hastened what he called the “economic colonisation of Europe by stealth.” Heffer and others suggest that Berlin (Washington, in reality) is using economic pressure rather than armies to “topple the leaderships of European nations.” Today, presidents, prime ministers, and their generals openly classify Russia, China, Iran, and other nations as “potential enemies.” In reality, whichever entity sits on the “flanks” of NATO is treated with hostile intent. We cannot be sure that Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele (Dr. Death) cloned little “Hitlers” and seeded them around the world or not. (See “The Boys from Brazil). We can, however, easily identify NATO and the EU as part of a larger “realm” – an American empire, if you will. If not American, then a remake of the Holy Roman Empire seems likely.
No wonder General Michael Langley and all the other U.S. general staff speak of Africa, Russia, China, and every other place as if they were to be defeated—or, at least, potential foes from which to defend the new Riech. Perhaps we should investigate ideas like the pan-European identity, pan-nationalism, or a future United States of Europe! A good summary for our discussion here comes from history Professor Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, the author of “The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present.”
“By revealing how our worst fears have gone unrealised, it cautions against hysteria. Examining how people have contended with fears in the past shows how they might cope with fear in the present.”
So, we are faced with the question of whether or not we should be analyzing (paying attention at least) the ideas and utterings of generals, technocrats, and statesmen wherever their loyalties may lie. Suppose you read TASS or study Russian generals. In that case, everything on the borders of Russia is only a potential enemy because NATO and the U.S. hegemony have metastasised an extraordinary (false) idea of democracy worldwide. To be continued…
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Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.