Letters, we get letters, we get stacks and stacks of letters.

It's Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining

social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm a Hoover

Distinguished Policy Fellow, and I'll be your moderator for the course of the next hour or so,

joining in a conversation with the stars of our show, who we jokingly refer to as the Goodfellows.

And who are the Goodfellows? That would be the eminent historian, Sir Neil Ferguson, the grumpy economist, John Cochran, that's the name of his blog, not an

editorial comment, and former presidential national security advisor, Lieutenant General H.R.

McMaster, Neil John and H.R. or Hoover Senior Fellows. Gentlemen, very simple show for you

today. We asked our loyal viewers to send in questions, and boy, do they deliver, and I'd like to thank all of you who bothered to write to us. It's a reminder that the show is both

international and its scope, and you are a very smart audience. So again, thank you for setting in

your questions. If we don't get your question today, my apologies, simply just too many questions

too little time. So on with the show, and let's begin with the question from Mark in Northbrook,

Illinois, who writes, quote, I am curious about what's happening in Africa. It seems that the whole continent is being quietly overtaken by China and Russia. Africa presents a major source of potential

instability because of mass migration to Europe and Islamist threats, yet there has been very little

public discussion about its role in geopolitics now in the near future.

I would add that as we're recording, President Biden is in Angola, the first president of visits sub-subherent Africa in almost a decade.

Neil is it possible that a continent of about 1.4 billion people can go overlooked.

Well, it's been largely overlooked since the presidency of George

W. Bush. And in that period, China's involvement has only grown, involvement in the form of

direct investment, as well as the deployment of significant amounts of Chinese labor, as the

Chinese often bring in their own people when they're building infrastructure.

I went to Zambia 10 years ago now, more than 10, to make a film about this, showing that

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