The opening of Cold War Archives and the Rewriting of Jimmy Carter’s Policy in Africa: Reconsidering the Cold War factor

Abstract

During the Cold War, strategic considerations relating to the need to contain and reverse Communist influence in Africa colored different American administrations’ policy and prevented an unbiased approach to the various issues of the region, including the open racism practiced against large sections of its population, and the glaring lack of commitment to human rights among many of its leaders. The presidency of Jimmy Carter was generally perceived as an exception to that general rule, and the historical verdict on his African diplomacy is mostly a positive one. Carter and his foreign policy aids were believed to have downplayed a factor that was a fixture for other administrations, namely the role of the Cold War in shaping official attitude to the moral problems and dilemmas of that continent. Shortly after the Cold War era, however, the United States government started to declassify a considerable portion of governmental documents relating to that period. The new documentation has cast the dominant assumptions relating to anti-Communism and Carter’s policy in Africa under a completely different light and allowed the possibility for the rewriting of a more accurate assessment of his administration’s agenda for Africa. Relying primarily on some of this declassified data, this research aims to tackle the following questions: what was the real role played by American containment objectives in formulating the African agenda of Jimmy Carter? How different was his administration from others in that regard? And did Carter truly give priority to morality over interest in his approach to Africa?

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n4p225