Musing in his diary during his first visit to the African continent in 1967, George Kennan, the former American diplomat and author of what came to be known as the geopolitical posture of ‘containment,’ noted that, ‘I had become an isolationist of sorts in my old age, and nothing I had seen in Africa had changed my inclination to believe that we could do more good by withdrawal and detachment than by the sort of effort we had been making in recent years.’

Reflecting on Kennan’s perspective on the Cold War in Africa is a valuable exercise in our current moment. What would Kennan have made of contemporary Russian military inroads in West Africa, or of Chinese economic investments across the continent? It is reasonable to believe that he would advise modern policymakers to avoid appearing as what he called the ‘anxious suitor’ when dealing with African states. Rival investment would not in and of itself justify American commitments. Kennan wrote in his diary in 1952 that Washington ‘ought not to be terrified by threats that such and such a country would “go Communist” if it were not wooed by the West; the effect of any widespread of communism in that area would certainly be to enhance the centrifugal forces within the communist orbit.’ Above all, he would caution against acting upon either America’s ‘missionary’ ideals or its ‘guilt complex’ in the face of crises, however tragic, which did not impinge upon America’s strategic interests. Instead, he would likely advise a low-cost, patient, and ‘isolationist of sorts’ approach to US-Africa policy.

Kennan also offers a useful lens through which to view the Trump administration’s early record on Africa. The administration’s policy towards the continent combines elements of the ‘isolationist of sorts’ approach Kennan championed alongside the militarised ‘missionary impulses’ he criticised. While officials described Africa as a ‘peripheral’ theatre ‘that demands strategic economy,’ they simultaneously accused the South African government of overseeing a ‘white genocide,’ launched missiles in Nigeria to ‘protect Christians,’ and escalated the pace of airstrikes in Somalia. As Kennan begrudgingly recognised, the gravitational pull of domestic political forces often contorts US-Africa policy away from an unemotionally realist position.

When faced with a challenge from Moscow in Africa, Kennan typically urged patience. As early as 1952, Kennan wrote that ‘what we needed were cool nerves.’ While the continent held some raw materials of value to the United States, these commodities were ‘not really vital to us at this time nor would they be wholly denied to us.’ As the global Cold War’s battlefields shifted to Africa in the 1970s with Soviet-Cuban military interventions in Angola and Ethiopia, Kennan advised Americans to be wary of ‘the fear that in the absence of scrambling for African favor from the American side the Russians might move in and preempt the positions we would like to retain.’

Kennan’s perspective on dealing with what he called the ‘black African states’ reflected what he called a ‘damned if we do damned if we don’t’ dilemma. If Washington did something in Africa, it faced charges of imperialism. If it did nothing, it risked Communist encroachment. Kennan was perfectly willing to hazard the latter, given his assessment of Africa’s limited strategic importance and the potency of African nationalism. ‘Boxed in, ideologically speaking,’ Kennan wrote, Washington should simply ‘leave them strictly alone in their own affairs.’

Kennan saw little in Africa that resembled vital US interests. In his 1977 book Cloud of Danger, Kennan dedicated a chapter to Africa policy, his longest contribution on the subject. ‘Official Washington,’ he wrote, ‘had been acting under the influence of some sort of massive guilt complex, or feeling of moral inferiority.’ Kennan located this within America’s own missionary tradition, which he claimed led Washington’s diplomacy to an over-eagerness to win favour with African states for its own sake. This resulted in ‘a persistent over-doing of many things’ across the continent. This ‘over-doing’ included growth of aid programmes, establishment of US consulates in unnecessary locations, and reactionary aid to governments that flirted with Moscow.

He argued that this missionary zeal also led Americans to assume a desperate posture when dealing with African states. Kennan criticised the ‘state of mind which led many people to feel that it was we, in the first instance, who had to prove our benevolence towards the peoples in question, we who had to win their favor, rather than the other way around. It was as though it were we who were the only losers if relations did not work out to everyone’s satisfaction.’ Kennan dubbed this the ‘anxious suitor’ approach. In Kennan’s analogy, America was the desperate wooer, ‘always prepared to accept today’s rebuff in the hope of tomorrow’s favor.’

Kennan expounded further on these themes in his diary during his 1967 visit to southern Africa. ‘I saw the goodwill of our people towards these small nations being abused,’ he wrote. Kennan believed that America’s desperation to win friends – and keep African states out of Moscow’s orbit – had backfired. ‘They took our aid… as a sign of weakness and assumed it was given for ulterior motives, out of fear that they lean to the Russians or Chinese.’

Kennan blamed a myriad of domestic forces for this policy. In addition to the missionary tradition, Kennan blamed the ‘black vote,’ ‘expatriates,’ and the bureaucratic influence of ‘aid administrators.’ Finally, Kennan charged the liberal press as ‘always ready to suspect the United States of a lack of liberality in its treatment of smaller powers.’

What was Kennan’s solution to this problem? Play hard to get. Instead of displaying the ‘inner insecurity that affects Americans when they come into contact with smaller and less developed societies,’ America should display confidence that African states want to partner with the United States. Moreover, the US should be comfortable walking away from troublesome or disinterested partners. ‘The first requirement for getting on with most foreign peoples,’ he suggested, was ‘to demonstrate that you are quite capable of getting along without them.’

Kennan retained this cold-blooded aloofness towards the continent beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, Kennan denounced the US humanitarian intervention into the Somali Civil War as ‘a dreadful error of American policy.’ In his diary, Kennan called the intervention ‘an immensely expensive effort’ when ‘there are many needs at home.’ Bush’s military commitment to ‘a situation where no defensive American interest is involved’ was ‘something that the founding fathers of this country never envisaged or would have ever approved. If this is in the American tradition, then it is a very recent tradition.’ Kennan’s critique proved apt, as the intervention ended ignominiously following the death of 18 American soldiers in the now-infamous ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident.

Kennan’s legacy on the white supremacist governments in southern Africa mars his broader contributions to US-Africa policy. Kennan’s public and private perspectives on this issue remain difficult to untangle. His views on Apartheid are full of contradictions. On the one hand, Apartheid’s routine humiliations and ‘heart-rendering’ cruelty deeply disturbed Kennan during his 1967 visit to the country. He called Apartheid ‘not only offensive to our sensibilities, but clearly inadequate to South Africa’s own needs and doomed to eventual failure.’

On the other hand, Kennan grew sceptical of external efforts to accelerate Apartheid’s end. Pulitzer Prize-winning Kennan biographer and Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis sympathetically assessed that Kennan’s views on South Africa emerged from his reaction to America’s war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War, Gaddis argued, left Kennan with a deep scepticism around America’s ability to enforce changes on the internal character of foreign governments. If billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of troops couldn’t change Vietnam; how could Washington change South Africa with words of condemnation and sanctions?

A distaste for student activism also soured Kennan on the anti-Apartheid cause. While Kennan opposed the war in Vietnam from the beginning, he became disgusted with the student protest movement on the Princeton campus on which he taught. Unsurprisingly, he felt similarly peeved by the students’ campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against South Africa. He disparaged this effort as both ’emotional’ and ineffective.

Writing for Foreign Affairs and The New York Times, he instead advocated for a hands-off approach to the problem. ‘Efforts to bring about the isolation of South Africa from the rest of the world,’ he wrote, ‘are simply counter-productive.’ Instead of criticisms, diplomatic isolation, and sanctions, Kennan hoped that South Africa’s own domestic politics would eventually produce a suitable solution to the country’s troubles.

This perspective met fierce public critiques, but lay generally in line with the Nixon and Ford administrations’ ‘communication’ policy, which conceded pessimistically in a notorious 1969 NSC policy review that ‘the whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them.’ After a brief departure under Carter, the Reagan administration continued the broad contours of this strategy under the mantra of ‘constructive engagement.’

However, Africa experts within the US government, such as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Donald Easum, strongly disapproved of this soft-on-Apartheid policy direction (Easum would later be fired by Kissinger for deviating from administration policy in favour of the aspirations of Black African states). On one trip to South Africa in 1974, Easum wrote that:

A week in this country is a tremendously sobering experience…I leave with one salient overriding impression – that it is a political and social system that condemns four-fifths of the population to a Catch-22 kind of police state system that can only be viewed as utterly repugnant to human dignity in the twentieth century. It cannot avoid being increasingly subject to internal and external assault.

Africa hands like Easum realised that America’s support to the internationally repugnant Apartheid regime bore negative consequences across both Africa and what was then referred to as the ‘Third World.’ One State Department critic called this approach ‘the tar baby option,’ because communication with white supremacist regimes – to say nothing of occasional cooperation – tarred America’s reputation everywhere.

Kennan’s private diary entries regarding Apartheid, most of which occurred during his 1967 visit, are contradictory. At moments, he eloquently denounced Apartheid as cruel and discriminatory. However, in other entries, he shared racist – or at least shockingly ignorant – sentiments. Kennan sometimes appeared to sympathise with Apartheid in theory – just not with the cruel and petty way it was carried out. He wrote that ‘there is on principle nothing necessarily pernicious about the belief that it might be better, in a multi-racial society, if each of the various racial communities were to retain its identity as such…rather than be subject to the process of forced homogenization.’ Another shocking entry regarded the US embassy’s admirable practice of hosting a multi-racial 4^th of July reception in defiance of Apartheid laws and customs. ‘The wisdom and propriety of this,’ Kennan wrote on 12 May 1967, ‘I should be inclined to question.’

While Kennan understood the domestic importance of US-Africa policy for ‘the black vote,’ he did not appreciate the racialised roots of America’s continued engagement with the white minority regimes in southern Africa. Amidst Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy,’ support for Apartheid South Africa and white-minority ruled Rhodesia represented a powerful message to white southerners, who projected their own racial anxieties into the politics of southern Africa. As historian Nancy Mitchell wrote, conservative leaders like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used Africa policy as ‘an opportunity to signal’ racist dog-whistles to their own supporters. At a time when overt anti-Black racism became taboo, southern Africa’s racial struggles gained an allegorical potency in American politics.

Nor were these signals contained within the fringes of American politics. As a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1976, Ronald Reagan warned that American support for majority rule in Rhodesia could lead to ‘a massacre’ of Rhodesia’s white population. Congressman Robert Michel, the Republican House Minority Whip, meanwhile, noted that any abandonment of white-ruled Rhodesia would have a ‘devastating effect’ on Ford’s primary hopes throughout the South. Later, Chester Crocker, who would go on to become Reagan’s own Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs commented that ‘all Reagan knows about southern Africa is that he’s on the side of the whites.’ Kennan, who disdained the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy, overlooked the powerful influence of this white solidarity bloc.

Kennan hoped that his first visit to the African continent would ‘cure my ignorance, since I had never been there.’ After nine weeks of travel, he ended the visit prematurely after ‘suffering – literally – from a touch of jaundice’ that led him to also ‘[view] everything with a jaundiced eye.’

The ‘jaundiced eye’ is an apt analogy for Kennan’s perspective on US-Africa policy. Kennan remained a lifelong sceptic of American efforts on the continent. He feared that America’s ‘missionary impulses’ would lead it to squander its inherently limited power and resources for quixotic objectives.

While Kennan’s writings on US-Africa policy remain fascinating, he lacked a nuanced understanding of the African political scene. This ignorance, clumsily merged with his own realist philosophies, led him to espouse retrograde perspectives on Apartheid. Kennan’s failure to reckon with the moral and political weight of racial oppression in southern Africa underscored the limits of a realism stripped of both moral imagination and regional awareness.

Kennan lamented – but also misunderstood – the domestic political forces which shaped much of America’s Cold War Africa policy. As one Nixon administration NSC staffer later mused, ‘the whole tragedy of American Africa policy lay in its obvious connection to US domestic politics.’ American foreign policy in Africa, both during the Cold War and today, is often more about domestic political calculations than strategic necessity. Nor is this phenomenon unique to the Trump era. During the Obama administration, viral online campaigns, from ‘#Bring Back Our Girls’ to ‘#Kony 2012,’ spurred military interventions in Nigeria and central Africa, respectively. Americans would be wise to heed Kennan’s warnings against such ‘missionary impulses.’

Revisiting Kennan’s writings also gives readers an alternative lens through which to think about Washington’s contemporary approach to great-power competition on the continent. While the region is sadly an inescapable arena in what some are calling the ‘New Cold Wars,’ these struggles will not be won or lost in Africa. Therefore, Washington will need to economise its approach and limit the urge to answer every Chinese or Russian move on the continent with a corresponding military or economic initiative. African states want to know what Washington is for, not just what it is against.

Finally, US-Africa policy would best be served by an appreciation for both African agency and the complexity of the region’s politics. In fairness to Kennan, he acknowledged this reality. As he wrote in 1977, ‘with respect to a continent where there is so much variety, both in nature and in behavior, all generalizations are dangerous.’

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the US Department of the Army or Department of War.