How Ruto's goofs created a US-China dilemma

Absence of prudence and foresight has informed Kenya’s diplomacy from the very day President William Ruto was inaugurated, in September 2022. It gets worse by the season. The current imbroglio that involves the US and China is only the latest chink in the once solid armour of Kenyan diplomacy in gone decades. 

The American Congress is reviewing Kenya’s meddling with China. It is reconsidering the granting of major non-Nato (MNNA) ally status to Kenya in June last year. It will be a terrible slap in the face if the status is revoked, about three months from now. Yet diplomatic faux pas seems to be the badge of Kenya Kwanza’s foreign relations. 

As soon as he left the inauguration arena, President William Ruto plunged into the deep end of diplomatic blunder. He got entangled in the decades-old Saharawi Republic controversy. Unfamiliar with these waters, the President quickly ate diplomatic humble pie.

He rescinded his words. But that was only the beginning of what has now become Kenya’s common coin on the diplomatic circuit.

It speaks at once of naivety, lack of clear focus, and failure to tap the highly trained professional diplomats in the Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs. An overbearing national political Executive operates on whim even here. It stumbles from one blunder to the next.

The Executive mistakes a flurry of words for excellence in diplomacy, hence the huge pile of blunders and embarrassment. 

Diplomacy is not a gin and tonic affair. Nor is it about flashy motorcades, bespoke Parisian attire, and leg-crossing.

Hans Morgenthau, the foremost authority in modern diplomacy, famously defined diplomacy as politics among nations. Hence, when the Prime CS and CS for Foreign and Diaspora Affairs Musalia Mudavadi, tells Kenyans “not to politicize diplomacy” he completely misses the point. Diplomacy is about political realism on the international market, where nations meet to compete for opportunities.

It is at once a brutal and subtle market. Only the very finest get what brings them here. The rest remain pawns, to be kicked about like ping-pong balls. But, sometimes, some become ping-pong balls out of their own initiative, such as Kenya under the Kenya Kwanza regime.

What counts on this market is power politics, national interest and value proposition. Every nation gets here with a selfish agenda. Yet, unless they have the muscle to bulldoze through the space, they communicate their interest with fragile elegance. The US bulldozes  all the time, because it has what it takes. The rest are either allies, adversaries to be crushed, or pawns in the game. The pawn can be pampered, bullied, or thrown out, depending on the great questions of the day; and the pawn’s value on the market. African states, Kenya among them, play in this league.

Hence, even when President Biden and Congress granted Kenya the MNNA status last year, Kenya was still a pawn. And pawns must behave. 

Since, however, international politics is an unending power struggle for economic benefits, pawns can also grow to become legitimate allies. They could go on to grow into significant powers. And a significant power could eventually become a great power, and even the axis around which a new world order rotates. When a new global power begins rising, it redefines both the balance of terror and balance of loyalty in the cut-throat global market of power struggle. Abramo F K Organski famously explained this in his Power Transition Theory. 

Challenging a dominant state

The rise of a challenger to a dominant power is a major driver of international conflict. Indeed, armed conflict has easily been the ultimate outcome of such a challenge to a dominant power. The Second World War (1939-1945) was in many ways driven by the rise of Germany as a major power in Europe, challenging Great Britain. Having advanced so phenomenally in industrial technology and manufacturing, Germany also wanted to have her day in the global sunshine. The dominant powers of the day resisted. Hitler insisted. The world paid the price.

When President Ruto announced in China in April that Kenya would work with Beijing to create a new world order, he slapped Washington squarely in the face. The Kenyan president criticised what he called an “inequitable world order.” He praised China for what he sees as a humane presence on the competitive global market. China is on the rise, and this disturbs Washington to no mean end.

The Red Dragon is emerging as a fast-advancing economic and military power in the 21st Century. It is a huge challenge to the United States’ dominance of this space in the 20th Century. The emerging order that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates gives the US sleepless nights. The understanding is that it seeks to put down the United States and Nato. 

Whether he knows it or not, President Ruto has told Xi Jinping that they will work together to challenge Nato dominance and bring about a new world order, in which China will be the new dominant power. This is why the American Congress is reconsidering Kenya’s status as 20th MNNA. For what is Nato, and what does it mean to be a MNNA state?  

Where it began

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) was formed in 1948, as a military pact involving the United States and its Western allies. Underlying all concerns was the need to protect Western capitalism and wealth. At the root of it all is the pursuit to dominate the world economically. Militarism is, accordingly, a tool for protecting economic dominance. At the time, competition had arisen between the United States and Russia, two nations that had been allies in the Second World War.

While the war had been against the spread of Hitler’s Nazism and fascism, the US and Russia had unfinished business that had come with the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Towards the end of the First World War (1914-1918), Vladmir Lenin and his Bolshevik friends overthrew the Russian monarchy and established the Soviet Union. They embraced Marxist communism as the new economic and political model. They declared that they would carry out similar revolutions everywhere in the world. They would overthrow all capitalist governments and install communist regimes. This worried the world of capital. 

But Adolf Hitler and his fascist friends were a threat to everyone else. They had to be sorted out first. As the war ended, Russia’s new ruler, Joseph Stalin, gathered all the territories he had redeemed from Hitler to become either a part of a new entity called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or allies of the USSR. They were mostly in Eastern Europe.  Churchill called them the Iron Curtain that protected Russia from possible military attack by Western Europe. 

Stalin now declared that he would resume export of the revolution to the rest of the world. Conversely, President Harry Truman of the US declared that he would roll back communism by overthrowing it everywhere (the famous Truman Doctrine). Both sides formed defence blocs. Hence Nato was born. And seven years later, in 1955, the communists formed the Warsaw Pact. Each camp understood that any war against any one of their members was war against all of the members.

The USSR and the USA became the two global superpowers around which ideological competition to control the world happened (called the Cold War). They engaged in a race to arm themselves (the arms race); proxy wars were fought by their pawns all over the world, propaganda against each other, and winning over allies and pawns. The objects of Nato have never changed, even after Warsaw collapsed with communism in 1990. And last June Kenya was drafted into the formation, as a Major Non-Nato Ally. 

Ruto and Nato

The prompting was, of course, President Ruto’s acceptance to send the Kenya Police to Haiti. But beyond that was the growing Chinese presence and potential dominance of the global community. Kenya is, accordingly, an important strategic partner of the United States. America’s primary interests in the region are economic and military. While these interests are cast in benevolent optics, at the bottom is American national interest, as is the case with every country on the international political and economic market. However, the US will usually profile them as “expanding economic growth” for East African nations, through US investment, “encouraging good governance,” and the like. 

The most fundamental interest, however, is what the US can get out of the region and the role of the region in US security and military interests, here and beyond. Counterterrorism is especially important as is, also, protection of US military bases in the region. For their part, the bases are a part of a wider American security network that goes all the way to the Arabian Peninsula and the entire Persian Gulf region. For this matter, the US will maintain an abiding interest in stability in Kenya. It dislikes abductions and lawlessness that Kenya Kwanza has embraced, for the instability it brings. This is risky for strategic partnership of the kind President Biden extended to Kenya last year. The two countries especially share critical military intelligence on regional security threats. This is at risk in an unstable state.  

When you have entered the space into which Kenya sits with the US, moreover, your diplomatic forays have to be judicious, methodical and intentional. As a MNNA, you observe certain allied protocols, even as you exercise your sovereignty on the competitive global political market. You avoid faux pas that could disturb your allies in Nato, where you are now a fringe member. Dalliance with China, complete with intemperate remarks will worry the US. For, it has an ever-expanding raft of anxieties about China. 

Concerns

For a start, the United States has a huge trade imbalance with China. This means that China is gaining more from doing business with America than the US gains by trading with China. Anything that gives China more succour in that space is creepingly hostile to America. To proclaim openly that you will work with China to consolidate the Chinese muscle is to line yourself up among Washington’s adversaries. To do this when America has made you a MNNA is seen as an act of betrayal.

Yet, even amidst these voiced concerns, Ruto has remained adamant, stating rather artlessly that he will work with everybody, in Kenya’s interest. 

The trade advantage that China enjoys is a factor of her tech growth and the economic advancement. Put together with her own massive domestic market of 1.4 billion people, as compared to America’s 342 million, any advantage that the Red Dragon enjoys overseas is a major point of concern to the US. Besides, America attributes China’s tech growth to what she sees as theft of America’s intellectual property and unfair trade practices. Regardless of the truth, it is space that requires methodical diplomacy, and not unguarded declarations. 

Bring in China’s naval growth in the South China Sea, and her overall new Big Brother influence in the region, and you begin to appreciate America’s fears about an emerging great power that could play the US off its global altar. Chinese presence virtually everywhere in the Global South, with massive cocktails of infrastructural projects, crowns American unease with her. Accordingly, when Mudavadi tells the Kenyan nation that all is well in relations with America, he is either being disingenuous, or he simply does not understand, or even both.

Diplomatic faux pas

Away from all these, Kenya’s diplomatic docket is a lesson in diplomatic gaffes and goofs. Nairobi is now home to the rogue armed group called Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of Sudan. Both President Ruto and Mudavadi have publicly defended the presence of this group that has laid waste massive swathes of its own country, and visited untold suffering to civilians. It is difficult to tell Kenya’s stakes in the war in Sudan, apart from possible self-interest in the high echelons of power.

Closely related to this is the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Kenya is perceived to be supporting M23 rebels against the government. 

The sending of 1,000 police officers to Haiti, for its part, remains a controversial affair. The Executive circumvented the law to realise its unknown goals in Haiti. President Ruto’s humanitarian proclamations in this regard amount to little more than high sounding sanctimony. Diplomacy remains about national self-interest in the global arena. And so far Mudavadi and Ruto have not explained what the Kenya Police are doing in Haiti when there is so much they could at home. With all the eloquent and often embarrassingly loud presence in the global arena, Kenya is a diplomatic cripple, who has failed to cultivate any useful alliances that could deliver even such an obvious trophy as the African Union chairmanship.

-Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser.