ABSTRACT
There could be no greater contrast between the treatment of two regions than that accorded by the US to Africa and the Middle East. For instance, Israel was designated as a developed state in 1963 and therefore beyond the need of aid, but America gave it $2.6 billion in 1983 – twice the amount of aid given to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.1 US African policy was largely one of benign neglect, except for South Africa, which raised political difficulties because of apartheid. Similar problems arose with the white supremacist regime of Ian Smith in Southern Rhodesia from 1965 to 1979. For much of this period the US expected its West European allies to handle Africa, particularly as the Soviets did not mount a serious challenge there until the 1970s. In contrast, the Middle East was a theatre of fierce rivalry and high stakes. Policy struggled to keep pace with American economic expansionism and to cope successively with containment, fears of overextension and for oil supplies, discordant allies, decolonisation, nationalism, Zionism and Islamic fundamentalism. It was the region in which the limits of both cohesion within the Western Alliance and of US power were most evident. Furthermore, boundaries between blocs were most insecure here and occasioned seven of the 20 US nuclear alerts during the Cold War.
