The African diplomat’s remark is a single quotation John Kiriakou uses to answer why the United States has lost ground to China across much of the world despite spending vastly more on defence.
The remark
Kiriakou says an African diplomat told him recently — he was in Washington with his president for a White House summit — that the thing about you Americans is that you always offer us democracy and military aid, and the Chinese offer us food and new roads.[1]
So they go with the Chinese.[1] Kiriakou relays the diplomat’s reasoning on both halves of the American offer: they do not want democracy and cannot make democracy function anyway, and they are going to get the military aid regardless, because terrorism has to be stopped.[1]
The Chinese offer
Kiriakou then describes the transaction as the Chinese put it. They arrive and say they will pave the road the country has been wanting to build from its capital city out to the hinterland, and all they ask in exchange is the international airport — plus five billion dollars repaid over thirty years using treasury bonds.[2] And the answer, he says, is that this sounds like a pretty darn good deal.[2][3]
The result
The next thing you know, in Kiriakou’s phrase, the Chinese have bases all over Africa — and in Washington, at the State Department, they ask themselves how that happened, and say they did not see it coming.[3]
He frames the whole exchange as an argument about priorities, raised immediately after his observation that the American military budget is larger than those of the next nine countries combined while the country’s own bridges, airports and highways go unrepaired.[4][1]