Trump edition: America's AI war with China & what his presidency means for Africa
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I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. It's Friday the 30th of January 2025. Today the Chinese AI model sends shockwaves through Western tech and security and the doomsday clock inches closer to midnight and the latest from eastern Congo where the fighting in Goma has raised tensions across the continent. We ask what does Donald Trump's administration mean for Africa?

But first, this week a Chinese company released an AI program that has sent shockwaves through the tech sector but also Western security agencies. DeepSeek surged to the top of Apple's free app downloads when it came out this week and it's raised questions about American dominance of the entire AI industry. Donald Trump said: "The release of DeepSeek

AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win. But just how much of a wake-up call is it? Mark Andresen, the tech billionaire, compared it to a Sputnik moment for AI, suggesting that this is the start of a Cold War-style space race for the future of this technology.

Telegraph investment editor James Baxter-Darrington compared it to the launch of Amstrad computers in 1986 and who owns one of them anymore. So is it Sputnik or Amstrad? Is it a major security threat or not? To discuss all of this, I'm joined by The Telegraph's Gareth Caulfield, who has long been following AI and all its twists and turns. Gareth, thank you.

Welcome to Battlelines. Chris, quite a broad question. What is DeepSeek and why is it making such a stir? DeepSeek is the Chinese answer to ChatGPT in a nutshell. So it's one of these advanced AI models where you can have a conversation with it. In the technical argo, it's a conversational chatbot. You can type questions into it and the chatbot will give you an answer in natural language, real time, as if you were speaking to a fellow human. But of course you are not, you're talking to a very, very clever piece of software.

Now the reason this is controversial is that DeepSeek comes from China whereas hitherto ChatGPT and other such technologies like it have come from the US or from affiliated Western countries, if I can put it that way. So the problem becomes with DeepSeek one of origin first of all, it's Chinese, it's not Western so our visibility as the West is, is limited into what it is, what it does and crucially how it does it and what it does with the data it gathers while it's doing it, if that makes sense.

So the national security element here is that, well, it's twofold. Number one, the technology itself is concerning because you've got the potential to extract data from its users, something I'm talking great depth about and I'll come to in a moment. And the other element of that for the national security angle is how on earth did the Chinese manage to produce something which, according to their own marketing literature, so we have to take this with a pinch of salt, but...

They claim that they were able to do this using far fewer resources, data centers, electricity, and advanced chips, than the likes of OpenAI were doing with ChatGPT. So there's a two-pronged element to this from the security angle, Rowan.

Let's take the first of those security prongs, this issue about collation of data on users. How is that different from what the big American Californian-based tech giants do anyway? We know that Google, Facebook, Meta, whoever, they take vast amounts of data points from us. They can kind of track what we do. They know when we wake up in the morning, they can tell all kinds of things about us. Is there an element of double standards here? We just

because these are Chinese servers, not American servers? Bluntly, Rand, I think there is an element of that in here at play.

The problem with DeepSeek, I've sort of mentioned already, from the Western point of view, the Western security point of view, is that it is Chinese. So the data it gathers, which fundamentally is not all that different from the likes of Meta, you know, Facebook, Instagram, and so on and so forth, Google, all the other big ad tech giants, Snapchat and that, all of these companies are harvesting up data. You install the app on your mobile phone, instantly it fingerprints the phone, it takes a snapshot of what else is happening,

installed on there, the operating system, so on and so forth, all of that information is valuable to advertisers. Fundamentally, the Western companies are all ad-driven businesses in the business of getting eyeballs on the content that somebody else is paying them to place there.

Now, with DeepSeek, the argument goes that, all right, there might be an element of advertising here, but actually this is some sort of evil Chinese ploy to spy on the West and steal all our data. And putting aside the argument that, yes, this is happening in the West, the problem is essentially one of visibility, right? The app...

does a lot of fingerprinting, it also captures something which most of the main Western social media apps don't do, which is your actual keyboard fingerprint. So you can create a unique profile of people depending on how they tap keys on a keyboard or an on-screen input method and uniquely fingerprint them that way so you can see. Whoa, whoa, whoa. How they tap on a keyboard?

What do you mean? You mean like the gap of time between keystrokes or how long you press on it or something like that? Exactly those things. How you press on the keys, how long you press on them, how quickly you type certain words, how slowly you type certain other words. So it is creating that unique digital fingerprint. It's kind of similar to another Chinese surveillance technology, gate analysis for CCTV. So if you look at a crowd of people, you can tell particular individuals by the way in which they walk. This is a very similar way of doing that.

And the text existed in the West, but it is not generally used in social media apps that millions or billions of us use. So that's one instant point of concern there with DeepSeek.

I keep coming back to this one. Problem is that data is then beamed back to China. Now, like the West, China has national security laws which compel their tech companies to cooperate with security authorities. So if the Chinese authorities turn around one day and say to deep-seek creators, right, we're interested in all users in Washington, D.C. or in London or Cheltenham or Munich or somewhere like that.

then they can pull that data out and DeepSeek is legally compelled to give it to them in whatever format or depth that they want to have. That's a concern because obviously that kind of information, very, very detailed, it could be anything from, I've mentioned fingerprinting, location data, type of device, software installed on it, other software and apps installed on it and so on.

That is obviously a very big advantage if you are some sort of national security agency working in China's interests as opposed to the West. Yes, we do this in the West. Yes, the Western security services absolutely do request that kind of data and make use of it.

But I think the broader picture here is, we are Westerners talking about this. Do we care much that Western advertising companies who cooperate with law enforcement authorities gather this data? And do we care more, or indeed less, that Chinese companies and Chinese authorities are harvesting this for whatever it is China wants to do? And bearing in mind that China is not exactly our closest friend in geopolitical terms,

My personal view is that is a cause of concern. I suppose one way of looking at it would be saying all those issues, you know, for a Western citizen dealing with something like, I don't know, Facebook or something. I mean, there's a civil liberties issue. There's a privacy issue there. When it's China, it becomes a national security kind of kind of a geopolitical concern.

Absolutely. I mean, we've seen this play out with TikTok already. I mean, there's a lot of controversy about TikTok over the last few years, which essentially boiled down to West good, China bad. And in the US context, it was sell TikTok to a Western company or we will shut it down.

So the, you know, again, I keep coming back to the phrase problem. The problem is who do you trust, them or us? And it is, you know, in the Western context, we have always looked at it as a privacy and civil liberties issue. I mean, if you know your tech industry history, you go back to the days of Edward Snowden in 2013 with the revelations about NSA mass surveillance, which...

Nobody in the wider world realized at the time was quite so advanced or capable, to quote a phrase there. So, you know, it's an old playbook that we have seen a number of times in the recent past, but also stretching back years.

And it is that one of trust. Do you trust the Chinese? Do you trust what they're going to do with this information? Do you trust what the Chinese authorities may choose to use it for in future? I mean, taking it in the wider geopolitical context of security, there's also a Chinese tech company called Huawei, who longer-term listeners might recall were very controversial in the late 2010s and early 2020s, early part of this decade, because Huawei was very advanced in computer networking technologies. Now,

There's a lot of controversy about Huawei, which has parallels with DeepSeek, because Huawei in its earliest days was accused of stealing its intellectual property, its secret source for building all these network switches and routers and other such dull but vitally important devices for making the internet work. It was accused of stealing that technology from companies such as Cisco Systems in the U.S.,

DeepSeek is now facing allegations that they have hoovered up AI, in broadest terms, technology from ChatGPT, OpenAI and from other makers of advanced AI foundation models and chatbots and so on and so forth in the West.

Now, this is a bit controversial. There's an element of hypocrisy there, I think, because OpenAI has also faced similar accusations of helping themselves, everybody else's copyrighted content to train their software without paying for it and so on. Well, isn't this the source of the huge falling out between Sam Ortman and Elon Musk, isn't it? This accusation that he was basically using Twitter.

as a source for for text to train for train AI and Musk saying hold on you're not paying for that but the users of Twitter like myself might say well Elon Musk isn't paying me for it either so you know who should open AI actually be paying IP is great when it's yours and it's terrible when somebody else owns it

That brings us nearly to this second part of the question, of the security question, which is about how cheap this is. I mean, you use the term resources, you know, fewer chips, less energy. The bottom line is, if DeepSeeker are telling the truth, they've done this at a fraction of the cost of open AI. What are the implications there?

That's a fascinating one because, first of all, it's an eye-catching claim to make. So from a marketing and sales, if you like, standpoint, deep-seek of every incentive to say they've done what's taken the West huge amounts of time, energy and resources with a fraction of all the above.

Now, if we take it at face value and say it is true, what that means is China is closing the technological gap between themselves and the West. This plays into the geopolitical machinations around another US tech company called NVIDIA. NVIDIA, maker of, among many other things, highly advanced computer chips used for training or used to power hardware that trains AI software and runs AI software.

So the US has been trying to choke off the flood of NVIDIA's most advanced chips to the US for a good few years now. And China has been coming up with ever more ingenious ways of circumventing that, including by such highly advanced dodges as buying them via Singapore and routing the orders that way. So it's a sidestep to sanctions, allegedly. However...

The Chinese say that they have managed to do all of this and train this model, which on the face of it has similar capabilities to chat GPT with a fraction of the resources doing so. The implications of that are that China could then reach parity with the Western companies' most advanced technology and potentially get in front of them. And that's the thing I think that the Western establishment is most in fear of because, of course, one of the sort of foundational bits of thinking in our way of how we do these things

is that the West will always have the technological edge, that dominance over the rest of the world.

Once that paradigm is no longer true, you then enter a whole new world that nobody's really put much thought into. We're used to resource constraints in the West. We're used to having hyper-expensive technology that is nonetheless much better than everybody else's. But if we end up in a situation where we have hyper-expensive technology that is on a level with cheap and readily available technology from China, an awful lot of Western industrial and security assumptions start falling by the wayside.

Gareth, for countries who are looking at these national security concerns, and I suppose to play devil's advocate, if I was sitting in Beijing, I'd be equally worried about my citizens using Western stuff. What can be done? It's a very tricky one. The Americans have resorted to the blunt instrument of banning it and blocking it, certainly as we've seen with TikTok.

Here in the UK, we've tried to sort of manage and moderate these things and hope that we can muddle through and everything will be all right on the night. There are intermediate steps. I think one of the things the Americans tried to do before deciding to ban TikTok outright was to pass laws saying that they had to store their user data in the US on servers operated by a US company. The idea being that you couldn't beam it back to China and do all your slicing, dicing and passing it along to the authorities if it wasn't physically within the Chinese authorities' grasp.

So there's a limited amount that can be done short of a full-on ban. And of course, these technologies are designed to be fun and easy to use and simple to pick up and grasp, which enhances the consumer appeal, which kind of makes it trickier to go forward with a full-on ban. So yeah, difficult question. The committee who set the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists doomsday clock, they've just moved it one second closer to midnight. And they've talked about part of the reason for that is...

is the rise of AI and the possible, you know, the confluencing, the possible networking of AI systems into nuclear weapon systems and so on. Could you just spell this out to us a little bit? What's the link between these two things? Because at one level, I find...

Speaking personally, chat GPT, for example, it seems to me like little more than a kind of glorified Google search that kind of collates stuff into a kind of, you know, a computer's idea of a passable GCSE essay answer. But there's this whole other question, isn't there, about the decision-making powers of AI and general AI. What's the link between these two, you know, these large language models, which seem like kind of chatbots, and this question of a much bigger intelligence?

I suppose the bulletin of the atomic scientists are worried about the idea that you can connect AGI, autonomous general intelligence, which is a technical term for AI that does the HAL 9000 thing from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It operates completely autonomously with no human oversight, total independence, makes whatever decisions it wants, even when those conflict with the better interests of humans or humanity as a whole.

Now, we saw a lot of kerfuffle about this back in 2022, 23, when ChatGPT finally hit the mainstream. And, you know, there was a lot of disastrous doom and gloom. AI is going to wipe out humanity type discourse, which was, you know, from a newsman's point of view, from my point of view, great fun to write about. But in terms of informing the wider debates, well, you know, headlines are headlines, but perhaps not the best way of sitting down and having a good sober think about the situation.

So one of the big attractions of AI systems from the military and security standpoint is that if you can connect that to a weapon system, you know, a missile launcher or some sort of nuclear bunker or silo, then you can massively shorten the time it takes either to launch those or to respond to somebody else launching them at you. So, you know,

Looking at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Doomsday Clock, all of that was set back when the prospect of the Cold War going hot was a big, ready concern. And they wanted to, not unreasonably, wanted to calm the situation down a bit and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're a few seconds from midnight here, let's just step back a bit and not nuke ourselves to death and wipe out the whole planet.

Connecting AI to that kind of thing is risky, very risky, because you end up with decisions being made or worse. You end up with the critical thinking being outsourced to the AI. And this is what you're saying, Roland, about it being a very clever chatbot that fundamentally puts together Google searches and GCSE level essays. It's not all that good, really.

But if you have a situation where humans are told, trust the magic computer, the black box will weigh up all the options and tell you whether to press the launch button or not, that would be extremely bad. And I really, really hope that we don't do that. Because when you start taking humans out of the loop in decision making, especially military decision making, you end up with a situation where everybody shrugs their shoulders and say, well, I'm not to blame, even as the nuclear fallout's falling and everything's burning down around our ears. Gareth Caulfield, thank you very much. Thank you.

Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock has indexed the countdown to nuclear apocalypse. On Tuesday, it inched another second closer to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Venetia Rainey spoke to General Robert Latiff about how that decision was taken and why 21st century advances in artificial intelligence could be as dangerous as nuclear proliferation was in the 20th. The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are the ones who set the clock.

And we meet several times a year and we talk about the issues, what's going on in the nuclear business and with climate change, what the trends are, some of the goods and the bads about emerging technologies and biological threats. And sort of the short answer to your question is we look at the trends and we look at actual things that have occurred and we try to make an assessment of whether or not

were any better or worse than we were in the previous year. And so the decision was that

The trends are bad and some of the actions and results are not good. And so we set it one second further toward midnight. I guess one second is not much. I wonder how you made the decision to do one second versus five seconds or 10 seconds. One second, you know, in our estimation, the message it sends was that

Last year and the previous year, we were at 90, closer than we've ever been. And we wanted to indicate this year that we were getting even closer. Once we're this close to midnight, one second is a very valuable bit of time. So, you know, while one second doesn't sound like much, we're moving closer and closer and closer to midnight. And so that was really what we wanted to transmit to the public that,

It's not getting better. It's not even staying the same. It's getting worse. Was there a particular aspect? I know the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cover all sorts of different areas. You're a former general in the US Air Force. Which aspects were you particularly concerned about or which aspects were you looking at particularly closely? My background has primarily been in the advanced technology area. So I'm

was most specifically concerned about the disruptive and emerging technologies. The whole emergence of artificial intelligence as it relates to information transmission and fake news and conspiracy theories and the spread of misinformation is very worrisome and is also a very difficult problem.

And the second area that I've spent a lot of my career being concerned about is the growing antagonism that we find in space between the space powers. Some of the activities of China and Russia concern us a great deal. When you think about the threats of AI and how that factors into the doomsday clock updates,

Are there particular players, actors in the world, for example, China, that you feel are driving it in a particular direction? Or is it worrisome that different countries are all doing different things? Well, I think it's both. I think that, you know, different countries have different things that they find important. But your question is exactly the right one. We know from the last election, for instance, that both China and Russia voted

were very active in trying to foster their agendas, trying to impact the US elections. And so in both cases, we worry about their cyber capabilities and their artificial intelligence as it applies to information technologies. The doomsday clock is supposed to be a warning to the world, but specifically to leaders, to people who have some power to do something about these sorts of things.

Do you think they're listening? Well, judging from a lot of the feedback we get when we announce the clock, we know at least that many of the people who work for them are listening. But it doesn't appear, at least in the last few years, that if they're listening, they're taking any actions to try to mitigate the problems. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep moving the clock forward.

I think they're listening. The question, the bigger question is, do they have the wherewithal in their minds to actually try to do something about it? Frankly, we've been disappointed in world leaders'

willingness to try to do something about it. One of the other things that's mentioned in the statement from the scientists is about the interaction between AI and nuclear weapons. Can you tell me a bit more about what that would involve and why that's worrisome? AI has been and is being rapidly incorporated into conventional weapons of all types in the military. They're moving very, very, very fast. And we've always seen

sort of had the idea that the use of nuclear weapons would be strictly a human decision. And recently we've heard from Russia that they've been making moves to incorporate artificial intelligence in their command and control. Even in the US, the leader of our global strike system has said that not directly in the decision, but perhaps in the systems that lead up to nuclear command and control.

there probably will be a place for artificial intelligence, even if it's in the analysis of data. And that's worrisome because many of these artificial intelligence systems are black boxes and we don't know how they operate. But as long as we can assure that there's a human being in the loop and that the machine is not making the final decision, that gives us some hope. One of your books is called Future War, Preparing for the New Global Battlefield. What...

What are some of the things that a country like Britain or America could be doing to prepare for that battlefield? Thank you for bringing that up. My message has always been that we needed to slow down. We're trying to go too fast. It's a race, as it always has been, with arms and technology.

And I think that the best thing we can do is to slow down because we don't understand necessarily all the new technologies that we're building. They're so complex, they're very difficult to understand. So one of the things that we could do is to slow down. The other thing that we can do, it's pretty obvious that many of the countries in the world follow the U.S. lead. And so the U.S. can take it upon itself to lead in a more moral and ethical way.

And then, of course, I think the last thing is that we have to try to understand the motivations of many of the other countries for doing what they're doing. Very often, I think we react to their actions and don't quite understand what their motivations are. And as Dr. Santos said today, we just need to sit down and talk. That was General Robert Latiff speaking to Venetia Rainey.

After the break, M23's seizure of the Congolese town of Goma is turning into an Africa-wide confrontation. We ask what all this means for Africa and what does the new Donald Trump administration mean for the continent? Work management platforms. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

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On Wednesday this week, Marco Rubio, the newly installed US Secretary of State, called Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, to push for a ceasefire in eastern Congo. It's one sign of how that crisis that we first reported on on Monday's episode of Battle Lines is turning not only into a regional crisis, but a continent-wide issue and one that could have global implications. To discuss all this, I'm joined by Alex Vines, who is the director of the Africa programme at Chatham House.

Alex, I think we're by now fairly clear on what has happened. Could you then, a very brief rundown of what your understanding is of the situation there right now? And I say that because I did get through to someone on the ground. The city is said to be completely without internet access.

except for a few hours every day. We found it very difficult to get stuff from the ground ourselves. What's your understanding of the situation in Goma right now? So my understanding is that Goma now is firmly in the grip of M23 and there is a sense of anticipation but also fear and trepidation within the city of what will happen next. M23 is saying they're going to set up a local administration

And meanwhile, they are pushing southwards now and moving towards Bukavu, which is another big city, which is very much protected by Congolese government troops and also has neighboring Burundian soldiers assisting the Congolese government there. So we're looking as if we're on the trajectory to another big clash at the moment.

What's also now clear is that Rwanda isn't pretending that it isn't involved with M23 any longer. There have been a number of UN panel of experts reports, and they have been calling out that Rwanda has been very involved in the reemergence of M23. So that's now very public. And the question is,

Is this linked to a wider ambition, including of Rwanda, to have de facto territory that is economically significant in eastern Congo, or is it to negotiate something else? The next week, I think, will become clear what this is really about.

I was wondering if you'd get into that. The key player, it seems to me here, is Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. He's been very outspoken over the past week. He spoke to Marco Rubio, Donald Trump's secretary of state, on Wednesday and seemed to agree with American calls for a ceasefire. He's also fired off some pretty...

fiery confrontational kind of language in the direction of the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa. Yeah he told the South African president there's been lying in public and he claims that actually the death of South African peacekeepers in eastern Congo over the last week are not because of M23 but they were killed by Congolese government troops which is a direct contradiction to what everybody else is saying.

Could you tell our listeners just, you know, who is Paul Kagame? Because he's quite, you know, he's a storied character. Who is he? Where does he come from? What kind of a person is he? What's his temperament as a leader? What do we know about him? So Paul Kagame is a guerrilla leader. I mean, he led an insurgency that eventually, after the Rwandan genocide, took over Rwanda.

I mean, he is authoritarian. You know, he got in the last presidential elections last year, I think it was 99% of the vote. I mean, take that as you wish, but he improved on his previous performances.

And, well, he's very insistent on delivery. So Rwanda does manage, under Kagame, very well its international development aid. It has very good relationships at a technical level. His ministers all have key objectives that they need to fulfill. So it's a very efficient country in that way. But it is, in the end, a very authoritarian country. And there is a culture of self-censorship in Rwanda.

And there's still no clarity on whether there would be succession to him. And what does he want? Do we think he's trying to grab a chunk of another country or he's trying to extract something else here? Yeah, well, that is the key question at the moment. I mean, Rwanda is a rational actor. Kagame is rational. You know, he doesn't do things emotionally. He does risk take. I mean, if you go back to the

The big war that happened over 20 years ago, which was sometimes called the Great War of Africa, where Rwanda and Uganda and Angola and Zimbabwe and everybody was in the Congo fighting each other and extracting things. The Rwandans did a very brave mission to try and capture Kinshasa that didn't work out. So occasionally they do significantly risk-take

And I'm beginning to wonder if that's one of these moments where they're going to try and really push the boundaries and see what can land in their lap.

I do think there's economics involved in this. My own reading of why the M23 reappeared in 2021, 2022 is that Kinshasa and the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had decided that it wanted to build an all-weather road all the way from Goma right through to Uganda. And the one thing that Rwanda really needs is trade and

and commerce to go through its border and so wouldn't welcome at all anything that avoids Rwanda from eastern Congo because of the richness that's in this region, particularly related to trade and mineral resources.

And so I have a feeling that there is economic logic here in Rwandan thinking that this is a rich part of territory. And there may be a little bit of kind of romanticism, if that's the word, that this territory, historically, some of it,

could be tied back to historical kingdoms that involved what is the territory of Rwanda now. So you're mixing a variety of different things that are driving this and it will become clearer, as I've already said, over the next week or so, I think, whether Mr. Kagame, the president of Rwanda, is amenable to kind of a cessation and kind of a pulling out again like we saw in 2012.

or he's looking for something else. The thing that I'm most puzzled about is that the African Union, the continental bodies are fairly quiet about this. Historically, any danger of annexing, invading other people's territories get really stamped on very, very quickly in Africa because Africa's borders are all inherited mostly from the colonial period. And if you start

picking them apart, the whole kind of rubric of modern statehoods in Africa become very vulnerable.

So what's happening now, if it were to be a territorial grab, would be highly significant. And I think we'll see more African states and regional bodies raising their concerns. I am wondering if one of the incentives for the timing of this thing, of moving forward, is a Trump administration and Mr. Trump himself talking about that he would like Greenland, for example, to

maybe looking at the difficulties the international community has faced with dealing with the Ukraine crisis and the invasion of parts of Ukraine by Russia. So there may be that Kagame has also been looking at the global context, which might explain the timing of this brazen push by M23. That's a great moment for us to talk about the implication of Trump administration here and for Africa today.

generally what is the American role in in this particular crisis do they have leverage is there is there any way that they can solve this

Well, I heard that Mr. Kagame had hoped to talk to Mr. Trump. I think that's very premature for that type of conversation to take place. And the US, I do think, has an important role. Companies that are linked to the US that are interested in the minerals in Eastern Congo, but also have investments in Rwanda also in terms of mineral production. So there is an economic logic. It's not massively strategic, but it is there.

And the incoming assistant secretary of state, so that's equivalent of the kind of minister for Africa, for the US, if he gets through the nomination process, is a gentleman called Peter Pham, who has been previously under the Trump administration, kind of an envoy for Great Lakes and Congo for a bit, but is also on the board of one of the companies that's investing in Rwanda, so has interests on both sides.

One of the things we've been looking at on this podcast is the kind of arrival of, you know, Donald Trump 2.0, a very assertive kind of America first policy on international affairs around the world. What does this new Donald Trump administration and its approach to following policy mean for Africa more broadly?

For Trump, 2.0. Africa will not be the focal point of a U.S. policy by any means. There'll be a lot of continuity, in fact, from previous administrations. So Republicans and Democrats aren't that different on Africa. What I do think will be a sharp focus for a Trump administration is competition with China. And so countries that are too aligned, too close to China may experience American displeasure.

And so that will be an issue. We'll have to see around American concerns related to the Russian Federation. That's a bit more difficult to predict. And then I do think in parts of Africa, Trump will be looking for others to lead. So I think in the Horn of Africa, you'll see more subcontracting for Gulf states, for example, to be involved, the Emiratis, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others.

In West Africa, obviously France is on the retreat, but the message from Washington will be that Europeans need to do more there, and that includes the UK.

with the crisis that's going on in the Sahel and the kind of jihadi activities that are going on in that region, in addition to the military juntas that have staged coups there. So different parts of Africa, different drivers.

But the minerals of Africa, so the strategic and critical minerals, I think, will be the kind of spearhead for American focus in particular. Although there is also this kind of strong Christian Pentecostal side that's within the Make America Great Again movement. And so there will still be a humanitarian thrust, I think,

that will mitigate some of the other instincts of Trump himself. I wanted to ask you about this executive order that came very early, freezing foreign aid. And we've seen it in several parts of the world. We've already seen kind of knock-on effects and reports of hospitals on the Thai-Burma border having to shut up shop and all kinds of

things being shut down. How significant is that going to be for the continent? Different countries, of course, have different levels of dependency on aid. But in Rwanda, for example, I think it's a third or two thirds of its budget is meant to be from foreign assistance. How serious will that potential suspension of all American aid be for governments across the region? To be honest, really, I

The US humanitarian and aid support to the African continent is probably one of its most important contributions. Corporate America is much less visible on the continent. Now, some of that goes through philanthropic organizations, and so they won't be impacted by this.

But it is significant. And I do think that there has been unease even in the ranks of MAGA at this kind of scale of this. So maybe not some of the grassroots support in certain places in the US, but there is concern. And you're right, a country like Rwanda, I mean, Rwanda is a tiny country. For your listeners, they should realize it's the size of Wales. It's not a big country in the scale of things in Africa.

And it is very international development reliant still. It likes to play up that it's a leader for new technology and a hub for investment. But I think this goes back to the point of why Rwanda is looking at how to maximize its economic opportunities, because it wants to diversify from an over-dependency on international development, and its own internal trade is not creating the sort of

of growth rates that can sustain its population and drive it to middle income. Alex Fines, thank you very much indeed. That's it for Friday's episode of Battlelines. We'll be back on Monday where we'll be looking at the future of Iran. Until then, thanks for listening. That was Battlelines. Goodbye.

Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest.

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