In September 2024, China test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Pacific Ocean, only its third such exercise in more than four decades. Beijing gave Washington, Canberra and Wellington advance notice and conducted the launch within established international norms. Even so, Western media and political elites treated a legal, low-frequency test as a provocation that destabilised the region.
The United States carries out long-range missile trials far more often than any other nuclear power, with comparatively little international scrutiny. A year later, in September 2025, the US Navy fired four Trident II D5 missiles from a submerged Ohio-class submarine into the Atlantic, one of them lighting up the night sky so vividly that residents of Puerto Rico could see it with the naked eye. Minuteman III launches from California, bound for impact zones near the Marshall Islands, have become a familiar rhythm of American strategic signalling, drawing negligible protest from Tokyo or Canberra even though both nations have voiced sharper concern over comparable Chinese tests.
The contrast has little to do with transparency or regional stability as universal principles. It turns on power: who holds it, who may project it, and who is permitted to build it. Washington and its allies treat the modernisation of Western nuclear arsenals, including tens of billions of dollars earmarked for warhead upgrades within recent US defence budgets, as routine planning. Any comparable step by China to reinforce its own deterrent is swiftly recast as reckless expansion.
For Africa and the wider Global South, the lesson is unambiguous. Security cannot be outsourced, deterrence cannot be borrowed, and lasting protection will never come from powers that profit from your vulnerability.
Deterrence is the strategic craft of raising the cost of aggression beyond what any rational adversary would bear. It requires no inherent hostility between states, only two ingredients: credible capability and credible will. Sun Tzu captured its logic more than two thousand years ago when he wrote that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. The calculation is simple. Once a would-be aggressor concludes that retaliation, economic or military, will outweigh any conceivable gain, aggression stops making rational sense.
China’s own model offers a useful template for developing nations precisely because it is minimal rather than maximal. Its arsenal of roughly five hundred warheads is a fraction of the more than five thousand held by both the United States and Russia, representing a floor of credible deterrence rather than an arms race. It remains the only nuclear weapons state bound by a formal no-first-use pledge, a restraint that lowers global nuclear risk rather than signalling weakness. It has not initiated a foreign war in nearly four decades, a claim the United States, with roughly two decades of full peace across two and a half centuries of nationhood, cannot make. And its rare public tests function as calibrated signals of capability rather than open provocation.
Nations without credible deterrence have tended to share a grim history: occupation, resource plunder, political subjugation and the slow erosion of self-determination. Africa, Latin America and much of the Global South carry that history in their modern institutions.
Nowhere is this more urgent than in critical minerals. Cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, graphite, copper, nickel and manganese now underpin the industrial base of the twenty-first century, from electric vehicles to defence electronics, and their distribution is starkly uneven. More than seventy per cent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over half of known lithium reserves sit within the so-called Lithium Triangle of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. South Africa, Namibia and Malawi hold substantial rare earth deposits, Mozambique, Tanzania and Madagascar sit on major graphite reserves, and South Africa alone controls more than a third of the world’s manganese. Zambia, the DRC and Chile between them hold vast copper reserves.
This concentration is both an opportunity and a vulnerability. The same resources that could fund industrialisation and shared prosperity also attract predatory strategic interest from the major powers competing to secure them. China has built long-term mining partnerships across the continent to lock in supply; Washington has launched its own Minerals Security Partnership in response; the European Union has made critical minerals a strategic priority to reduce its reliance on Chinese processing; and Russia has used its own mineral and nuclear expertise to expand its diplomatic footprint in Africa. This is not a benign contest. It carries diplomatic pressure, economic coercion, intelligence activity and, at the extreme, the latent risk of military intervention.
History offers repeated warnings. Western mining interests helped drive the Katanga secession in 1960s Congo over copper and uranium. Oil rivalries shaped external involvement in Nigeria’s Biafran war. Cold War competition over oil and diamonds fuelled Angola’s long civil conflict. The interventions in Iraq in 1990 and 2003 were substantially about control of petroleum, however they were officially framed, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, also resource-driven, left the state in ruins. These were not accidents of history. They were the predictable result of an asymmetry: a great power identifies an irreplaceable resource, and a local state lacks the means to defend its claim to it.
Most African and Global South states currently operate inside a security vacuum that is, in important respects, built into the global order. Conventional militaries are underfunded and under-equipped. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whatever its genuine successes in curbing unregulated proliferation and expanding peaceful civilian nuclear energy, permanently locks in the nuclear monopoly of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Few developing states have independent satellite, radar or early warning capability, leaving them dependent on peacekeeping missions, regional blocs or bilateral security arrangements with major powers.
That dependence carries structural risks. Foreign patrons place their own interests above their host’s sovereignty and can walk away when priorities shift. Reliance itself becomes leverage that outside powers use to extract economic or resource concessions. Bilateral security arrangements are hostage to the domestic politics of the patron state and can be withdrawn with little warning. And costly arms purchases from abroad divert scarce fiscal resources from healthcare, education and industrial development at home.
Africa has made real if partial progress on indigenous security institutions, including the African Standby Force and the conflict resolution mechanisms run by ECOWAS and SADC, alongside a continental early warning system. These remain chronically under-resourced and were built to manage internal conflict, not to deter external great-power intervention. Closing that gap requires a layered deterrence architecture suited to three tiers of states, from small mineral-dependent nations to mid-sized regional powers and large industrialised economies, spanning latent nuclear capacity, conventional forces, independent intelligence, collective diplomacy and long-term economic resilience.
Nuclear weapons remain the ultimate high-cost deterrent against outright occupation, though they do little to guard against sanctions, proxy insurgency, cyber subversion or intelligence infiltration, and should be understood as a last resort rather than a general solution. Full nuclear arsenals are impractical for most Southern states given NPT obligations, cost and the risk of pre-emptive strikes or sanctions. A more pragmatic path exists for resource-rich, industrially capable nations such as South Africa, Nigeria and the DRC: build robust civilian nuclear energy and research infrastructure that could, in an extreme crisis, be converted; maintain the technical latency to produce a device within a compressed timeline without ever building one; and pair any regional nuclear research cooperation with binding oversight, regular IAEA inspection and clear dispute mechanisms to prevent diversion or an intra-continental arms race.
Short of that, integrated conventional forces raise the cost of intervention on their own. Unified regional air defence can shield mines, ports and refineries from reconnaissance or strike. Coastal patrol and anti-ship capability can secure exclusive economic zones and offshore mineral reserves. Domestic cyber defence, including limited offensive capacity, can disrupt an adversary’s command and control. Independent intelligence, including a shared continental satellite constellation and signals monitoring, gives advance warning of hostile planning that most states currently lack. And collective diplomacy through the African Union, ECOWAS, SADC, BRICS and the G77 can codify norms against resource-driven regime change, while diversified export markets and, where necessary, calibrated export restrictions convert mineral wealth into genuine economic leverage rather than a standing vulnerability. None of this substitutes for domestic economic resilience: diversified industry, local beneficiation, inclusive resource distribution and redundant infrastructure all reduce the openings that outside powers exploit, even though beneficiation alone cannot deter a determined military intervention.
The underlying doctrine is straightforward. Africa’s minerals belong to African peoples, their extraction should benefit African communities first, and their protection is an African responsibility, a position that is not anti-Western or anti-Chinese but unapologetically Afro-centric. It rests on resource sovereignty over extraction and pricing; beneficiation on the continent as a security imperative rather than merely an economic preference; the principle that an attack on one state’s mineral infrastructure is a shared continental concern; openness to international partnership strictly on African terms, with enforceable guarantees on technology transfer and local employment; and a defensive posture that scales to genuine threats rather than pursuing power projection for its own sake.
Translating that doctrine into practice is a matter of sequencing. In the next three years, African states can raise defence spending to two or three per cent of GDP with a bias toward air defence, cyber security and cross-border intelligence sharing, write binding mineral-infrastructure protection into ECOWAS, SADC and African Union law, stand up a shared intelligence platform to track foreign interference in mineral policy, and criminalise foreign meddling in resource decisions while requiring mining licensees to contribute to security capacity. Over the following decade, the priority shifts to a shared African satellite constellation, a dedicated rapid reaction force mandated to protect cross-border mineral infrastructure, coordinated civilian nuclear research programmes, and a continental cyber defence hub for energy, mining and transport systems. Over a longer thirty-year horizon, the goal is indigenous defence manufacturing, carefully regulated nuclear latency among the continent’s largest industrial powers, a unified maritime security doctrine for offshore resources and shipping lanes, and African leadership within a genuinely global coalition pressing for resource sovereignty and equal security rights within international governance.
China’s 2024 test was not an act of aggression. It was a signal that a state with credible self-defence will not submit to unilateral coercion. That is the essence of deterrence: a stable equilibrium built on mutual cost and mutual respect, not on the charity of dominant powers. For Africa and the Global South, the lesson from decades of great-power competition is unavoidable. No external actor will permanently safeguard your mineral wealth or your political sovereignty. Respect for your sovereignty follows only when violating it carries a real cost.
The double standard remains difficult to ignore. Routine, pre-notified American missile tests draw little international comment, while a single transparent Chinese test attracts sustained criticism from arms-control observers, and a defence budget built around tens of billions in nuclear modernisation is treated as ordinary planning even as far smaller increases in Chinese capability are called expansionist. The unspoken rule beneath that asymmetry is simple: established powers may build capacity freely, while a developing state’s minimal self-defence is treated as a threat in itself.
China’s four decades without initiating a foreign war, its no-first-use pledge and its stated philosophy of building strength to avoid conflict offer the Global South a genuinely replicable template, one aligned with the broader vision of common, comprehensive and cooperative security rather than confrontation. Investing in deterrence is a means of preventing conflict, not inviting it, and of protecting sovereignty rather than seeking dominance over others.
Deterrence is not aggression. It is the foundation on which sustained peace is built. Military capability, held for defensive purposes, is not provocation but a basic attribute of sovereign statehood, and an independent security architecture is not a luxury reserved for wealthy nations but a precondition for industrialisation and shared prosperity. The minerals held across the Global South sustain the global economy while simultaneously drawing great-power rivalry onto Southern soil, and the choice facing resource-rich nations is stark: remain a proxy battleground, or build the layered defences that make sovereignty real rather than declaratory. That path demands sustained investment, technical development and regional coordination, and it cannot be indefinitely deferred.
An old Chinese proverb captures the underlying imperative well: better to be a warrior guarding your garden than a gardener trapped in a war. Africa must build sufficient credible deterrence to ensure its territory never becomes another great power’s battlefield. The minerals beneath its soil should enrich the communities living above them, and the capacity to defend those resources must be built and controlled by the nations that own them. No external power is coming to secure that sovereignty on Africa’s behalf. Only self-built deterrence can protect its resources, its dignity and its future.
Written by Saxon Zvina who is a Principal Consultant of Skyworld Consultancy Services and a member of the Belt and Road Initiative Think Tank Alliance. The Southern African Times, its editors, or its management. Any content provided is for informational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as the publication’s endorsement of the positions stated herein.
