Gabriele Steinhauser

For a country like Vietnam, this is an almost impossible ask, right? A lot of countries have staked out this sort of in-between position and picking one side over the other puts them in a very precarious spot. Vietnam has fought a border war with China, has disputes with China around the South China Sea.

to basically show them a big middle finger is not going to play out for a country that is significantly smaller than China.

For a lot of countries, that is a choice that they will be incredibly reluctant to make because they need China for one thing and they need the US for another thing. It doesn't seem like the administration has entirely decided how they will use the talks with individual countries to somehow isolate China.

One option would be to demand that these countries sort of mirror the sky-high tariffs that the US has slapped on China for themselves. But that's a politically risky move for a lot of these countries that are not in a position like the US where they can afford to make China their enemy.

But it's also an economically very risky choice because they are dependent on Chinese inputs to make whatever they're exporting to the US. And to unwind that somehow is going to be incredibly difficult. And it's not entirely clear that these alternatives really exist for these countries.

Everybody around the world has been trying to figure out what is the administration trying to do? What's the ultimate goal here? And increasingly, it is becoming clear that the real target is China.

I arrived here a little over eight years ago in 2016, the year when Chinese lending to Africa was at its highest ever.

From the moment you land, a lot of the airports are Chinese-built. A lot of the new highways that you might take from the airport into the capital city will be Chinese-built. Often you have Chinese hotels. You see Chinese people who live there. You have a presence of Chinese banks, of Chinese construction companies.

For instance, if you want financing from the World Bank, there are a lot of hoops that you need to jump through. They're going to look at your balance sheet. They're going to look at the specifics of this project. They're going to look at the environmental impact. They might say, actually, we don't want to invest in fossil fuels anymore.

If you're a government that quickly wants to build something and maybe wants to show results to its citizens before the next election, somebody who maybe has fewer resources hoops to jump through is going to be an attractive partner.

I mean, the family photo, as they're called, you know, those pictures of all the leaders sort of like standing together and getting their photo taken.

I was impressed. I mean, everybody was there. People who don't travel, people that we rarely see. And it was a bigger showing than the Americans had at Biden's US-Africa summit at the end of 2022.