EU OBSERVER The elephant in the room at this weekend's African Union summit EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen (centre) at a previous EU-AU summit in Addis Ababa in 2020 (Photo: European Commission) By LUCA BERGAMASCHI ROME/MILAN, TODAY, 12:05

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The elephant in the room at this weekend's African Union summit

EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen (centre) at a previous EU-AU summit in Addis Ababa in 2020 (Photo: European Commission)

By LUCA BERGAMASCHI

ROME/MILAN, TODAY, 12:05

This weekend (17-18 February), African leaders will meet in Addis Abada for their 37th African Union summit. European leaders should pay serious attention, in particular those who put the relation with Africa on top of their foreign and development policy, such as Georgia Meloni and Ursula von der Leyen.

At the end of January, over 40 leaders from the African continent met in Rome with the hope to learn more and shape the Italian investment approach to Africa, or "Mattei Plan".

Italy's relation with Africa has become Meloni's largest international foreign policy project and will be the litmus test of her international credibility in 2024.

To her credit, Meloni has elevated this relation to the highest political level. Given the scale of the development challenges faced by African societies, this is exactly the right level to build the political consensus and mandate for much-needed action.

However, little at the scale, quality and inclusivity needed to face the challenge was achieved in Rome. This was certainly only the beginning of an ambitious endeavour, but a lot more remains to be done.

The African Development Bank estimates a gap of over $100bn [€93bn] per year in infrastructure investment in the African continent. At the same time high debt levels, increasing debt service costs and high-interest rates are limiting the investment capacity of African countries for vital social and climate needs.

Since 2010, public debt in sub-Saharan Africa has skyrocketed to $1.3 trillion, private creditors are taking out greater amount than they are investing and the poorest countries in the world — most of which are in Africa — paid $89bn in debt-servicing costs alone in 2022.

None of this daunting reality was recognised by Meloni.

Italy's offer to mobilise €5.5bn over the next years, overwhelmingly in already-allocated loans and guarantees, pale in comparison to the volumes and reforms needed for the financing challenges faced by Africa. Only an EU-wide coordinated financial offer can credibly respond to African needs.

Italy however has a second chance throughout the year to turn words into action. A major opportunity to increase financial means African nations need hinges on the replenishment of the International Development Association (IDA), one of the most concessional forms of financing of the World Bank whose main beneficiaries are African countries. Upholding and enhancing its grant element and at least sustaining the current level of grants will be crucial.

The Italian G7 presidency of 2024 — which takes place 80 years after the creation of the Bretton Wood Institutions — is another major opportunity for Italy to set out its vision to make the international financial system fit for a fast-warming and still largely unfair world.

Debt moratorium

Supporting debt reforms, a debt moratorium — as asked by the African Union — and mechanisms to increase the fiscal space for productive investment will be key. Again, Italy will need to work with its European allies to provide the scale and depth needed, the more so in a scenario of a US retrenchment under Donald Trump.

Next to debt, the other elephant in the room — as highlighted by Kenyan president William Ruto — is the quality of energy investment.

While recognising the need to address the climate-energy nexus in Africa, Meloni has remained too ambiguous about the nature of energy investment she will support. The summit was a missed opportunity to spell out by both Italian and African leaders how they intend to uphold the COP28 Dubai declaration of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

The powerful influence of the Italian O&G company Eni, the second-largest producer of oil and gas and the third-largest developer of new oil and gas in Africa, cannot be ignored. The more Italian diplomacy and politics remain entangled with O&G industry's plans misaligned with a science-based transition, the less credibility Italy will gain on the international stage.

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By supporting new gas projects incompatible with climate, security and development goals, Italy will fail to credibly support a sustainable growth path for African people, who benefit the least from new fossil fuels projects, such as in the case of Mozambique, and to address climate change as a root cause of forced migration.

The World Bank estimates that by 2050 there could be up to 216 million 'climate migrants' worldwide, with sub-Saharan Africa affected the most.

Phasing out fossil fuels is a main request of over 70 organisations of African civil society to the Italian and African leaders. However, while the Italian O&G industry representatives enjoyed full access to the summit, there was none provided to civil society nor transparency over the discussions, marking a huge disconnection between public interest and political representatives.

Both in Europe and Africa we need a much more open and inclusive conversation about where the public interest lies in the era of climate change. And how to address the conflict of interests between the fossil fuels industry and decision-making bodies, as it emerged at COP28 and will continue at COP29 in Azerbaijan.

Without accountability, openness and innovation, Meloni's intention of building a new and fairer relation between nations will fail. There is still time to catch up.

The Italian G7 Summit in June is the next stop which will tell if we are witnessing a real "paradigm shift", as claimed and hoped by Meloni, or another empty promise.

AUTHOR BIO

Luca Bergamaschi is director and co-founder of ECCO, an Italian climate change think tank

Bloomberg

The US Needs to Get Out of the Middle East — Soon

Once the crisis in Gaza settles, America should withdraw from the region, not least to remain able to keep order in Europe and Asia.

February 13, 2024 at 8:01 AM GMT+3

By Andreas Kluth

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

Does this still make strategic sense?

Does this still make strategic sense?Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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The US has about 46,000 troops stationed in 11 countries across the Middle East, with all the accompanying hardware and support. Those forces are not available elsewhere, whether in Europe or East Asia, where America’s most ominous foes need deterring and its closest allies need reassuring. One of the biggest strategic questions for US President Joe Biden — or Donald Trump if he wins in November — is whether to maintain this huge American presence or draw it down.

Right now would be the wrong time for such a drastic change. America is consumed by partisan acrimony in the run-up to its election. Israel is waging war in the Gaza Strip and stands accused of genocide. And Iran-backed militias from Yemen to the Levant have not only the Zionists but also US troops in their crosshairs. One such group killed three Americans with a drone strike on a US base in Jordan just the other day. If the US were to pull out now, it would hand Tehran a propaganda victory and risk chaos reminiscent of 2021, when Biden fecklessly abandoned Afghanistan.

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But what about the medium term? At some point this year, the hot phase of Israel’s campaign against Hamas will end. Iran and its proxies may, after Biden’s retaliation this month for the three dead Americans, refrain from major escalation against US forces. And by the end of the year, fingers crossed, Americans may know who’ll be in the White House for the next four years.

What makes the US presence in the Middle East especially relevant is that it’s also the prime case study in a larger debate about America’s role in the world. Should the US remain a hegemon, using its leadership to preserve a modicum of global order? Or should it retrench to deal with its own problems, leaving an increasingly multipolar and anarchical world to unrestrained power politics?

I gravitate toward the former camp, also known in Washington as internationalism (as opposed to isolationism). History shows that periods when hegemony is absent or ambiguous (such as the 1920s and 30s) tend to end in disaster (World War II). Even for a hegemon, it’s cheaper in the long run to incur the costs of keeping order than to clean up the messes of global calamity.

But even internationalists need to accept that hegemony cannot mean that the US must be active everywhere all the time. Christopher Preble at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, argues that the US has already lost global “primacy” and can’t afford to get it back. During the last two decades of the Cold War, for example, US public debt averaged 38% of economic output; last year, it ran to three times that ratio. Americans increasingly want their country to invest in solving problems at home, and to set clear priorities abroad.

Is the Middle East such a priority? My colleague Hal Brands argues that the history of failed American attempts to exit the region proves its geopolitical centrality and means that the US must stay because “such is the burden of a hegemon.”

Others beg to differ. Daniel Depetris at Defense Priorities, another Washington think tank, thinks the US should withdraw its roughly 3,400 military personnel in Iraq and Syria as soon as possible, and eventually also the tens of thousands in the Gulf states and the rest of the region.

The US Has About 46,000 Troops in the Middle East

Many of them are targets, all of them are unavailable in Europe and Asia

Sources: Various, collected by Defense Priorities

Note: Numbers are estimates as of October 2023.

That’s because the US troops have completed their ostensible mission of the past decade, which has been to destroy the Islamic State, a barbaric terrorist group that formed in the aftermath of America’s ill-considered second war against Iraq. Today, the Islamic State no longer controls any territory and has been degraded to a point where its regional foes, from Syrian Kurds to Shia fighters, can keep it subdued without US help.

Other more expansive justifications for a US presence are iffy, Depetris argues. For example, the US, a net exporter of oil nowadays, relies much less on hydrocarbons from the Gulf region than it did during the oil shocks of the 1970s, and world markets have become more resilient too. Over time, the Western economies will supposedly wean themselves from fossil fuels anyway. So if Iran tried to close the Strait of Hormuz, it would hurt its own customers, notably China. In any case, the US and its allies can intervene to keep trade routes open even without a permanent presence.

Some strategists want the Americans to stay in order to prevent Iran from becoming a regional hegemon. But Iran is nowhere near as militarily dominant in its neighborhood as Russia and China are in theirs. Besides, the region’s other powers, notably Saudi Arabia and Turkey, would organize constellations to counter Tehran’s weight. The US can support such efforts by building alliances — Turkey is already a NATO member, and Washington is in talks with Riyadh about mutual security guarantees.

The idea that an American exit would create a vacuum that Moscow or Beijing would step into is also overblown. Russia dabbles in Syria, Africa and elsewhere, but it’s mainly trying to project its power into eastern Europe and central Asia, as well as the Arctic. China is eyeing the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas. A US withdrawal wouldn’t hand the Middle East to the Kremlin or Zhongnanhai just as the US retreat from Vietnam didn’t give them Southeast Asia.

The strategic downsides of the US presence are clearer. As Kelly Grieco, also at the Stimson Center, argues, the Americans in the Middle East, instead of deterring Iran and its proxies, serve as provocations and targets, breeding anti-Americanism and terrorism. The recurrent need for the US to retaliate tit-for-tat against low-level attacks raises the risk of unintended escalation drawing the US into a major war that it and the world don’t need.

Moreover, Washington, by deploying its own strength, actually encourages its partners, such as Riyadh, to free-ride and do less than they could for regional security. As it happens, neo-isolationists also use this argument to demand more US “restraint” in Europe and East Asia.

Does the American defense umbrella not tempt Japan, say, to spend less than it otherwise would to protect itself against China and North Korea? Does Germany not shirk its duties in the transatlantic alliance against Russia? Trump taps into American frustration at such perceived free-riding, claiming that he would encourage the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” to Washington’s European allies who skimp on their armies.

Washington must indeed manage the moral hazard that comes with American alliances. And there are positive signs already. Tokyo just passed its largest ever military budget, and Berlin has set up a special fund to boost its defense spending.

But there are also huge differences between the US commitments in Europe and East Asia and those in the Middle East. By invading the sovereign country of Ukraine and threatening Moldova and others, Russia has brought naked imperialist aggression back to Europe. And by threatening Taiwan and the countries around the South China Sea, China has thrown its revanchist gauntlet at the entire “rules-based” international order. Russia has the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons; China has the third largest and entertains ambitions for parity with Russia and the US. If there is ever, heaven forbid, a World War III, it will be between the US and one or both of these autocracies.

By contrast, neither the tragic 75-year-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians nor the 45-year quest by Iran’s theocracy for regional dominance needs to escalate into a global conflagration. Israel, with the region’s strongest army and its only nuclear arsenal, can defend itself. Iran is best dissuaded from building its own nukes, but could be deterred by Israel much as India and Pakistan hold each other in check. In time, it’s up to the peoples of the Middle East to make peace, and no outside power can force them.

What the debate about the US presence in the Middle East boils down to is opportunity cost. An American soldier standing guard at Tower 22 in the Jordanian desert cannot simultaneously watch over the NATO border in Estonia, the demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula or Philippine shoals in the South China Sea. Captain America has a shield that’s big but not global. To keep holding it over Europe and East Asia, he must withdraw it from the Middle East.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

The US Needs More Foreign Entanglements: Andreas Kluth

Trump Flaunts His Threat to NATO and the US: Timothy L. O’Brien

Taiwan and the US Are in a “Situationship”: Karishma Vaswani

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.