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To fully understand the gist of Trump’s tour of the Middle East, and the things that the American president reiterated many times, one has to look at the entire packaging of the tour, the president’s entourage, the events they held, and the products they were selling and extracting. Pitched as a diplomatic tour, it was confusing as it quickly took the shape of a “business forum”, with many business executives and CEOs. Quickly, it was about trillion-dollar deals being signed and “treaties of protection”, so akin to the late 1880s, when the British Empire roamed the world signing treaties of protection (against whom?) and cutting deals for the corporations of empire: petroleum corps, rubber, coffee and cotton, sugar, gold, et cetera. There was also big tech and Artificial Intelligence – perhaps telling of the artificiality of these friendships. Moments like this are very instructive – rude reminders, indeed – about the pretensions of the free world (the façade of democracy and human rights), the pervasiveness of subjective violence, quasi-sovereignty, the palimpsests of colonialism, and the absolute deception behind claims of keeping governments out of business.
It is capitalism 101. Indeed, without a close relationship with the state – especially its violence – capitalism cannot reproduce itself. Donald Trump might not have been directly dropping bombs on the Middle East (except through Israel, and directly over Yemen), but he was vending violence. While Trump sold the tools of violence – without explicitly saying against whom these Middle Eastern countries would be protecting themselves – he endlessly issued threats to the only truly sovereign country in the region: Iran. Basically, under the veneer of diplomacy, peace, and business, and throwing jabs at the interventionists neocons of previous American governments, the man stayed in sync with the previous American regimes he so vehemently sought to disassociate himself from. It was violence packaged differently: security and protection. Thusly, Saudi Arabia is reported to be investing US$600 billion in America in the areas of “energy security, defence industry, technology leadership, and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals”. Notice here that the difference now is in the nomenclature of violence, an entirely new packaging; it is called “defence protection”. Indeed, the United States “touted a nearly $142 billion deal to provide Saudi Arabia with weapons and services from US defence firms”, one news outlet reported.
Scam of free markets
Perhaps the high point of this mix – capitalism-state conspiracy – came to full display during a “Business Forum” in Doha (not a “Summit” as they are called when Africa is involved). Here American CEOs helped themselves to lucrative deals – under the auspices of their government. Why did these independent, private businesspeople have to visit the Middle East under the wings of Airforce One? It was not only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, but also Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Others included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Alphabet President Ruth Porat, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon. Indeed, as the American media reported throughout this tour, the stocks of almost all these companies shot upwards as several deals were being negotiated and concluded.
In Empire, Incorporated, Philip J. Stern recently re-narrated the story of corporations extracting from the colonised world on behalf of the colonial governments – while themselves marking territory: “Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society remained invested, quite literally, in their ventures.” Interesting how colonialism looks so gentrified nowadays, where the colonialists and their victims appear to cherish the relationship. Palimpsests.
In truth, states do business. The exception is Africa where states are under 24-hour IMF and World Bank surveillance to ensure that they do not get involved in any business. In truth, free markets are a scam. Because elsewhere states are business entities themselves – or Company States: they support, promote, and protect their businesses. They tax potential competitors out of business – as the Trump Tariffs have so far demonstrated. This isn’t new, by the way; Sterns, Philips and Sharman tell this story even more succinctly, calling corporations “company-states” that even had the power to wage war – because they were somehow sovereign.
During the colonial period, it was businessmen – individuals or companies – who exploited colonies with the support of the Colonial Office: Imperial British East African Company in East Africa; Imperial British India Company in India, Vincenzo Filonardi in Italian-colonised Africa, the Indian merchant, Aldina Visram, in Kenya and Uganda; King Leopold II in Belgian Congo, et cetera. Is this not what Dan Gertler International or Glencore Plc. are involved in inside DRC and South Sudan presently? Palimpsests, indeed.
As a supposedly “formerly” colonised subject, I followed this trip with mixed emotions – and often said to myself, “I hope Africa’s political elite is watching.” On the one hand, it remains true that in moments of violence or absolute nervousness, capitalists thrive the most. And not just weapons manufacturers. Isn’t this what Naomi Klein has called “the shock doctrine”? Profiteering from nervousness, and fear and shock? With the genocide in Palestine continuing, and bombings in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, surely the Middle East is in a “nervous condition”. The region is on the edge as Israel and the US continue to threaten Iran. Exploiting the moment, Donald Trump was in full capitalist mode. He would endlessly brag about America’s possession of superior tools of violence; about how they have the best missiles and nuclear arsenal (he doesn’t like the word, “nuke”, he joked as he threatened Iran not to have one). He bragged about their submarines, which allegedly can stay under water for 30 years – “only coming out for food”. It was cinematic.
The different uses of democracy
Somehow, Africa has been convinced that democracy = free markets = development. We have gambled with democracy – endlessly searching for the best model. One quickly notices that while none of the three countries in the Middle East visited by Trump meets the often-claimed criteria of electoral democracies, they are close friends with the “vanguards of democracy”. There is not a demand on them to organise elections or implement a wide range of human rights standards. Could this be because they need nothing from the IMF and the World Bank? I’m not saying they should be compelled to do anything. But it becomes clear that notions such as (electoral) “democracy” and “human rights”, endlessly pushed onto the subaltern world, are not necessarily a model for development, but rather an entry point into something else. Perhaps a close friendship with Euro-America covers for any other supposedly “shared values” of the so-called modern world.
For Africa, the challenge now is to find that language that works for the continent; democracy = free market = development is clearly not working and might never work for the continent, as Samir Amin warned many years ago. We ought to look at the Middle East and take lessons. Well, not simply about being friends with Euro-America, but about nationalisation of extraction, and working for the people. The modus operandi in the Middle East is neither free markets nor (electoral) democracy but something else, which the continent ought to define and try to learn. The continent’s problem isn’t necessarily about human rights or the voting rights of individuals – this is a secondary, and, sadly, often externally defined question – but rather sovereignty, and a political economy that enables the continent to use our environment (extractive and agricultural prowess) for our own self-sustenance.
Is it not fascinating that pseudo-socialist, and nationally run rich countries command more respect from the “democratic world” than their democratic and election-organising peers in Africa? Watching the US president travel to the Middle East, and visit these different countries individually, and not demand that he meets all of them in one capital – say, Riyadh or Doha – should be telling enough. Why do the leaders of the richest continent in the world (especially countries such as DRC and Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia) travel to European and American capitals to attract peanut investments? Contrapuntally, they don’t even travel individually but instead travel like school children on a tour. I used to think this was an acute case of inferiority complex, but I now understand it is because these African leaders are actually “colonial caretakers”, the crop that Franz Fanon warned us against.
Euro-America’s double standards on supposedly coveted items such as democracy and international law have been exposed for a long time now. The flip-flopping on the genocide in Palestine or the war in Ukraine is a more recent example. But often, one gets a new occasion where all doubt is extinguished. A new Africa will have to dig inside, dig deeper and be steadfast. Clearly, the signposts around which we have imagined our futures in the post-independence period – democracy, free markets, international law – are usable in more ways than they tend to proclaim.
