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United States Military and Strategic Interests in Africa
| Article
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10067 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
7,895 Words |
| Author
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William J. Foltz
William J. Foltz is professor of political science and
director of the Yale Center for International and Area
Studies. |
Introduction
The title of this paper is a sad sign of the times in which we live. Throughout almost all of United States history, America's military and strategic interests in Africa would scarcely have merited a paragraph in anything other than an ambitious naval officer's dream book. The significant exceptions were two brief periods: World War II, when North Africa became a theater of war and other parts of the continent harbored allied lines of communication and supply, and the early days of the cold war, when the United States operated Strategic Air Command bases in Morocco and Libya as instruments of a primitive phase of post-war containment policy. Only in the last decade, however, has the African continent acquired what has all appearance of a permanent and significant place in the military and strategic interests of the United States.
This paper will argue that such an increase in Africa's military and strategic significance to the United States is not a transient phenomenon, nor one conjured up by the perfervid imagination of born-again cold warriors. Rather, it stems from major changes in the United States' position in world affairs, including its relations with its major allies, from related changes in the position of the Soviet Union, from changes in military technology that are not easily controlled, and not least, from political and military changes in Africa itself and in neighboring areas. None of these changes will be easily reversed, though their consequences can be managed in widely differing ways. It seems likely then, that papers with titles like this one will be part of academic symposia for many years to come.
Interests: Military, Strategic, and Other
The concept of "interest," particularly the interest of a complex collectivity like a nation, requires some preliminary clarification, "national interest," despite its brief vogue in the 1950s as a respectable analytic tool, has become more the stuff of campaign rhetoric or bureaucratic and special pleading than of dispassionate analysis. Yet policy analysis finds it hard to proceed without reference to the idea that even so large, disparate, and contentious a collectivity as the United States has in some sense relatively enduring and stable interests of a structural nature, interests that transcend, though do not supplant, the interests of the individuals making up the collectivity. These interests are expressed primarily through the governmental system, but reflect the desires and needs of broader economic and social structures, those that nourish--and
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