Senior US officials have kept their focus on China and Ukraine at a key annual security conference in Colorado this week, but officials from Africa and Southeast Asia said they need to see greater American engagement if they really want to push back on Beijing and Moscow. 

“The US needs to become less reactive to what China is doing and bring American ingenuity and American companies and American competitiveness to the table,” Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, said on a panel at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday. 

Representatives from other countries agreed, saying they want to have a choice of international investment partners for key projects and regretted the “with us or against us” pressure over Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

While Singapore has been a rare example of an Asian nation sanctioning Moscow for its invasion, the country’s ambassador to the US suggested that efforts to unite the world against Russia, including with resolutions at the UN, make some nations nervous.

Dozens of nations -- including India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia and Mexico -- abstained from a vote in April, after the invasion began, to remove Russia from the UN’s human rights body. The measure passed with 93 votes in support, but 82 nations abstained or voted against the proposal. 

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“Because you have framed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as democracy versus autocracy, then people start questioning what democracy are you trying to promote?” Singapore Ambassador Ashok Mirpuri said. “And who are you putting in the autocratic camp, just because you didn’t vote for the UN resolution, are you basically an autocratic country?” 

While Russia has sought to make some inroads in the Middle East and Africa, China has been the biggest player, using billions of dollars through its Belt and Road Initiative to help build ports, highways and other infrastructure. US and other Western officials say that investment comes with too high a cost, citing Sri Lanka’s turmoil as evidence of what can go wrong when nations become too dependent on Beijing. 

Countries across the developing world “do not want to be pawns on the chessboard of global powers,” Jendayi Frazer, a former US assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, said at Aspen. “Their view is, ‘Let us choose who we want to partner with. Our decision to partner, for instance, with China on the Belt and Road Initiative does not mean that we don’t want to partner with the United States.’” 

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At a G-7 summit last month, leaders announced a green investment initiative intended to serve as a counterweight to China’s Belt and Road effort. But China has a long and well-funded head start in many parts of the world, and tends to make fewer demands up front for its investments. And Mirpuri said the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the Trump administration still stings -- and left a void for China. 

“I definitely heard ‘we would love a choice,’” Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning at the State Department and current head of the New America think-tank, told Bloomberg News in an interview. The view, she said, is that “if it’s not there, and it’s not on offer, then what we mostly need is to grow, and feed our people and give them opportunity, and you can lecture us on the dangers of Chinese investment, but they get the roads done.”

Kimani, the UN envoy, told an anecdote about a Kenyan minister going to Beijing, being impressed by the road from the airport, and wondering if it was possible to get Chinese support to build such a road from the airport in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. In a few months, there was a proposal for a public-private partnership to build the road, which was completed in a couple of years, he said. 

By contrast, he said, his head of state visited a European capital around the same time and discussed a major infrastructure project.

“Seven years later, it’s nowhere to be seen,” he said. “We appreciate Chinese investment. We appreciate China’s ability to give us options.”

But he added, African nations would like to see the US ramp up its efforts. If America shows up, he said, “I think you’ll do very well, if not win the whole game.”