African Affairs Advance Access published online on November 4, 2009
African Affairs, doi:10.1093/afraf/adp065
US Policy towards Africa: The Bush Legacy and the Obama Administration
* Nicolas van de Walle (nv38{at}cornell.edu) is a Professor of Government at Cornell University. An early version of this article was prepared for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and I thank Kirsten Maas-Albert for supporting the project. I also thank Jaimie Bleck, Nicholas Bratton, Gero Erdmann, Jeff Herbst, Richard Joseph, and Todd Moss for useful comments, though all remaining flaws are my responsibility.
This article discusses the Bush administration’s African policy legacy and its implications for the Obama administration. Many have argued that the events of 9/11 led the administration to view the African subcontinent differently, and that the US has altered its conception of national interests in the region. The tripling of American foreign aid to the region is noteworthy. AFRICOM’s creation also suggests a policy shift. The article is nonetheless sceptical that these changes represent a paradigmatic shift in policy towards Africa, rather than a partial and inconsistent adjustment made possible by a conjunction of quite specific circumstances. Indeed, these circumstances provided an opportunity to redefine US foreign policy towards the region, which the Bush administration largely failed to do. The article argues that the weight of the American diplomatic presence in the region has continued to decline, because of the worsening institutional fragmentation in the foreign policy apparatus, contradictions in policy, and the decline in the State Department’s institutional capacity. As the Obama administration defines US policy in the region, it must address most of the same conundrums as its predecessors, but with less leverage than past administrations and constrained by the fiscal effects of the worst recession in sixty years.