Nancy Mitchell Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War Washington,DC

Reviewed by: Robert Anthony Waters Jr, Ohio Northern University r-waters@onu.edu

Historian Nancy Mitchell has written a very good book about Jimmy Carter and the Cold War in Africa, focusing on his response to crises in White-minority-ruled Rhodesia and the Horn of Africa. The width and depth of her research is a model that diplomatic historians should aspire to achieve, her writing flows, and she places Carter’s Africa policy within the larger context of US foreign policy and politics. At times she provides an hour-by-hour account of events, and the pace rarely drags. Despite these strengths, the book is ultimately unsuccessful because Mitchell is trapped in the anti-Cold War paradigm that dominates US diplomatic history.

In Southern Africa, Mitchell claims for Carter the mantle of true foreign policy realist: he assessed Rhodesia as a potential Cold War hot spot, but also made a careful study of the African context, giving his policy nuance and suppleness. Mitchell praises Carter for his refusal to lift sanctions even after the White-minority government turned over a large share of power to nationalist Black leaders who opposed the Marxist guerillas, arguing that without the guerillas, the civil war would have continued and probably led to Cuban and Soviet intervention. She concludes: “Carter … had to … claim the moral high ground but not end up on the same side as the Soviets” (670). In other words, he could not allow his support for peace and Black-majority rule to end in Soviet and Cuban intervention and regional war. Only a negotiated settlement involving all parties could prevent that outcome.

Mitchell argues that in the Horn, Carter behaved as a traditional Cold Warrior. When Somalia expelled the Soviet Union, Carter moved to fill the vacuum in exchange for use of the strategic port at Berbera. Implicit in the bargain, the United States would ensure that weapons flowed to Somalia as it prepared to invade and annex Ethiopia’s Somali-majority Ogaden region. Mitchell portrays this as an example of the reflexive amoral Great Power Diplomacy that Henry Kissinger had practised in Africa during the Gerald Ford administration: secretive, unconcerned about African norms such as the inviolability of colonial borders, and focused purely on the Cold War without concern for the Africans themselves. It was exactly the kind of foreign policy that Carter had renounced in his campaign for president.

Carter’s policy in the Horn lacked nuance and true realism, Mitchell argues, because the opportunity was unexpected. Somalia expelled the Soviets just when his new administration had its hands full with momentous policy changes vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the Mideast, the Panama Canal, and Rhodesia. With little time to do his normally exhaustive due diligence, Carter’s instinct was to better the US strategic position without concern about antagonizing African leaders or violating his own commitment to rein in international arms sales. The Horn Crisis shows that, contra his conservative critics, in his heart Jimmy Carter was a Cold Warrior.

Mitchell’s conclusions about both crises are questionable.

In Rhodesia, Mitchell is simply wrong that the United States could not accept a solution that left the United States on the same side as the Soviets. In fact, the British believed that would be the optimal outcome. Their candidate to rule Zimbabwe was Soviet-supported guerilla leader Joshua Nkomo, whom they considered the most talented and flexible of the colony’s leaders. They saw the other guerilla chief, Chinese-supported Robert Mugabe, as an overly doctrinaire and inflexible Marxist. Mitchell shows that Nkomo was close to joining an “internal settlement” that would have left out Mugabe. Had Carter joined the British, he could have induced Nkomo to make peace and form an electoral coalition with the leading opponent of guerilla war, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, a match that would have given the “internal solution” Nkomo’s prestige as a freedom fighter while bringing together Nkomo’s minority Ndebele tribe and Muzorewa’s majority Shona. Nkomo’s joining the agreement also would have split the governments of the countries that surrounded Rhodesia, known as the “Frontline States,” thus preventing them from mounting coherent opposition. The Soviets and Cuban troops would have stayed out since Mugabe (a Shona) was China’s ally.

Carter’s refusal to join the British scheme meant that Nkomo did not join the settlement. He lost prestige and influence to Mugabe. Muzorewa’s victory in the newly christened Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’s election—the freest and fairest that African-American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin had ever witnessed in Africa—was doomed. The guerilla war continued and intensified, undermining Muzorewa’s government and ultimately leading to new elections and electoral victory for the execrable Mugabe. The election was marred by Mugabe’s forces attacking his opponents’ supporters—which Mitchell glides over as readily as had the desperate-to-decolonize British. Post-election, Mitchell joins Carter in praising Mugabe’s moderation, exemplified by his support for a continued White role in Zimbabwe. Carter and Mitchell ignored that Mugabe had turned his attention from the Whites—whose power was broken—toward Nkomo’s Ndebele tribe, launching a near genocidal war against them. Nkomo fled the country and Muzorewa was jailed.

As to the disastrous totality of Mugabe’s 37-years-and-counting in power, in which “Mugabe descended into murderous thuggery” and “squandered this opportunity,” Mitchell concludes that Carter ought not to be blamed (679). She is largely wrong. Like the British, Carter knew who and what Mugabe was, but Mitchell devotes only a couple of paragraphs to sketching out his biography.

On the Horn, although Mitchell criticizes almost every step Carter took, the president extensively consulted Somalia’s regional neighbours—Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—all terrified by communism in the Horn, and he consulted the Western allies, including France, which was decolonizing Somalia’s Somali-majority neighbour, Djibouti, and the British, whose former Kenya colony had a majority-Somali population on its border and had been the scene of Somali separatist rebellion in the early years after independence. Both the British and French supported Somalia, but they also pledged support for their former colonies if the Somalis made trouble. Almost everyone agreed that the possibility of flipping Somalia from the Soviet camp and acquiring its port on the Gulf of Aden was enticing, but the possibility that Somali victory could overthrow the Communists in Ethiopia was positively exciting. Instead, Cuba intervened and quickly defeated Somalia.

Mitchell calls Carter’s policy an amoral failure, but geo-strategically, it was not. The United States got its port, Carter strengthened the recent alliance with Egypt, and he helped to assuage Iranian and Saudi fears about communism’s spread in the region—fears every bit as powerful and absolute as Black Africans’ detestation of White colonial rule.

Mitchell’s work shows the new normal for Cold War analysis. She privileges Black Africans’ anti-colonialism over the Muslim states’ anti-communism. She plays down the great strategic victory the United States won by acquiring use of Somalia’s port, an advantage Somalia would never have granted had Carter not agreed to help arm the Somali army. Indeed, with nowhere to turn, Somalia might have unhappily stayed tied to the Soviet Union, giving it strategic control of the Horn and opening the possibility that Somalia would renew aggression against Kenya instead of Ethiopia.

In Southern Africa, Mitchell criticizes the British plan for Rhodesia as having sought a “decent interval” during which they could wash their hands of Zimbabwe, but she almost ignores the genuine British concern about what Mugabe would do once in power. In fact, Carter’s failure to help the British meant that Zimbabwe received an indecent interval of less than two years before Prime Minister Mugabe began murderously destroying all opposition. Carter’s plan for Zimbabwean independence was idealistic and democratic, albeit disastrous for Zimbabwe; by contrast, the British were more than a bit Machiavellian in their effort to keep Mugabe out of power. Mitchell prefers idealism.