The End of the Cold War and U.S. Foreign Policy toward the Horn of Africa in the Immediate Post-Siyaad and Post-Mengistu Eras

The End ofthe Cold War and U.S. Foreign Policy toward the Horn ofAfrica in the Immediate Post-Siyaad and Post-Mengistu Eras Peter J. Schraeder Loyola University American foreign policy toward the Horn of Africa between 1945 and 1990 was guided by a series of Cold War rationales that looked upon the region as a means for solving non-African problems. Specifically, U.S. policymakers did not perceive the countries and peoples of the Horn of Africa as important in their own right but, rather, as the means for preventing the further advances of Soviet communism. As a result, U.S. relationships with various regimes in the region evolved according to their perceived importance within the East-West framework. Emperor Haile Sellassie, for example, was courted from the 1940s to the 1970s due to the importance of Ethiopia as part of a worldwide telecommunications network directed against the Soviet Union. When the U.S.-Ethiopian security relationship was shattered during the 1970s, Siyaad Barre subsequently rose to preeminence due to Somalia's importance as an access country from which the U.S. could militarily counter a perceived Soviet threat to Middle East oil fields. Indeed, not only was the U.S. preoccupation with anti-communism manipulated by these leaders to obtain greater levels of U.S. economic and military aid—over $600 million for the Sellassie regime and nearly $800 million for the Siyaad regime—it also served as an important rationale for Washington's general disregard for the authoritarian excesses of these regimes, as well as for a host of interventionist practices designed to maintain U.S. influence within the region.1©Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Volume 1 Number 1 (New Series) 1994, pp. 91-11991 92 Peter J. Schraeder These Cold War rationales and the policies they generated were dramatically called into questionby radical changes in the Sovietbloc during the 1980s. Emerging in 1985 as the undisputed leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), President Mikhail Gorbachev's intention to alter significantly Soviet economic and political structures was captured in a variety of buzz words—"perestroika" (economic restructuring ) and "glasnost" (political openness)—which quickly became part of the lexicon of the West. Of greatest importance to U.S. policymakers was Gorbachev's desire to move beyond the conflictual confines of the Cold War and seek a form of international cooperation reminiscent of President Roosevelt's vision of a post-World War II international order. The crucial ingredient of what became growing U.S.-Soviet cooperation at the end of the 1980s was Gorbachev's adherence to the theme of "novoye myslenye" (new political thinking). In the case of Eastern Europe , this approach entailed Soviet tolerance for the fall of single-party communist states and a recognition of the need to allow the peoples of Eastern Europe to determine their own political paths independent of Soviet control. Throughout the various regions of the Third World, the new political thinking entailed a rejection of revolutionary struggle and, instead, the need for political negotiations and compromise to resolve ongoing regional disputes and civil wars.2 The irony of Gorbachev's radical initiatives is that they unleashed a variety of forces that ultimately led in 1991 to the fragmentation of the Soviet Union into a host of smaller independent and non-communist countries. Although the largest of these—the Russian Republic—pledged to seek further cooperation with the United States in a variety of realms (including a resolution of regional conflict in Africa), the reality of the fragmentation of the Soviet Union was a significant shift in the international balance ofpower as a former superpower ceased to exist. Most importantly , this event underscored the end of the Cold War and the irrelevance of its related anticommunist rationales. In a stunning example of how Cold War rationales had shifted, U.S. policymakers at the beginning of 1992 were embroiled in a fierce debate over how best to ensure future cooperation with Russia and the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union. As debates focusing on U.S.-Russian cooperation continue to replace the antagonistic relationship characteristic End ofthe Cold War & U.S. Foreign Policy Toward the Horn ofAfrica...