Obama's Mission in Kenya

The president has tough task as he visits East Africa. He can't revive British colonialism, but he must provide an alternative to Chinese cynicism.

When you drive down the Mombasa-Nairobi highway, the commercial artery that links Kenya's major coastal port to its booming capital, you see two railway lines: one British, one Chinese.

As if a metaphor of their divergent ambitions, the two tracks don't run in parallel but, rather, carve their own paths through the Kenyan landscape. When U.S. President Barack Obama lands in Nairobi on Friday for his first visit to the country while in office, his own path, in Kenya and East Africa more broadly, will be determined by how far he can distinguish U.S. foreign policy from these two legacies: one a European history of colonialism and the other a Chinese future of mercantile capitalism untethered from any democratic vision....

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