From Confrontation to Accomodation and Back Again
"Between the fall of Vietnam and the fall of the Shah of Iran," declared Business Week in 1979, "the U.S. has been buffeted by an unnerving series of shocks that signal an accelerating erosion...
...policy as originally conceived...
...willingness to sacrifice an outdated symbol of colonialism and pursue negotiations aimed at preserving longer-term economic and strategic interests...
...4. Allen Isaacman and Jennifer Davis, "United States Policy Toward Mozambique Since 1945," Africa Today, Vol...
...In April Kissinger shuttled off to southern Africa in search of a viable neo-colonial solution for Rhodesia...
...diplomatic, military and intelligence contacts with Pretoria were increased...
...Amalia Bertoli, et.al., "Carter and the Generals: Human Rights in the Southern Cone," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...This time around, Nathaniel Davis resigned his post, favoring a political solution for the Angolan crisis...
...complicity with South Africa was unveiled, prompting Congress to block further covert aid for the FNLA and UNITA...
...The aim of U.S...
...Muzorewa was nicknamed a "Blacksmith...
...See Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planningfor WorldManagement (Boston: South End Press, 1980...
...See Carolyn Brown, "Apartheid and Trilateralism," in Sklar, ed., Trilateralism...
...10MaylJune 1982 11 Angola Angola was meant "to be the post-Vietnam testing ground of American will and power...
...Policy recommendations for the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique and the settler colonies of Rhodesia, South West Africa (Namibia) and South Africa were based on this ill-fated premise: "The whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them...
...161-79...
...policy from confrontation toward accommodation...
...Ronald Reagan would have to wait four more years before winning the Republican nomination and the presidency...
...With African support, the Angolan government insists that Cuban troops were called in to defend against South African aggression, and they will remain until the South African threat is mitigated by the achievement of an independence settlement for Namibia...
...1 The resettlement scheme was, however, one of the most visible signs of growing ties between South Africa and the Southern Cone regimes...
...William Minter, Portuguese Africa and the West (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp...
...XXV, no...
...agenda...
...These shocks were rooted in economic, political and military trends which accelerated throughout the 1960s and '70s...
...Security Council in approving a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa...
...Kissinger visited Kenya, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, Senegal and Liberia, but was rebuffed by Nigeria...
...A process of decolonization which unfolded rapidly after World War II was in its final stages, with national liberation struggles uprooting the most intransigent colonial outposts...
...2. Mohamed El-Khawas and Barry Cohen, The Kissinger Study ofSouthern Africa (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1976), pp...
...9. Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, pp...
...corporate interests in South Africa rested on both the nurturance of a strata of skilled black labor, professionals and pro-West political leaders, and the continued super-exploitation of the mass of black labor...
...By 1968 the Vietnam War had led to the fall of Lyndon Johnson (and the Cold War liberal coalition around him...
...At a cost of tens of thousands of lives and millions of exiles, the regimes suppressed the Left, harshly disciplined labor and kept the lid on popular discontent...
...3 In 1971 the United States signed the Azores Agreement with Portugal (the last formal agreement for use of the Azores air base had lapsed in 1962) and increased economic and military aid for the Caetano dictatorship...
...power in a rapidly changing world...
...Kissinger rationalized U.S...
...Also see Seymour Hersh, New York Times, December 19, 1975...
...Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Washington, D.C., April 27, 1976...
...4 As argued in an earlier NACLA Report, the human rights policy would help the United States improve its soiled international image and rebuild the domestic consensus shattered by Vietnam, Chile, Angola and Watergate...
...policy was not to destabilize the South African government (any more than the human rights policy was designed to destabilize Somoza or the Shah, as Jeane Kirkpatrick contends),"' but rather to defuse the prospect of revolution with reform...
...In November 1977, two months after Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko was murdered by South African police, the United States joined other members of the U.N...
...And the white settlers found hope in the prospect of recreating their privileged lives elsewhere...
...he was head of AID in Guatemala from 1967 to 1969 when the United States funded a "model police program...
...s And the human rights policy had another important purpose: to prod the military regimes of Latin America into easing the political repression and economic corruption which not only radicalized workers and peasants, but alienated elements of the middle and upper classes...
...has been buffeted by an unnerving series of shocks that signal an accelerating erosion of power and influence...
...In 1978 Rhodesian whites (representing 4% of the population) had heeded their longtime leader Ian Smith and approved a new constitution for "Zimbabwe-Rhodesia" which would preserve white privilege and power under a facade of majority rule...
...While Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both supported negotiations, Ronald Reagan and the Right promised to hold on to the Canal and Canal Zone ("We built it, we paid for it, it's ours...
...In 1974 Kissinger signed an Eight-Point Agreement on the Panama Canal with Panama's Foreign Minister Juan Antonio Tack...
...Kissinger organized policy around the notion of "realpolitik" rather than ideology...
...intervention as a necessary response to Soviet support for the MPLA, described as a violation of the "rules" of detente...
...corporations such as Boeing and Gulf Oil, the U.S...
...Throughout the fall and winter, the CIA collaborated extensively with South Africa in a desperate effort to oust the MPLA government of President Agostinho Neto...
...Indeed, U.S...
...More Power to the Generals In South America there was little attempt to complement repression with reform, the twopronged approach of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress...
...Among other things, the Directive reaffirmed the need for peaceful solutions to the liberation struggles in the region, arguing that escalating guerrilla warfare allowed the Soviets to gain influence they wouldn't otherwise have in a political solution...
...105-6...
...Angola, like Vietnam, was widely regarded as a MaylJune 1982 1112 NACLA Report foreign policy debacle for the United States...
...China, more a regional than a global power, was to play this role in Asia...
...7 The Angolan civil war was a bloody Cold War battleground...
...public, Carter's human rights policy reflected the trilateralist assumption that a "minimum of social justice and reform will be necessary for stability in the long run...
...The hardening of Carter's line toward change in the third world was more visible in regard to the Middle East, northern Africa and Central America than it was toward the Southern Cone and southern Africa...
...XVI, no...
...business faced mounting competition from the rejuvenated economies of Western Europe and Japan...
...But whites from Rhodesia and other white-ruled regimes who wanted to emigrate would be encouraged to resettle in South American countries like Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay, rather than return to their "mother countries" (Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands...
...1 9 Rhodesia to Zimbabwe Carter pushed accommodation to change in southern Africa to its limit in Zimbabwe...
...2 Crisis and Confrontation While world events and domestic politics had forced Nixon and Kissinger to become more accommodationist, Carter was pulled along the opposite course...
...support for the white settler regimes and creation of a South Atlantic Treaty MaylJune 1982 1314 MACLA Rsport Organization were dashed by the election ofJimmy Carter...
...His view coincided with long-held right- wing theories about the growing Soviet threat to the Cape route: the Soviet-backed MPLA would surely provide the Soviet Union with naval bases on Angola's Atlantic coast and thus threaten Western access to minerals and oil...
...231-36...
...And it reinforced the rhetoric and assumptions of Reagan and the Right...
...3. See Edgar Lockwood, "National Security Study Memorandum 39 and the Future of United States Policy Toward Southern Africa," Issue, Vol...
...The Panama Canal became a major issue in the 1976 presidential campaign...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Commentary, Vol...
...8 In November 1975, having established control over Luanda and most of the country's district capitals, the MPLA proclaimed independence for Angola (in line with the original decolonization schedule...
...South Africa received more sophisticated aircraft and communications equipment...
...the Clark Amendment passed the Senate in December 1975 and was approved by the House inJanuary 1976 (the remaining funds from earlier appropriations were still being spent on equipment and payoffs in April...
...2 " Washington and London had expected an inconclusive vote with Muzorewa and Nkomo out front, but Reagan's so-called landslide win pales before Mugabe's 63...
...In March 1976 talks between Rhodesian leader Ian Smith and nationalist opponent Joshua Nkomo collapsed, ending hopes for an "internal settlement" involving Nkomo...
...1 (January-March 1978...
...See Article III, this issue...
...Standing economic and military sanctions were relaxed (e.g., in November 1971 Nixon approved the Byrd Amendment authorizing the importation of 72 "strategic and critical" materials from Rhodesia, including chrome...
...Majority rule for South Africa was not on the U.S...
...The Carter Crusade Jimmy Carter came to office inJanuary 1977 with a sweeping foreign policy agenda...
...6. John A. Marcum, "Lessons of Angola," Foreign Affairs, April 1 9 7 6 , p. 407...
...It stated that the United States would have to take "visible steps" to downgrade relations with South Africa if the Botha government did not move toward power sharing with the black majority...
...right-wing forces, led by Senator Jesse Helms and supported by neoconservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, hailed the "multiracial" government and urged Carter to drop sanctions and normalize relations...
...In his chronicle of the Angolan intervention, In Search ofEnemies, John Stockwell, former chief of the CIA's Angola task force, refutes the Kissinger version of events...
...Although some white families did settle in Bolivia, the program did not fulfill the visions of its original planners...
...1 (JanuaryFebruary 1982), p. 12...
...But it became quickly apparent that the nominal Muzorewa government could not fulfill its promises of ending the war, revitalizing the economy and securing international legitimacy...
...23 FROM CONFRONTATION TO ACCOMMODATION AND BACK AGAIN 1. Business Week, March 12, 1979, p. 36...
...Los Immigrantes Sud Africanos Llegaron A Bolivia Segun Lo Planeado," Centro de Informaci6n Bolivia, Wilrijk, Beljium, November 7, 1977...
...3 (Fall 1974...
...In July 1975, President Ford approved a $30 million covert action program, escalating support for the FNLA and initiating large-scale support for UNITA...
...IV, no...
...In a 1980 address to the Los Angeles Affairs Council, trilateralist David Rockefeller blessed the harder line when he said: "We cannot count on an alliance of angels to defend the free world...
...Group for Dependency Research and the Southern Africa Group, eds., Documents on Colonialist Export from South Africa to Latin America (Sweden: Uppsala University, 1977...
...International Defence and Aid Fund, "Apartheid's Army in Namibia," Fact Paper on Southern Africa No...
...Right-wing hopes for steadfast U.S...
...The United States did, however, undertake one major accommodationist initiative in Latin America...
...At the same time, the human rights policy became more selective and superficial...
...There was promise for apartheid Bolivian-style as the Indians "had an intelligence level on a par with South African blacks and could be taught to do manual labor without any problems...
...III, no...
...But if Washington and its clients were successful in suppressing popular movements in the Southern Cone, in southern Africa the liberation forces held the momentum...
...policy toward southern Africa, policy toward the Southern Cone remained on its original track: supporting the military regimes and fostering "free enterprise" economics...
...At best, the Soviet Union would become the United States' tacit partner in containing change and managing stability in the third world...
...But South Africa stalled, and the United States and other Western powers refused to support United Nations sanctions to get an intransigent Pretoria regime to follow through with negotiated independence plans...
...22 Not long after, Rockefeller would travel to Argentina and other Southern Cone countries to reassure political and business elites that President-elect Ronald Reagan would not be so concerned with human rights...
...Az 14 NACLA ReportMayIJune 1982 15 ternational legitimacy, but Washington did not consider majority rule the bottom line for political change...
...On the economic front, U.S...
...Africa News, July 11, 1977...
...The Carter equivalent of Nixon-Kissinger's NSSM 39 was Policy Review Memorandum (PRM) 4, a review of southern Africa policy which resulted in a Presidential Directive by March 1977...
...1 The Bolivian government of General Hugo Banzer was most enthusiastic about the prospect of adding to the European side of its heavily Indian population...
...His conciliatory speech in Lusaka, Zambia, "Southern Africa and the United States: An Agenda for Cooperation," marked the public turn in U.S...
...Washington Post, October 12, 1980...
...The aim of detente and rapprochement was to better exploit Soviet-Chinese animosity, update the rules of the arms race and construct a web of economic relations which would profit Western corporations and tie the Soviets and Chinese more closely to the capitalist system...
...The Whites are Here to Stay" Early Nixon-Kissinger policy toward southern Africa was based on Option 2 of National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 39, secretly adopted by President Nixon in winter 1969-70...
...Whereas human rights had to be force-fed to Carter's predecessors by Congress and the U.S...
...influence-FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and later UNITA (National Union for Total Independence of Angola)-against the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola...
...Kissinger urged Pretoria to use "its influence in Salisbury to promote a rapid negotiated settlement for majority rule in Rhodesia" and he called for dialogue between South Africa and African states...
...Unlike the Rhodesian white regime, the Southern Cone generals seemed to be "there to stay...
...Apartheid had to be modified if South Africa was to gain political and economic stability and restore its inSleeping quarters for black gold miners in South Africa...
...With Henry Kissinger at the helm, the new Nixon Administration attempted to steer an innovative foreign policy course which would not only preserve but extend U.S...
...Africa Policy Shift Events elsewhere in southern Africa continued to upset U.S...
...Moreover, Carter's return to Cold War propaganda about the "Soviet threat"--aimed largely at justifying "unleashing" the CIA, draft registration and the Rapid Deployment Force for third world intervention-legitimized the anticommunist ideology that Pretoria and the Southern Cone regimes had long used to cloak their repression...
...The Soviets, Stockwell discovered, were a "half-step behind, countering our moves...
...On the strategic front, the so-called Communist bloc remained divided into two hostile camps, but the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States...
...5 (November 1979...
...Detente replaced Containment as the guiding doctrine in MaylJune 1982 9NACLA Report U.S.-Soviet relations, together with a policy of rapprochement with "Red China...
...OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) became the first-and only-real third world power bloc in the capitalist world order...
...Pretoria's strategy was (and is) to play for time, wresting more concessions in the negotiations while it bolstered its multiracial puppet party within Namibia, the DTA, (Democratic Turnhalle Alliance), and attempted to defeat SWAPO militarily (with counterinsurgency in Namibia and search and destroy missions in Angola...
...Guerrilla warfare escalated...
...But across the Atlantic in southern Africa, policy proved a poor match for events...
...As the locus of covert intervention shifted from Chile to Angola, some of the actors remained the same: Nathaniel Davis, ambassador to Chile from 1971 to 1973, became assistant secretary of state for African affairs in March 1975...
...Thus, by turning a more accommodationist cheek (the softline approach) to China and the Soviet Union, the United States hoped to wield a more effective confrontationalist policy (the hardline approach) in the face of third world challenges...
...5. George Black andJudy Butler, "Target Nicaragua," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Southern Cone Stability In contrast to U.S...
...government continues to withhold recognition, demanding the exit of Cuban troops as a precondition...
...The United States worked with Britain, France, West Germany and Canada (the five members of the so-called Contact Group) to shape a negotiated plan for Namibian independence involving SWAPO (South-West Africa Peoples Organization...
...His accommodationist policy designs closely followed the priorities and prescriptions of the Trilateral Commission, the North American/West European/Japanese planning institution to which Carter belonged since its establishment in 1973.13 Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission's first director, became Carter's national security adviser and Trilateral Commissioners such as Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young dominated the highest echelons of the Administration...
...An outcry over the "export of apartheid" was raised in Bolivia and around the world...
...Wall Street Journal, April 30, 1980...
...1 (March-April 1979...
...7. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 66...
...Where necessary, the United States covertly encouraged the internal forces allied with international capitalism to overthrow democratic governments, as in Chile...
...Exporting Apartheid At a conference hosted in Costa Rica by the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) in November 1976, the West German government offered $150 million to South American governments willing to resettle 30,000 white settler families (about 150,000 people) of German origin within their territory...
...Penny Lernoux, "White Africans in Latin America," The Nation, September 23, 1978...
...Nixon-Kissinger policy toward the Southern Cone was simple: support the military regimes which guaranteed internal stability and safeguarded regional Western interests...
...The so-called Tack Agreement never materialized during Kissinger's tenure, but it was a signal of U.S...
...Whites would receive economic inducements to stay after ma !May/June 1982 13 n FL Banzer Government crushes 1974 peasant rebellion in Cochabamba, Bolivia...
...14 (New York: Trilateral Commission, 1977), p. 10...
...10, London, January 1982...
...Although the MPLA government has had extensive relations with U.S...
...Kissinger's plan for Rhodesia envisaged a $2 to $3 billion development fund...
...arms support for the FNLA predated Soviet arms support for the MPLA...
...See Philip Wheaton, "Trilateralism and the Caribbean" and Lisa Wheaton, " 'Democratization' in the Dominican Republic," in Sklar, ed., Trilateralism...
...But in April 1974 the Caetano regime was overthrown by a military junta tired of fighting what they saw as unwinnable wars with liberation movements and so committed to quick independence for Portugal's African colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea- Bissau, Cape Verde Islands, Slo Tome e Principe).4 The year 1974 was also the decisive year of Watergate...
...8. Nathaniel Davis, "The Angola Decision of 1975: A Personal Memoir," Foreign Affairs, Fall 1978...
...Washington opposed a negotiated political settlement among Angola's rival independence movements, and instead supported groups which appeared more susceptible to U.S...
...Rather than recognize the unstable Muzorewa-Smith regime and court eventual armed victory by the liberation forces, the Carter Administration worked with the British government of Margaret Thatcher to follow through on the earlier Anglo-American Plan and arrange negotiations with the Patriotic Front...
...Holly Sklar, paper on colonization in Bolivia given at Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, November 27, 1977...
...At the least, the United States and the Soviet Union would respect each other's spheres of influence...
...70, no...
...This'ignores the fact that the Angolan Constitution prohibits the establishment of foreign bases on Angolan territory, Soviet bases not excepted...
...Convinced that the Southern Cone regimes would have to broaden their social bases to remain politically stable and economically productive, the Carter Administration encouraged the kind of liberalization or "democratization" which has gone furthest in South America under Brazil's "abertura" (opening), and furthest in Latin America generally in the Dominican Republic.'" Negotiation and Reform Carter helped conclude two of Kissinger's unfinished negotiating tasks, albeit in different form: the Panama Canal Treaties and the Zimbabwe independence settlement...
...The subsequent all-parties conference, chaired by British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, produced the independence settlement which led, much to the surprise of the Carter and Thatcher governments, to the landslide election of Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe's first prime minister...
...But the new counterrevolutionary confrontationalism ensured that relations with Angola (and Cuba) were never normalized...
...Richard N. Cooper, et.al., "Towards a Renovated International System," Triangle Paper No...
...In April 1979, with martial law prevailing around the country, Bishop Abel Muzorewa was elected as the first black prime minister...
...2 The Nixon Administration pursued a policy of "selective involvement" with Portugal's Caetano regime, the Smith regime in Rhodesia and the Vorster regime in South Africa...
...jority rule came about...
...See Prexy Nesbitt, "Trilateralism and the Rhodesian Problem: An Effort at Managing the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle," in Sklar, ed., Trilateralism...
...The FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, operated from bases in Zaire (Roberto is the brother-in-law of Zairean ruler Mobutu Sese John Stockwell and Holden Roberto, August 1975 Seko) and UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, was based in southern Angola and backed by South Africa...
...Deane Hinton, Agency for International Development (AID) chief in Chile from 1969 to 1971 and then deputy director of the National Security Council's committee on international economic policy, served as ambassador to Zaire from 1974 to 1975 (Hinton is currently ambassador to El Salvador...
...9 Meanwhile, the Neto government sent an urgent request for Cuban troops to turn back the South African invasion force as it closed in on Luanda...
...The Nixon-Kissinger strategy of economic, polical and military support for the Southern Cone dictators proved to be a relatively viable one...
...and the United States vetoed or abstained on major United Nations resolutions on African colonialism...
...The South African Sunday Times of March 12, 1978, quoted spokespersons of the Afrikaner Herstigte Nationale Party (the Afrikaner party to the right of the ruling National Party) after a tour of Bolivia as saying, "The whole economy is run by a small minority of white immigrants from Europe who keep the Spaniards and local Indians well and truly in their place...
...Carter's foreign policy grew more confrontationalist in the face of perceived setbacks and looming challenges: the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, rebellion in South Korea, revolution in Central America and the Caribbean, guerrilla war in the Philippines...
...Following Nixon's August resignation, Kissinger tried to carry on business as usual under President Ford...
...New York Times, November 11 and 24, December 5 and 15, 1980...
...Speech distributed by U.S...
...The Patriotic Front-comprised of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), led by Robert Mugabe, and the Zimbabwe African Peoples' Union (ZAPU), led by Joshua Nkomo-was excluded from the election...
...When thousands of South African troops and mercenaries invaded Angola from Namibia, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) rallied behind the MPLA...
Vol. 16 • May 1982 • No. 3
