David Ottaway

The veteran Washington Post journalist Ottaway uses Bandar's flamboyant diplomatic career to provide an informative history of U.S.-Saudi relations over the past three decades.

The third year of the Carter Administration saw a quiet but marked change in the tone of American diplomacy toward Africa, with a waning of its "activist" role in the search for negotiated settlements to the racially explosive issues of southern Africa. Administration initiatives in the region continued to run up against the limits of American power to shape events there--an underlying reality which had begun to emerge in the previous year. In addition, the conservative mood sweeping across the United States was beginning to have its own impact on American official thinking about Africa. A congressional shift to the right coupled with President Carter's own growing preoccupation with Soviet expansionism served to revive the globalist approach former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had taken toward the continent. Kissinger himself was by mid-year publicly assailing the Carter Administration for leaning too far toward Africa's "ideological radicals" and thereby impaling the United States on "the horns of a dilemma where our rhetoric is out of step with our capabilities; our stated objectives out of tune with our public opinion."