We cannot acquiesce in independence movements where independence means a return to savagery or Communist domination. ~Sen. Barry Goldwater

Earlier today I had written a fairly lengthy commentary on this item taken from a 1961 National Review Goldwater essay, but my browser cut out on me at an inopportune moment and all of it (plus the time I had spent writing it) was lost.  What follows will be a shorter, more pointed version of what I was going to say.

Mr. Kimball of The New Criterion has done us a service in reminding us of both the sensible and strange things in Goldwater’s essay.  Unfortunately, I must disagree with Mr. Kimball here when he says that the line quoted above constituted “sound advice” on Africa policy.  It is the sort of thing that I expect was quite in line with National Review anticommunism c. 1961, and it is probably the sort of thing that internationalists always like to hear, but what it is not is sound.  For starters, this was precisely the sort of thinking the New Frontiersmen applied to Indochina with unhappy results for all concerned.  Goldwater’s idea here made as much, or as little, sense for Asia as it did for Africa.  Who prevailed in an internationalised form of what had been a Vietnamese civil war had surprisingly little to do with containing the international Soviet communist threat, as we can see fully in retrospect, but then the logic of expanding containment to Southeast Asia to counter such a threat relied heavily on misunderstanding the strategic goal of containment (keep the Soviets out of western Europe) because there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the Soviet threat.  When seen as an implcabale, universal revolutionary force that could not be checked by traditional methods, the Soviets might appear to pose a very different kind of threat from the one they actually posed.  Thus Washington might pursue containment anywhere in the globe, regardless of whether it mattered to weakening the Soviets.  The Soviets were not ideological zealots so much as they were Russian national imperialists and great power players on the world stage, which had a significant effect on how to address the threat they posed to the West.  As Russian nationalism in communist dress was not fully understood or appreciated, neither was the indigestibility of the subject nations of the USSR and the Soviet bloc (except by Kennan), and as a result the opposition between different nations within the communist world was not as clear as it should have been.  The greatest diplomatic and political successes of the Cold War followed from recognising this opposition and the national dimension, while some of the worst blunders stemmed from undervaluing or underestimating the role of nationalism and ethnic differences.

Additionally, George Kennan, the “author” of containment–though he would have disputed the significance of the article that formulated the concept in its classic form–saw containment as a policy that should have been focused squarely on Europe, since Europe was the strategically significant continent where the confrontation with the Soviets was.  The farflung corners of the globe were of lesser concern, because they were, well, actually less important as a matter of geopolitics.  Furthermore, just as advocates of “rollback” and the New Frontiersmen misunderstood the Russian nationalist core of Soviet policy they also misunderstood the greater significance of some form of nationalism in driving Third World independence movements.  A classic mistake repeated again and again in the Cold War was to take these nationalist and anti-colonialist independence movements as natural Soviet satellites, when they often turned most sharply to Moscow or Beijing (or both) in response to efforts to smother them.  Above all, the quote points towards a lack of depth of analysis, as if it were enough to know that such-and-such an independence or national movement calls itself communist or even merely socialist to conclude that its interests are somehow connected to that of other communist states.  Attention to national divergences and cleavages between communist states (such as those between Beijing and Moscow or Belgrade and Moscow or Tirana and Moscow or Beijing and Hanoi) proved to be very important when noticed or would have been very useful in developing policy had they been noticed more often and taken more seriously.  Today we neglect or ignore vital differences between different states and Muslim groups at our peril. 

That brings us back to Africa.  Independence movements fairly often turned to savagery or communism because of efforts to repress them (e.g., Algeria, Angola, Mozambique) or to intervene against them.  This does not discount the home-grown savagery and brutality of many African regimes in their artificial countries, all of which were of no great strategic significance.  Some turned strongly pro-Soviet and were outside our influence and some were anti-Soviet or anticommunist and therefore seen as useful bulwarks against Moscow’s influence, but all of them were basically irrelevant to American interests, except to the limited extent to which they affected such allied states as South Africa.  Acquiescence was not only to be expected–it was the sensible approach.  Indeed, American interests arguably might have dictated more support for at least some independence movements at this time.  Meanwhile, of the African communist movements in Africa that America did actively try to suppress, the Angolan Marxists are still in power after a long, protracted and nasty civil war with UNITA that accomplished nothing except for making life in Angola miserable.  The nominal Marxists now sell us oil, which makes it all rather unclear what the civil war was for.  Asian and African independence movements largely went ahead with our “acquiescence” with a variety of results: many of the resulting regimes proved awful, but it is difficult to see how intervention would have made the situation less awful.  Ironically, the occasion when Washington and the West did “acquiesce” to a pro-communist national movement in Africa was in supporting the rise and legitimisation of the ANC in South Africa on the grounds of supporting “democracy.”  That has probably been one of the greatest active mistakes in Africa policy, such as it is, of the last 30 years, and southern Africa is suffering the consequences of it.  As it happens, “acquiescence” is usually not a bad policy, because it is another way of saying “minding our own business.”