ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 1990, United States (US) foreign policy makers had every reason to be euphoric. The Berlin Wall was being torn down, the Iron Curtain continued to fall as communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were overthrown or cast out in elections, and politicians within the Soviet Union were pushing ahead with perestroika and glasnost. Perhaps more so than anywhere else, the sudden foreign policy obsolescence of containment posed distinct difficulties for advocates of continued US involvement with Africa. As the vocal antiapartheid lobby was quick to point out, though there were stirrings of potential change within South Africa at the beginning of 1990, apartheid and widespread civil unrest were still a reality. In spite of the attention South Africa continued to generate, Bush, and therefore the Bush administration, was committed to finding ways to downgrade it as a necessary prerequisite for doing the same with Africa as a whole.
