Martin HenryCOLIN POWELL is out, Condoleezza Rice is in, as U.S. secretary of state. Both of African descent. Rice is moving up from the National Security Council as Henry Kissinger did in the Nixon
administration at a time when Southern Africa was in a ferment of liberation struggles against white minority rule and
colonial rule.
By the middle of the 1970s, Cuba had thousands of troops fighting alongside MPLA rebels in Angola for independence from Portugal. The alliance was supported with Soviet military hardware. The South African Defence Force, the best army in the region, pushing into Angola from occupied Namibia against the rebel forces and their Cuban allies,
was decisively routed in the engagements of Cuito Canavale and driven back. So why didn't the United States intervene in the conflicts and struggles of Southern Africa?
My exploration of the question in an earlier column delivered an intriguing source of answers, the classified but leaked 'National Security Study Memorandum 39: The Kissinger Study of Southern Africa'. Much has changed in the world since Henry Kissinger. But at this major turning point in history, there are valuable lessons about how the great power United States measures and pursues its interests beyond the border and implications for the rest of the world.
US POLICY TOWARDS
SOUTHERN AFRICA
"The president," Kissinger wrote on April 10, 1969, "has directed a comprehensive review of U.S. policy towards Southern Africa. The study should consider (1) the background and future prospects of major problems in the area; (2) alternative views of the U.S. interests in Southern Africa; and (3) the full range of basic strategies and policy options open to the United States." NSSM39, in so far as it became official foreign policy, explains the lack of direct engagement by the United States in the conflicts of Southern Africa: "Our interests in the region are important but not vital. The U.S. does not have vital security interests in the region."
But there were broad objectives for engagement with the area: "To improve the U.S. standing in black Africa and internationally on the racial issue; to minimise the likelihood of escalation of violence in the area and risk of U.S. involvement; to minimise the opportunities for the USSR and Communist China to exploit the racial issue in the region for propaganda advantage and to gain political influence with black governments and liberation movements; to encourage
moderation of the current rigid racial and colonial policies of the white regimes; to protect econ-omic, scientific and strategic interests ad opportunities in the region, including the orderly marketing of South African gold production."
WHAT WERE THE OPTIONS?
The study group recognised that, "these objectives in some instances are conflicting and irreconcilable. What were the options? Five options were offered, mixing varying degrees of collaboration with and dissociation from the black and white-ruled states but excluding military intervention and economic sanctions.
Option Two became the preferred option guiding, at least roughly, American foreign policy towards Southern Africa: "Broader association with both black and white states in an effort to encourage moderation in the white states, to enlist co-operation of the black states in reducing tensions and the likelihood of cross-border violence, and to encourage improved relations among states in the area."
The U.S. coldly calculated its interests in Southern Africa, not the interests of Africans, and proceeded with its foreign policy, overtly and covertly, accordingly. What's on the Caribbean and Jamaican foreign policy files of the Government of the United States? The Munroe Doctrine of special sphere of influence in the Americas is not about to disappear after 181 years. During the Cuban engagement in Southern Africa, Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago came under U.S. pressure not to permit the refuelling of Cuban aircraft en route to Africa. Recent pressure to support the U.S. in the U.N. for the war in Iraq is still fresh in our minds. Kissinger's memo was copied to USAID and the study set out the strategic use of aid to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives.
It would serve us well as a little non-power to abandon sentiment, study the manoeuvres of the big guys and craft our own hard-nosed foreign policy for survival in a hard world where big players, as a British statesman famously said, have no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
