Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The United States And South Africa: The Reagan Years

The United States And South Africa: The Reagan Years

Pauline H. Baker
Reviewed by Jennifer Seymour Whitaker
Spring 1990
The United States And South Africa: The Reagan Years
Pauline H. Baker
Ford Foundation/Foreign Policy Association
1989
158 pp.
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Leading off this comprehensive update of an influential 1981 Ford Foundation study is an essay on the Reagan years and the policy of Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker that sums up the final epoch of the Cold War in southern Africa. Its usefulness is enhanced by the inclusion of several chronologies (of U.S.-South African relations and events in South Africa), a bibliography and appendices chronicling major watersheds.

Related

Essay, Summer 1988
Southern Africa: Challenges and Choices
Michael Clough

Conflict between the administration and Congress exemplifies the disarray of US policy towards Southern Africa. Reviews the background to the passage of the Anti-Apartheid Act, the goals of which, however, are not achievable in terms of practical politics. The Reagan administration has concentrated on white opinion, when a strategy of "black empowerment", defined as dialogue with the black leadership, would be more fruitful. Notes the relationship between regional re-stabilization and the use (or threat) of sanctions. For the remainder of 1988 the administration should concentrate on Namibia and Angola.

Read
Essay, Winter 1983
Revolution in the Making: Black Politics in South Africa
Thomas G. Karis

For a quarter-century, the goals of American policy toward South Africa have remained remarkably consistent, but that consistency has served to mask sharply contrasting perceptions of the nature and direction of change in that country's racial policies. U.S. policymakers--including those of the Reagan Administration--have deplored official South African racism, affirmed the American belief in government by the consent of the governed, predicted fundamental change, and prayed that it would come peacefully. But beyond such broad outlines, American analysts have differed sharply in their specific judgments regarding the effectiveness of white-led change in South Africa, and the importance of black opposition to white rule.

Read
Essay, Special 1985
Africa: Year of Ironies
Helen A. Kitchen

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.

Read
Cover image

In the Magazine

November/December 2009 / 6, 88
Essay
The Dollar and the Deficits
C. Fred Bergsten

The global economic crisis has revealed the folly of large U.S. budget and trade deficits, as well as of the strong dollar that makes them possible. If it is serious about recovery, the United States must balance the budget, stimulate private saving, and embrace a declining dollar.
Read