The Trump clowns are planning to close U.S. embassies in Africa.

Good riddance, right?

Wrong.

They still plan to work on “coordinated counterterrorism operations” and “strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources.”

They also still plan to maintain U.S. military bases across the continent. They’re shutting down all kinds of offices, but not Africom.

In U.S. culture and media, where it’s one’s duty to pretend that the military budget and everything that goes with it does not exist, one could hardly be blamed for thinking that the closure of embassies actually meant a full departure.

And one could hardly be blamed for thinking this a positive development. Those embassies have steadily been transformed over the decades into weapons dealerships, military sidekicks, and dens of spies. (The CIA may yet point out to Trump how many embassy employees are CIA and make him an offer he can’t refuse.) It’s hard sometimes to imagine other functions. In fact, in U.S. culture, withdrawing the U.S. military from a place is usually called “isolationism” as if militarism were the only way to interact with people. But that’s the one thing that’s not ending in Africa or anywhere else.

The U.S. government is cutting off all sorts of aid, but not what it calls “military aid” or “defense aid” — meaning the U.S. military giving money and training to other countries’ militaries (never mind all the trainees who do coups). Go here, pick a year, and click on “Department of Defense.”

Most of Africa has been loaded up with U.S.-made weapons, and there’s been no indication of a halt to that (despite the planned closure of the dealerships). Go here and scroll back through the years.

The blue countries below are the ones without U.S. troops:

The red countries below have had U.S. wars or military interventions over the past 80 years:

The red countries below are under illegal U.S. sanctions:

Maintaining the militarism but dropping even the pretense of anything else is not progress.

Ways to relate to people other than through mass slaughter include cooperation on environment, healthcare, migration, and international law; and actual aid. Such approaches can be perverted into “soft power” and used for ulterior purposes. Eliminating them is asking for trouble, for hostility, for misunderstanding, for incapacity to handle any conflict through anything other than bombs and missiles. As everywhere else on Earth, the people of Africa have no widespread interest in competing with Donald Trump’s greedy business interests, but do have an interest in peace.

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