Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror by Elizabeth Schmidt, and: Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden: The United States, the Horn of Africa, and the Demise of Détente by Louise Woodroofe (review)

The end of the Cold War and the subsequent opening of East European archives have been a boon for scholars who study East-West relations in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the topics that have attracted a good deal of attention among students of international history is the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Third World. A rich set of local, regional, and international dynamics and actors contributed to a complex set of motives for the superpowers to become involved in remote areas. Two recent accounts try to shed more light on the issue through markedly different approaches: Elizabeth Schmidt’s Foreign Intervention in Africa offers a broad synthesis based on well-known secondary accounts regarding U.S. motivations for engaging in Africa, whereas Louise Woodroofe’s Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden provides a detailed study of U.S. reactions to the Horn of Africa crisis from 1974 to 1978, based almost entirely on original research in U.S. archives.

Examining Schmidt’s and Woodroofe’s books together may seem a bit strange at first, owing to their different scopes and frameworks, but the nature of their conclusions justifies reading these accounts together. Different as the two studies may seem from one another, they arrive at nearly identical conclusions, painting in dark tones the outcomes of foreign intervention on the African continent. Despite their methodological limitations, they represent two noteworthy studies of contemporary history, using contrasting yet complementary frameworks. The books demonstrate the pitfalls and deficiencies of the West’s approach (and inevitably the East’s as well) toward the Third World during the Cold War.

In Foreign Intervention in Africa, Schmidt tries to challenge the “popular myths” (p. 1) in which Africans are assumed to be reluctant or unable to govern themselves and are blamed for their own plight. Schmidt takes on this ambitious task by offering a sweeping historical overview of external powers’ involvement in Africa. In defending her thesis, she contends that the variety of predicaments ravaging the continent today are not solely the outcome of choices made by Africans themselves but are also partly the result of foreign interference in African politics. The time span of Schmidt’s account is broad, encompassing the entire period of the Cold War and decolonization (1945-1989), the years of state collapse (1991-2001), and the unfinished “global war on terror” (2001-2010). With limited space available, the task of examining external powers’ involvement in a vast and complex continent is bound to be difficult. Schmidt focuses mostly on U.S. political and military interventions in carefully selected African case studies. Woodroofe’s Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden provides a well-documented and insightful story, which, though lacking the breadth of Schmidt’s “histories,” demonstrates an enviable depth in tracing U.S. policies and perceptions toward the Horn of Africa in the turbulent period for the region that began with the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1974 and the Ethiopian-Somali war of 1977-1978. Schmidt weighs the relative importance of key variables that determined the extent of foreign influence over a host of troubled African regimes, whereas Woodroofe’s biggest challenge seems to have been her failure to use Soviet, East European, and Cuban documents that would yield a fuller picture of East-West interaction. Regardless, her focus on issues of U.S. decision-making and Washington’s reactions to Moscow’s intervention in the Horn delivers an insightful and detailed analysis of debates in the White House and at Foggy Bottom.

Both books, though employing different frameworks in...