U S Foreign Policy In Southern Africa

This book charts the evolution of US foreign policy towards South Africa, beginning in 1948 when the architects of apartheid, the Nationalist Party, came to power. Thomson highlights three sets of conflicting Western interests: strategic, economic and human rights.

This title was first published in 2001. "Grand aims" refers to the overarching tenets and doctrines that prevailed in US and South African foreign policies towards Africa. This study argues that when modest means were imposed upon American and South African foreign policy-makers, they were often forced to devise new grand aims. Few in-depth resources exist with regard to United States and/or South African foreign policies towards Africa. Those that do are overwhelmingly pre- or early-1990s in focus. This analysis encompasses the years 1990 to mid-1998 and is intended to be relevant to a broad readership, including academics, students, Africanists, historians, political scientists, regional specialists and policy-makers in the public and private sectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

This thesis is designed to demonstrate analytically three propositions: First, that the U.S. has maintained a foreign policy toward southern Africa which has been unevenly implemented and even neglected by various administrations, due to perceptual differences about Africa and due to other manifest priorities on the agenda of U.S. foreign policy concerns. Second, that a major determinant of U.S. policy in southern Africa has been the concern over potential superpower rivalry and intervention in the region as a dangerous and unwarranted element in the U.S.-Soviet competitive relationship. Third, that an overreaction in the U.S. to the perceived Soviet threat and a dramatic reinstitution of the East-West perspective in U.S. foreign policy priorities could lead the U.S. to set aside the regional approach toward southern Africa that has marked the Carter Administration's African policy since 1977. This development may create a situation of incipient crisis for future U.S. relations in the region. (Author).

First published in 1997, this volume examines United States policy towards South Africa in the nineteen seventies, spanning the period of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. What sets it apart from similar works is that it analyses policy in the broader context of American ideals and responses to apartheid. It examines whether actual policies were in conformity with these ideals and focuses attention on the American predicament over the issue of apartheid.

Relations between the United States and South Africa - or the parts of the world these nations now occupy - go nearly as far back as the very beginning of their inception as permanent European colonial intrusions. This book is a critical overview of these relations from the late seventeenth century to the present. Unprecedented in its scope - and s