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Eyes On U.S. — When African Leaders Go To Washington, China Is In The Room

photo of Senegal President Macky Sall coming out of his airplane

President of Senegal Macky Sall arrives Monday at Andrews Air Force Base for the U.S.-Africa summit. Md., Dec. 12, 2022.

U.S. Air Force, Airman 1st Class Isabelle Churchill
Alex Hurst

-Analysis-

Some 100 of the most important political eyes in Africa aren’t turned towards the U.S. this week — they’re in the U.S. For the first time in eight years, the White House is hosting 49 African heads of state and leaders of government (and the Senegalese head of the African Union) for a U.S.-Africa summit. Not invited: any nation that has recently undergone a military putsch, or otherwise not in good standing with the African Union, like Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Sudan.

It’s only the second such summit, after Barack Obama held the inaugural one in 2014. For African nations, it’s a chance to push for trade agreements and international investment, as reports FinancialAfrik, as well as to showcase their most successful businesses. According to RFI, dominant in its coverage of West Africa, on the agenda are: fighting terrorism, climate change, food security, and a financial facility intended to facilitate African exports to the U.S.

These themes are recurrent in national coverage and official diplomatic communiqués, from the likes of Cameroon (whose communiqué pointedly notes the U.S.’s “lack of colonial history” in Africa), which is seeking to regain access to the the U.S. market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, to Madagascar, which as an island nation, is particularly concerned with climate change.

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But is the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and the accompanying nice talk all just cynical cover for what are, in fact, purely U.S. strategic interests in its wider global competition with China? That’s certainly the message from Chinese media — but also a point of view either echoed, or simply acknowledged as matter of fact, by African voices.

“No matter how many fancy words the U.S. uses, the country still sees Africa as an arena to serve its strategic goal of competing with China,” Liu Xin writes for China’s state-run Global Times.

Indeed, for the U.S., the summit is a chance to move past the disinterest — if not outright disdain — that the Trump administration showed for Africa at a time when both China and Russia were ramping up their economic and military presence on the continent. Even if Biden Administration officials have been eager to talk about Africa on its own terms, the “long shadow” of China is everywhere, writes Kenya’s The Standard.

There is more than simply a U.S.-China competition at work.

The U.S. is playing “catch up,” writes The Standard, having fallen behind China when it comes to foreign direct investment in Africa, and must convince African countries that it is a better partner than China. The Nairobi-based daily isn’t coy about Africa’s growing strategic importance, leverage, and need to be wooed, writing, “The continent, whose leaders often feel they’ve been given short shrift by leading economies, remains crucial to global powers because of its rapidly growing population, significant natural resources, and a sizable voting bloc in the United Nations.”

Cognizant of the UN voting bloc that African countries constitute, the Biden administration is eager to court their support for Ukraine, but maintains that irrespective of outcome, it wants Africa to have a louder international voice — perhaps, as Al Jazeera reports, by making an African nation a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Finally, for Malcom Biiga, writing in the regional Francophone magazine Jeune Afrique, there is more than simply a U.S.-China competition at work, and the timing of the summit can’t be disconnected from France’s pullback from West Africa, in particular the announcement this year of the end of its military mission in Mali. “As anti-French sentiment grows larger across Africa, the U.S. is giving it a go with a charm offensive,” Biiga says. It’s not so much competitively “thumbing its nose" at French President Emmanuel Macron, but an expression of Washington’s worry that Russia or China will step in to fill France’s void — reminding readers that Russian military contractor group Wagner has done exactly that in Mali.

As Cameroonian research Paul Simon-Handy told RFI on Tuesday, the U.S. “is trying to define its own strategic vision [in Africa] while remaining a strategic ally of France [in the region].”

Biiga, meanwhile, concludes his analysis of the African leaders’ collective pilgrimage to Washington by wryly pointing out that neither President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to visit Africa.

— Alex Hurst

In other news …

📰  UP, FRONT PAGE AND CENTER

U.S. scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they have — for the first time — created a net positive amount of energy from fusion. It could be a major breakthrough in the search for near limitless clean energy. The experiment used enormous, high powered lasers to start the reaction. Even if actual electricity generation on a large scale remains a long way off, for the Italian daily LaRepubblica, it’s the very first glimpse of a “spark” from the future.

⚜️ AMERICAN EXPORT

“We need an Anglo-American cultural detox,” writes a worried Montréal columnist, otherwise les Québecois risk becoming “Anglo-Americans who just speak French.”

It’s tough being an 8-million person linguistic island in the middle of a 350-million strong North American anglophone ocean … Referencing a professor friend who queried his students about Christmas movies and realized that none of them had any francophone references (like cult comedy films Le Père Noël est une ordure or Les Bronzés font du ski), Loïc Tassé doesn’t just fret about a loss of Québecois culture, but proposes solutions: more public financing of French language movies, books, and music, and introducing more francophone writers (possibly even in English translation) in school courses.

🎅🏻🎄 SO AMERICAN?

Germans are known to take their Christmas sehr seriously. And should they wish to expand their merry horizons and “celebrate it like in the USA,” Focus came up with a handy list of typically American customs for its readers. Some are well known (cookies and milk for Santa, hanging up socks, etc.) and others … less so.

Case in point, the “Christmas pickle,” which the weekly magazine says probably originated in Germany, and wherein a small cucumber (or cucumber-like ornament) is hidden among the other Christmas tree decorations. Guests and children are then invited to look for said Weihnachtsgurke, with the person finding it being awarded an extra present.

Hmmm? It seems most American readers will be as interested as Germans to discover this supposed popular tradition ...

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Society

Talking Risks: New Research Finds Psychotherapy Can Have Dangerous Side Effects

It has long been assumed that psychotherapy can do no harm at worst. But new research makes clear that for some people, it can have very serious, even life-threatening, consequences.

Photo of two people sitting

Questioning the long-held belief that "talking can't hurt"

Katja Ridderbusch

BERLIN — Until now, we have assumed that, at worst, psychotherapy has no impact whatsoever. However, new research shows that treatment can have serious risks. A few patients experience side effects — and sometimes even an increase in mental health problems.

Across Europe and the United States, experts and politicians alike are concerned that people’s mental health is suffering. Massimiliano Mascherini from Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, has even said we are experiencing a “parallel pandemic in mental health”. U.S. President Joe Biden recently announced that mental health was one of his top priorities and his government would provide $300 million of funding for mental health and community projects.

Why? Well, one in five people in the U.S. has mental health problems. According to data from the Robert Koch Institute, even before the pandemic hit, one in 10 women and 8.1% of men in Germany were seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist.

The coronavirus crisis has made matters worse. According to data from the World Health Organization, since the start of the pandemic, the number of people diagnosed with anxiety and depression has risen by 25%. As a result, more people are seeking professional help.

“Even after three years of the pandemic, the demand for psychotherapy remains high,” says Gebhard Hentschel, president of the German Psychotherapists Association. In summer 2022, the number of patients seeking therapy was still around 40% higher than before COVID, which means waiting lists at practices and clinics are also long.

So far the biggest issue has been the lack of provision. But research is starting to highlight another problem that until now has gone under the radar: psychotherapy, just like other medical interventions, comes with its own risks. “Around 10% of psychotherapy patients experience serious and long-lasting side effects,” says Michael Linden, a neurologist, psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the Charité Hospital in Berlin.

Some patients even develop new, more serious anxieties, become dependent on their psychotherapists or experience a breakdown in relationships with family and friends. They end up in a worse situation than before, and in rare cases, therapy even ends in suicide.

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