The United States should decouple it’s West Africa policy from France

Association with France’s colonial history and neocolonial policies are likely to handicap Washington throughout Africa in the medium to long term

I: Important lessons from the Cold War

After World War II the United States of America (U.S.) faced a dilemma regarding its Africa policy. On the one hand, it was allied with European imperialists in the region. But on the other hand, it feared losing influence in postcolonial African states to its Cold War geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union.

From the perspective of Africans, the Soviet advantage over the U.S. was both material and ideological. It was also a circumstantial advantage made possible largely because there were few other options (and was not without its own challenges). Moscow sent cash, recruited students to study in the Soviet Union (with increases after 1960), provided weapons and trained liberation fighters, among other forms of assistance. On the ideological front, Marxist-Leninist conceptions of self-determination had long trounced the Wilsonian idea of self-determination (Wilson was barely read in the region anyway). The former was explicitly anti-imperialist (and…