Dr Manaseh M. Mintah
There is a memorable moment in the song The Girl Is Mine by Michael Jackson featuring Paul McCartney from the album Thriller. In the song, the two singers engage in a playful argument over a woman, and Jackson calmly declares that he is “a lover, not a fighter.” The statement is humorous within the context of the song, yet it contains a deeper philosophical meaning. It suggests that persuasion, attraction, and patience can sometimes accomplish what confrontation and force cannot.
Growing up in Ghana, I encountered a similar idea in my Social Studies textbook in primary school. The book explained why the Fante people never built a vast territorial empire comparable to that of the Ashanti. The explanation offered was simple but profound.
The Fantes were primarily interested in trade rather than conquest. Their energies were directed toward commerce, diplomacy, and maritime exchange rather than territorial expansion through warfare. That childhood lesson offers a surprisingly useful lens for understanding contemporary geopolitics because modern nations, like historical societies, often choose between strategies of confrontation and strategies of attraction.
Modern states rarely act purely out of altruism. Nations pursue their interests even when they claim to be defending the interests of others. Yet history also shows that some powers have pursued those interests far more aggressively and far more exploitatively than others. For much of the twentieth century, global geopolitics was dominated by Western powers, particularly the United States, Britain, and France. Their influence was exercised not only through military alliances and political interventions but also through corporate and economic power. Western corporations became deeply embedded in the extraction of natural resources across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, often operating within broader geopolitical frameworks that ensured access to strategic minerals and energy supplies.
Large American energy and mining companies have long played significant roles in the global extraction economy. Firms such as ExxonMobil have operated major oil exploration projects across multiple continents, while companies such as Newmont Corporation have been among the largest gold producers in Ghana. In the petroleum sector, Kosmos Energy helped develop Ghana’s Jubilee offshore oil field, marking one of the most important petroleum discoveries in West Africa in recent decades.
Other Western corporations, including Chevron Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Occidental Petroleum, Freeport-McMoRan, and Barrick Gold, have operated across resource-rich regions such as Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Peru, and Zambia. These companies did not operate in isolation. Their activities often intersected with the broader geopolitical interests of Western states seeking secure access to oil, gold, copper, uranium, and other strategic minerals essential for industrial growth and technological development.
The results in many parts of Africa were mixed at best. While extraction generated enormous wealth globally, many host countries experienced environmental degradation, limited local industrialisation, and persistent economic dependency. Scholars and policymakers have frequently described this paradox as the resource curse, a condition in which countries rich in natural resources often experience slower economic development, weaker institutions, and greater vulnerability to external influence.
Over the past three decades, however, the geopolitical landscape has begun to shift significantly as China has expanded its economic engagement with Africa and the wider Global South. Before the 1960s, China had a very limited presence on the continent.
Today, Chinese trade with Africa exceeds two hundred and fifty billion dollars annually, and Chinese banks and construction companies have financed thousands of infrastructure projects, including highways, railways, power plants, ports, and telecommunications networks. Countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Angola, Zambia, and Nigeria have received substantial Chinese infrastructure financing, and projects such as the Addis Ababa to Djibouti railway and Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway illustrate the scale of this engagement.
Many of these projects operate under complex financial arrangements in which infrastructure loans are linked to long-term trade agreements or resource-backed collateral involving commodities such as oil, copper, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth minerals. These minerals are increasingly critical to the twenty-first century global economy because cobalt and lithium are essential for electric vehicle batteries, while rare earth elements are crucial for advanced electronics, renewable energy technologies, and modern defence systems.
Africa holds a significant share of global reserves of these strategic resources, particularly in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Ghana. China has moved aggressively to secure supply chains for these minerals through investment partnerships, mining concessions, and long-term purchase agreements, and Chinese firms now control or finance a significant share of global cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This expanding economic presence has gradually altered geopolitical alignments that had long been dominated by Western powers. For decades, the United States functioned as the central pillar of global economic influence through its financial institutions, multinational corporations, and cultural exports. The spread of American consumer culture, often symbolised by blue jeans and brands such as Coca-Cola, accompanied this broader geopolitical dominance. China has pursued a different strategy, focusing less on military alliances or overt political intervention and more on trade partnerships, infrastructure development, and economic diplomacy across the developing world.
In this sense, China’s strategy resembles the metaphor of the lover rather than the fighter. Instead of confronting Western influence directly in most regions, China has cultivated economic relationships that deepen its presence in sectors such as mining, logistics, manufacturing, telecommunications, and energy. Many countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America increasingly view China as an attractive partner precisely because its approach appears less politically intrusive than the conditional aid or governance demands often associated with Western institutions.
Meanwhile, global power competition rarely remains purely economic, and as China’s influence expands, the United States and its allies have increasingly reassessed their geopolitical strategies. Historically, Western powers have often responded to emerging rivals through containment strategies, alliance building, and political pressure, and military power therefore remains a decisive instrument in international politics. Even when actions appear to challenge international norms or legal frameworks, powerful states may still resort to force when they believe critical strategic interests are threatened.
The tensions surrounding Iran illustrate this dynamic clearly. Iran sits at the heart of one of the world’s most strategically important regions because the Strait of Hormuz is a vital maritime chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of global oil shipments pass. China is currently one of the largest consumers of Iranian oil and maintains extensive energy trade relations with Tehran. Any geopolitical shift that alters control or influence over Iranian energy resources would inevitably affect global energy markets as well as the broader balance of power among major states.
While China rarely projects military power far beyond its borders, its economic diplomacy has created an extensive network of trade relationships and infrastructure partnerships across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Some analysts argue that China’s reluctance to provide security guarantees to many of its partners may eventually weaken these relationships, while others believe China’s quieter strategy of economic attraction and long-term engagement may ultimately prove more sustainable.
Political thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama and commentators like Thomas Friedman have long debated the future of global power and ideological influence. In works such as “The World Is Flat,” and “Thank You for Being Late,” Friedman describes a rapidly transforming global order in which technological change, globalisation, and the rise of new economic powers are gradually diffusing influence away from the traditional centres of Western dominance. This transformation implies that the geopolitical monopoly once enjoyed by Western nations may slowly erode as emerging economies reshape trade networks, supply chains, and global economic relationships.
This broader shift is also beginning to influence political thinking across Africa. In several countries, leaders are increasingly asserting greater control over their natural resources and renegotiating agreements with multinational corporations.
Governments in countries such as Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have revisited mining contracts, strengthened royalty regimes, and, in some cases, nationalised or partially nationalised strategic mineral sectors. These developments reflect a growing recognition across the continent that Africa’s natural wealth must generate broader domestic prosperity rather than merely feeding global supply chains.
If such transformations continue, the global order may gradually evolve toward a more multipolar system in which influence is distributed among several economic and political centres rather than concentrated within a single dominant bloc. In that sense, the metaphor from Michael Jackson’s song may offer an unexpected insight into geopolitics because sometimes the lover, not the fighter, ultimately prevails. China appears to be betting that economic attraction, trade diplomacy, and strategic patience will generate influence more effectively than confrontation, and whether that strategy succeeds may well become one of the defining geopolitical questions of our time.
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