ABSTRACT
When Obama was making this statement in Moscow 2009 only six months after his inauguration he tried to regain lost diplomatic ground caused by his predecessor George Bush whose administration was facing a growing international alienation mostly due to his military intervention in Iraq breaking international law and leaving the country in political disorder, even after years of occupation and reconstruction. The election of Obama met very high expectations both domestically and internationally; winning the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office fuelled expectations even further, maybe to an unrealistic degree. Despite this, the determinants of US foreign and security policy have not changed substantially towards Africa. Obama’s above statement made clear that what he is supposed to do in the first place is protect America’s vital interests in a multipolar world. This is hardly surprising and the same can be said of most other nations. However, the difference between the US and most other nations is that America commands over still un-matched political, military and economic resources which allows the country a considerably larger political leeway. Multilateralism is an option not necessarily or automatically considered as the only dominant game. More than any other country the US can afford to go alone and act unilaterally or create a coalition of willing supporters. Although the US remains a reluctant peacekeeper and has mostly opted out of multilateral peacekeeping since its Somali disaster, the sheer power gravity it exerts makes it a too important actor to ignore for the African security regime complex. African-US relations have seen significant shifts over time, ranging from a strong military US presence during the Cold War to an almost complete retreat from UN peacekeeping in the mid 1990s to a more engaging foreign policy in the fight against global terrorism in Africa and the first Africa-US
summit taking place in August 2014. What has remained constant during the last few decades is African scepticism towards the US, a significant power difference between African states and the US administration and the fact that Africa has never topped the priority list of US foreign policy. African reluctance towards the US should not be surprising when a global superpower engages with mostly smaller nations that in many cases can hardly control their own territory and whose political culture is shaped by a strong rejection of neocolonial attitudes. Although the US never colonised the African continent in the way European powers have done, the US remains the target of much anti-colonial sentiment and rhetoric. Much of this can be referred to the Cold War era. During the Cold War Africa became the playground for the US and Soviet Union. While the continent as such was not of central importance, both powers thought they could not leave it for their enemy. Accordingly, US friendly governments could calculate with US military support, among them notorious autocrats such as Mobuto, Selassie and Savimbi.2 With the end of the Cold War Africa lost its relative strategic importance. In the early 1990s the UN was able to revive its role as a global organization responsible for peace and stability. The mutual vetoing of the UN Security Council during the Cold War came to an end and the UN eagerly took up the role as the world’s guardian for peace. In the early to mid 1990s the number of peacekeeping operations soared and the US was initially willing to provide troops under UN mandated missions. The heyday but also the low point of US peacekeeping in Africa came with the deployment of a large-scale UN operation in Somalia. The largest ever US operation in Africa also became its greatest failure with far-reaching consequences still felt today. Originally the UN intervention in Somalia was planned to remedy the humanitarian situation after Siad Barre was overthrown and war-lordism crippled the country. Rather quickly the mission target to disarm existing war lords failed and the US got embroiled in bloody street battles. The year 1993 still remains the year with the highest number of fatalities (251) since UN peacekeeping began in 1948.3 It was clear that with these high numbers the US and most likely many other countries would not have been willing to further provide troops for UN peace operations. In 1994 the US pulled out of Somalia which triggered a UN withdrawal automatically, marking a general decline of peacekeeping in Africa. The consequences of the Somali disaster have been manifold for the US, the UN and the African continent. The US departure from peacekeeping had an immediate negative effect on Somalia which has still not fully recovered from lawlessness, war-lordism and later on Islamist terrorism. Even more tragically the Somali case had an indirect impact on events in Rwanda. While a genocide was going on in Rwanda the US withdrew its troops from Somalia and ruled out any serious intervention in Rwanda, even officially denying that a genocide was taking place.4 The US contribution to UN peacekeeping has declined since the Somalia experience.
