From West to East, Ruto plays cat and mouse games with rival superpowers

French President Emmanuel Macron and President William Ruto at the AFrica Forward Le concert at Kasarani indoor arena in Nairobi. [David Gichuru, Standard]

As Nairobi bid goodbyes to more than 30 Heads of State and government that had came visiting for the Africa Forward Summit, Beijing rolled out the red carpet for President Donald Trump. Admittedly, the two events pose a classical dilemma for this column on what to analyse in today’s article.   

Nonetheless, despite the space of time, form and divergent agendas on the table, the two events confirm without any doubt that global economic, political and social order is dictated by permanent interests.

There are no enemies or friends when it comes to a powerful nation’s national interests. Their leaders are willing to bend backwards if that is necessary to protect their strategic interests without necessarily ceding anything to their object of desire.

Since the Nairobi event has already received sufficient local media coverage, here we’ll focus on an interesting convergence of the two most powerful economies in Beijing.

For those who may remember, President Trump imposed the most aggressive trade tariffs against Chinese goods into the US just a few months ago. This was unprecedented given US has had a delicate relation due to the emerging economic and military power of the dragon economy.

In fact, almost all the US presidents have made either official or State visits to China since Richard Nixon broke the diplomatic silence between the two countries in a February 21, 1972 visit.

Considered as a State visit despite the lack of diplomatic relations between the two nations until 1979, the week-long visit is considered in diplomatic and economic circles as the week that changed the world to what it is today.

Ever since, a number of US presidents have visited China more than once during their term in office. Of interest for us today is a question that President Xi Jinping asked in his official comments according to official accounts from the event. Will the two most powerful economies in the world today avoid the Thucydides Trap?

This concept has widely been applied in contemporary debates on the delicate US-China relations. Thucydides trap was popularised by Graham Allison to describe the structural stress and high risk of war when a rising power threatens to displace an existing ruling power.

The concept originated from ancient Greece and named after Athenian historian Thucydides who studied the origins of the Peloponnesian war between 431 and 404 BC.

The rise of Athens spurred fear in Sparta that made the war inevitable. In a study of 16 past cases over a period of 500 years, Thucydides found that where a rising power challenged a ruling one, 12 resulted into war.  The rise of China in the past five decades is the greatest threat to the post World War II geo-economic and political order that has been shaped by the US.

The Bretton Woods  System that lasted between 1944 -1973 entrenched a monetary order (referred to as the Gold Standard era) that was owned and controlled by the US. The system was aimed to ensure economic stability and prevent competitive devaluations by pegging currencies of 44 allied nations to the US dollar. The dollar was then anchored to gold at $35 per ounce. The inevitable  outcome was that the US dollar became the default reserve currency for the world.

When President Richard Nixon announced the suspension of dollar convertibility to gold in August 15, 1971, the current fiat system that pegs world currencies to the dollar was effectively established. Nixon’s policy choice was an executive fiat referred to as the “Nixon shock” or “closing the gold window” in economic circles. Effectively, the US set the Greenback (dollar) as the world currency.

The subsequent inevitable outcome from economic dominance of the world is military power. With the US firmly at the helm in the two fronts, it has attempted to dictate versions of democracy and socio-cultural norms around the world. In addition to this proprietary advantage, the US remains the most innovative economy in the world, allowing it virgin frontiers to extend its dominance of the world through technology and corporate power.

Thus, it is not a mere coincidence for the choice of the men whom President Trump chose the fly with in Airforce One on his trip to Beijing this week. They included prominent Big Tech, Wall Street, agricultural and aerospace billionaires like Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX), Tim Cook (Apple) and Jensen Huang (Nvidia and of Chinese descent) among others.

With the Chinese economy projected to overtake the US either in the mid-2030s or anywhere between 2045 -2075, Trump might have been signalling the US still controls the world from other fronts. As at April 2026, the International Monetary Fund projects that nominal Gross Domestic Products at $32.4 and $20.9 trillion for US and China respectively. On purchasing power parity terms, China is the largest economy in the world estimated at $40 trillion as at April 2026.

However, the average Chinese is about seven times poorer compared to an American according to the per capita incomes between the two countries.

So, why does President Trump’s visit to Beijing matter to Kenya? More so to the average Wanjiku in Nairobi’s streets?

Diplomatically, President Ruto appears to have been playing cat and mouse games between the two economic power houses. While in the US, Ruto projects an image of a trusted ally to the extend of putting Kenyan boots into war zones like Haiti, that is by all intends and purposes a US problem. When he visits Beijing, he not only castigates the Western multilateral system engineered by the US but also unilaterally hands over multi-billion construction projects to Chinese State-owned corporations without ever making the detailed contractual agreements to the Kenyan people.

In his meeting with President Trump, Xi Jinping argued a case for a constructive strategic stability shaped by positive stability with cooperation as a necessity, healthy stability with competition within power limits, constant stability with manageable differences and lasting stability with expectable peace.

Implicitly, China will play within the rules of strategic limits. The only thing Beijing is not willing to cede is the Taiwanese differences, that the US seeks to maintain the status quo. Thus, the diplomatic cat and mouse games of the Ruto administration leaves Kenya exposed diplomatically and strategically beyond transactional engagements with the two powers.

Secondly, while Kenyans remains trapped by US tech power that controls our financial and social systems like payments and social media, the Chinese offer credible alternatives.

One of the most strategic moves by Chinese authorities has been to create local alternatives to tech trap dominated by US multinationals to cushion itself from the US hegemony.

However, on the contra side, government policy decisions have trapped the Kenyan people to Chinese dominated infrastructure developments and the attendant inter-generational debt obligations or toll dues.

Finally, President Trump’s entourage must serve as a vital lesson to President Ruto and his successors on what a State visit looks like. The UhuRuto eras, presidential foreign travels have not only been astronomically expansive to the Kenyan taxpayers, but have also bordered on the comic and absurdity on the entourage.

In theory, when a President travels, the entourage must present the finest of his/her country and be dictated purely by the agenda on the table. Embarrassing scenes of entourages chewing ‘jungu’ or across high stakes table without a note pad or pen speaks volumes of the calibre of a nation’s leadership!