Africa: U.S. Policy Eclipse

David Ottaway

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1979

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Summary:  The third year of the Carter Administration saw a quiet but marked change in the tone of American diplomacy toward Africa, with a waning of its ?activist? role in the search for negotiated settlements to the racially explosive issues of southern Africa. Administration initiatives in the region continued to run up against the limits of American power to shape events there?an underlying reality which had begun to emerge in the previous year. In addition, the conservative mood sweeping across the United States was beginning to have its own impact on American official thinking about Africa. A congressional shift to the right coupled with President Carter?s own growing preoccupation with Soviet expansionism served to revive the globalist approach former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had taken toward the continent. Kissinger himself was by mid-year publicly assailing the Carter Administration for leaning too far toward Africa?s ?ideological radicals? and thereby impaling the United States on ?the horns of a dilemma where our rhetoric is out of step with our capabilities; our stated objectives out of tune with our public opinion.?

David Ottaway has for five years served as the Africa correspondent for The Washington Post. He is on leave this year as a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the co-author with Marina Ottaway of Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution and Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution.

The third year of the Carter Administration saw a quiet but marked change in the tone of American diplomacy toward Africa, with a waning of its "activist" role in the search for negotiated settlements to the racially explosive issues of southern Africa. Administration initiatives in the region continued to run up against the limits of American power to shape events there-an underlying reality which had begun to emerge in the previous year. In addition, the conservative mood sweeping across the United States was beginning to have its own impact on American official thinking about Africa. A congressional shift to the right coupled with President Carter's own growing preoccupation with Soviet expansionism served to revive the globalist approach former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had taken toward the continent. Kissinger himself was by mid-year publicly assailing the Carter Administration for leaning too far toward Africa's "ideological radicals" and thereby impaling the United States on "the horns of a dilemma where our rhetoric is out of step with our capabilities; our stated objectives out of tune with our public opinion."1

The main question as the year ended was whether the architects and proponents of the Carter Africa policy, including Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young,2 were losing out to the "globalists," led by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who emphasized the centrality of U.S.-Soviet competition in regional affairs. Since mid-1978, the State Department "Africanists," and even President Carter himself, had found themselves fighting on the defensive in their effort to align American interests more closely with black Africa than with the "pro-Western," white-dominated regimes of southern Africa. Since the Administration's Africa policy had explicitly rejected a cold war competition in Africa, and took majority rule as its central tenet, a return to the globalist approach would represent a fundamental shift, with possibly widespread negative repercussions in black Africa.

Administration moves late in the year to supply counterinsurgency arms to Morocco and to obtain access to military facilities in Somalia each stemmed from an impulse to "counter the Soviets" or "show U.S. resolve" in a conflict area. Each also threatened to place the United States in opposition to prevailing opinion in the Organization of African Unity (OAU) on a major regional conflict. Such steps represented a break with the Administration's own past policy. In southern Africa, where U.S. attention was focused for most of the year, there was less a change in substance than in tone. The Administration held to its policy of supporting peaceful diplomatic solutions, and witnessed an unexpectedly positive evolution toward a settlement in Rhodesia. The United States played a minimal role in the denouement, however, as the new Conservative government in Britain under Margaret Thatcher brought to a successful conclusion the London negotiations between the contending Zimbabwean parties and reimposed British authority in Rhodesia prior to elections.

As the great powers maneuvered, black Africa witnessed several other events whose significance was largely ignored by Western observers intent on southern ...

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