Seychelles is the latest in a string of small nations in which the U.S. is opening an embassy as part of a pushback against the influence China has acquired.
“We cannot say we are naive. We do understand the competition going on. In the Cold War we had the United States and the Soviet Union and now it is the United States and China,” Seychelles Foreign Minister Sylvestre Radegonde said in an interview. “Someone woke up and realized how important it is to counter the Chinese influence.”
China is also the only country to have maintained diplomatic missions in all six of the Indian Ocean island nations that until recently were represented by three U.S. embassies, noted Darshana Baruah, who heads Carnegie’s Indian Ocean Initiative. At first glance, China appears to have no immediate stake in the country. There is a small Chinese community of around 1,000 that dates back to the 19th century.
The Chinese have invited hundreds of Seychellois on visits and scholarships to China, and China’s Confucius Institute teaches Chinese classes in primary schools, the university, which China built in the 1980s, an adult education center in the capital and at the Seychelles Tourism Academy.Ramkalawan, the president, stressed that he, along with many Seychellois, is delighted the United States has returned.
“I’m not saying that there isn’t a concern about the Chinese presence and what the influences could be, what the implications could be strategically, but I would not want to narrow it down to a reductionist approach and say it’s purely a zero-sum matter of U.S.-China,” said Henry Jardine, who serves as the de facto current ambassador to Seychelles, based out of the U.S. Embassy in Mauritius; the U.S. Embassy in Mauritius has been responsible for Seychelles diplomacy since the pullout in 1996.
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