The Defence Of White Power: South African Foreign Policy Under Pressure
A noted analyst of the southern African security situation sums up South Africa's political and military relationships with its neighbors and the consequences of those relationships for its interaction with the West. Although the book was completed before the fruition of negotiations on Namibia in 1988, the basic analysis stands and is likely to hold pretty well until the central factor driving the policy-apartheid-itself deteriorates and disappears.
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For much of Africa this year, immediate threats to survival dominated national agendas. In the extreme north and south, Libya and South Africa attacked the territory of weaker neighbors. Less noticed but far more widely devastating, a harsh drought destroyed crops across the continent, confronting more than 20 million people with the prospect of starvation. Declining rates of per capita food production over the last decade, coupled with escalating debt and falling returns on exports, left many African states at the margins of existence--at least according to Western calculations. And at year's end, a military coup abruptly ended four years of American-style democratic government in Africa's largest nation, Nigeria, renewing fears about political upheaval throughout the continent.
President Reagan's sweep of 49 of the 50 states in the November 1984 elections set in motion mutations within both the Republican and Democratic Parties that have substantially affected U.S. relations with Africa. The mushrooming of groups and individuals in the coalition known as the Free South Africa Movement is ascribed by its founder, TransAfrica's Randall Robinson, to a post-election assessment that a very daring gamble was the only hope of keeping anti-apartheid activism alive in the face of another four years of "constructive engagement." On another front, the congressional leaders of the shattered Democratic Party seized upon apartheid as the most promising issue for drawing Jesse Jackson's constituency and other blacks sidelined during the campaign back into the party's mainstream. The 35 Republican congressmen who dispatched a sharply worded letter of protest against Pretoria's racial policies to South African Ambassador B. G. Fourie in December 1984 were at least partially motivated by a new belief that it was historically and practically shortsighted for the Republicans to concede the black vote and the civil rights constituency as a given to the Democratic Party.
Despite conflict resolution elsewhere, war still rages unchecked in Africa. But the continent is too important to ignore, so new solutions are needed. The best approach would be to prevent wars before they begin -- and the way to do that is for the West to work closely with democratic partners in the region. South Africa is the key to any long-term peacekeeping plan for Africa. Working closely with the United States, Africa's leading democracy can help distribute aid and spread the liberal values that will give the continent a real chance for peace.

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