Al-Qalam 
By Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool
Having had some time to be at close quarters and in real time with the US presidency of Donald Trump, and having had to endure his declaration of me as persona non grata, an unwelcome person, as punishment for his unhappiness with South Africa’s geo-political courage and my allegedly undiplomatic unmasking of a supremacist agenda at work, I have reflected on what lies behind all of this apparent madness. Some have stayed at the level of the crazy, irrational, unpredictable, obsessive, and vengeful behaviour. His supporters have, almost cult-like, seen in him the embodiment of their accumulated grievances, nostalgia for a black and white world, and the promised one who restores their greatness. Policy analysts have treated him with a seriousness that warrants the studying of data, the drawing of trend graphs, and the reach for statistics, all worthy of deep analytical debate. Yet others have looked at the geo-political implications given the profound implications of US decisions and actions for the world and its nations. All of these perspectives have their merit when considered as a whole.
But the clue to a method lies not simply in the narcissism of the leader, the cool aid fed to the cult, the emerging policies, or the geo-political implications. Surrounding the leader on inauguration day were a class of people, not the cabinet picks or the party bigwigs, but the tech oligarchs who may have an agenda and for whom Trump may be the vehicle. The centrality of Elon Musk amongst them speaks of one whose largesse – financial and communication – must make Gupta’s largesse small in comparison, without detracting from the central transaction inherent in state capture. Why do the tech-bros need to capture the American state?
The journal, Foreign Affairs, warns: “The United States must take the lead in shaping how Artificial Intelligence diffuses around the world – or risk ceding global leadership of the emerging AI World Order to China”. This phase in the epoch of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is premised on the idea that Artificial Intelligence and the Information Age are the bedrock to our entire future – economic, defence, civil – and require dramatic interventions for dominance. This is the central anxiety to which the USA is responding. For dominance, the USA does not lack the soft ingredients brought by tech companies in Silicon Valley producing software, doing programming, and mining data (although China is rising in innovation), but it finds itself in deficit on the hardware for this epoch. This hardware is not in the minds of tech nerds, but in the mines around the world in the form of critical minerals and rare earth elements. To access these, for example, the USA has a critical minerals czar in the White House and exempts such materials from its tariff regime.
This arises from the following facts: the USA has identified 50 critical minerals essential to its immediate future; it is 100% reliant on other countries for 12 of the 50; it is more than 50% import-reliant for 29 of the 50; it is reliant on China for 25% of the 50; China controls 80% of global processing capacity for critical minerals and 90% for rare earth elements; and the crucial areas of reserves of critical minerals and rare earth elements are in areas like Canada, Ukraine, Russia, Greenland, together with the Arctic, Africa (with 30% reserves), with South Africa holding 70% of the platinum critical minerals, and others. All of these translate, for the 4ir, into a need, not just for critical minerals and rare earth elements, but for their products: AI chips require semiconductors, data processing materials, battery technologies, energy sources, and aerospace technology. These are all the antecedents for dominance in this digital-intensive phase.
This phase includes a race for innovation, access to sources of critical minerals and rare earth elements, geo-political supremacy over shipping routes and security of submarine cables carrying the lifeblood of the age, diversification of supply chains, and achieved either through the USA being hegemonic in global co-operation or dominant in global relations. In this conundrum lies the method in madness. Every epoch has a beneficiary class, and every beneficiary class has its pioneers, most often acting as robber barons. We are familiar with them in the industrial revolution – whether dominating coal and other mines or dominating the oil and agricultural fields of the world for access to energy materials, industrial minerals, food security, and dominating the state for the means of expansion and stability of extraction. These shifts in the current epoch of the 4IR have their own robber barons who believe the USA has vacated the field and rendered the USA vulnerable. For example, a 30% supply reduction by China of the critical mineral, gallium, essential to every micro-chip, would result in a USD 600 billion reduction in US GDP. So, how would these robber barons overcome increasing USA vulnerability and Chinese dominance?
Firstly, it needs to establish – desperately – not just spheres of influence, but dominance, over territories like Canada, Greenland and the Arctic, Ukraine, Russia, Africa, etc. Secondly, it has to have the US state significantly altered / captured to compete so that they reduce dependencies or vulnerabilities to supply chain disruptions, and they are unfettered for their own objectives as captains of their industries. Thirdly, the US state must be transformed from arbiter/mediator to facilitator/dominator for these objectives: Reduction/elimination of democratic regulatory controls over the products or outcomes of the 4IR; removal of restrictions on monopolistic tendences or elimination of global competition; control and use of big data, especially gaining control of the US’ IRS and Social Security data, and its potential for both securitisation and monetization. It also needs access to supply chains of critical minerals/rare earth elements and their beneficiation or processing; secure access to shipping lanes and security of sub-sea cables.
In hoping to achieve these objectives, the preponderance of the tech barons around the US centre of power becomes meaningful. The apparent madness around Canada as the 51st State and the takeover of Greenland becomes significant. The seduction of Russia and the critical minerals browbeating of Ukraine make sense. And the obsession with South Africa for its platinum, its centrality in Africa, its influence in BRICS, and leadership of the G20, takes the debate to a much more complex level. The pettiness regarding SA was particularly heightened with SA having the temerity to take the USA’s ally, Israel, to the International Court of Justice and charge it with genocide. What SA potentially brings into the resistance of this contemporary scramble for the world’s resources is a moral authority. It has flexed this muscle on Israel.
*Ebrahim Rasool was the Ambassador to the United States and is the former Premier of the Western Cape.
