Africa-US Relations: Strategic Encounters (review)

Pity the poor U.S. government. It can't do anything right in Africa. When it increases aid to Africa, it is condemned for not reaching the sacred level of 0.07 percent of GNP. When it concentrates on development and humanitarian issues, it is chided for neglecting threats to American security. When it offers security cooperation to African governments, it is accused of a "Cold War mentality" that allegedly trumps economic development. When it offers more and better debt relief to African countries, it is condemned for leaving middle- and upper-income countries out.

This volume of eleven individual essays tends to fall into this condemnatory mode. The overall theme of the collection is U.S. security interests in Africa. But the term "security" is writ large to include challenges of poverty, environmental degradation, and civil wars as well as terrorism. There are some excellent chapters that are very worthy of selection as reading assignments for university students of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Princeton Lyman's "A Strategic Approach to Terrorism" deftly points out the need for the U.S. to bring Africa into our overall approach to the war on terrorism and to stop thinking about the continent solely as a humanitarian object. Don Rothchild and Nikolas Emmanual provide a very interesting discussion of U.S. public opinion with respect to our approach to civil wars in "U.S. Intervention in Africa's Ethnic Conflicts." This domestic dimension of foreign policy is too often neglected. Ruth Iyob and Ed Keller skillfully remind us of the complexities and conundrums we face in dealing with Africa's Nile basin in "Special Case of the Horn of Africa." Tom Callaghy has written the best analysis yet on the issue of "Debt and Debt Relief." This should be a must read for any student of Africa policy.

Missing in this volume is a discussion of surrogate wars in Africa and the U.S. policy toward the perpetrators of such wars. Since U.S. policy is to look the other way, it is not surprising that the academic world is doing the same. Unfortunately, surrogate wars inflicted by neighbors on Liberia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Côte d'Ivoire have been the most significant source of death and destruction in Africa since 1989, and policymakers have just treated them as inevitable and unstoppable. Also disappointing is Keller's introductory historical essay, "Meeting the Challenges of Globalization," in which he expresses the view that Republican administrations can do nothing right in Africa, and Democratic administrations are much more successful. In fact, Clinton's "new partnership with Africa" was all talk and no action. On the other hand, Bush 43's efforts have been much more substantive, especially in the area of debt relief, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the deepening and widening of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the transformation of World Bank loans into grants, and the Trans-Sahelian antiterrorist initiative. Moreover, Keller's failure even to mention Chester Crocker's diplomatic triumph in the 1988 New York accords leading to the independence of Namibia, and the subsequent unraveling of apartheid, is particularly unfortunate. It is time for the "constructive engagement" haters to get over it, and stop denying that peace in southern Africa and the end of apartheid happened on the Republicans' watch.