Beyond Humanitarianism

AFRICA-U.S. RELATIONS: Strategic Encounters.

Edited by Donald Rothchild and Edmond J. Keller. Lynne Rienner. 299 pp. $55

With a few notable exceptions—Chester Crocker in the Reagan administration, Herman Cohen under the first President Bush, and Princeton Lyman in the Clinton administration—Africa specialists in the U.S. government take an almost perverse pride in the idiosyncratic nature of their portfolios. Although poverty, disease, and conflict are hardly strangers to many areas of the globe, only with respect to Africa do these scourges frame American policy. Africa is needy—and nothing else. In his contribution to Africa-U.S. Relations, Lyman blames this myopia partly on the news media, which call our attention to Africa only when catastrophe strikes: “drought and famine in Ethiopia, brutal amputations in Sierra Leone, land mines claiming the lives of children in Angola and Mozambique, and racial and ethnic cleansing in Darfur.”

After a natural or human disaster, the United States may pump hundreds of millions of dollars into relief efforts. Many advocates for Africa no doubt derive satis­faction from the fact that their work is driven by humanitarian and moral concerns untainted by geopolitical or economic interests. However, the continent-in-need ap­proach essentially pushes Africa to the bottom of the U.S. foreign-policy agenda, a fact under­scored by the scant time and resources that both Democratic and Republican administrations devote to it in comparison with other regions of the world.

Noble as it is, the humanitarian impulse simply doesn’t have the sustainability of national interest and other traditional elements of statecraft. Consequently, the American government has made few long-term investments in Africa, especially post–Cold War, now that there’s no danger of dominoes falling to the Soviets. Further, the trauma of American casualties during the 1992–94 humanitarian mission to Somalia—especially the deaths of 18 soldiers during the episode made famous by Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (1999) and its movie adaptation—eliminated any possibility that the Clinton administration would move beyond the usual neglect. Campaigning to succeed Clinton, George W. Bush went so far as to declare Africa strategically insignificant to the United States.

However, several factors have shifted the geostrategic calculus since Bush took office: growing hydrocarbon production in West Africa, the availability of ports and airfields along the littoral of East Africa, and, post-9/11, concern about transnational terrorist networks penetrating southward from North Africa. In this book, Donald Rothchild and Edmond J. Keller, political scientists at, respectively, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Califor­nia, Los Angeles, bring together American and African scholars to consider a new model for American relations with Africa. Essays in the book focus on security issues, such as terrorism and ethnic conflict; social problems, such as HIV/AIDS and the environment; and economic troubles, such as trade policy and debt. While many of the authors continue to regard the continent as an object of humanitarian and moral solicitude—as does President Bush on some issues, most notably HIV/AIDS—they also recognize the connection between America’s strategic concerns and Africa’s needs in terms of human security. As Keller writes, “The United States has a vital interest in strengthening the military and intelligence capacities of poor countries like the ones we find in Africa. For their part, African countries could measurably improve their ability to solve problems of peace and security with the aid of the United States.” Such efforts are already under way. Since 2002, for example, the  Com­bined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa has worked with the governments of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen to keep the peace and enhance security.

To be sure, many experts still see pursuing self-interest and alleviating suffering as mutually exclusive, and their linkage as ethically suspect or, at the very least, unrealistic. Even some of the authors here come across as hesitant in their efforts to balance mundane national interests (both African and American) with more idealistic visions of humanitarianism. Change will be gradual, but solid works like this one may hasten it.

—J. Peter Pham