Africa Up Close

After all the clamoring for U.S. President Barack Obama to visit Africa and South Africa especially, he has finally embarked on what is much more than the token stop he made in Ghana a few years back. This visit could not come soon enough as patience for Obama and what is seen as his sidestepping of Africa has grown paper thin. On top of that, the piled up controversies animating America’s relations with the rest of the world have begun thickening the residue of anti-American feeling lurking beneath the black South African political surface. This sentiment has begun to emerge in a few cases as unwelcoming hostility as Obama embarks on his first real safari to the continent since becoming America’s first black president and, to boot, one with African origins that most African-Americans cannot speak of.

By Francis A. Kornegay
Senior Fellow, Institute for Global Dialogue, Pretoria

The Global Swing States report (German Marshall Fund-Center for a New American Security) exposes serious flaws in American foreign policy thinking by excluding South Africa from their equation involving India and Brazil as rising democratic powers. Washington’s foreign policy mind-set still has a way to go in order to adapt to these changing world realities. Given the major gaps that exist in the current U.S. administration’s own thinking, starting with President Obama himself, it is not surprising that South Africa is bypassed in Global Swing States or that Africa is treated simply as an object for US-‘swing state’ attention, rather than possessing its own agency for charting the continent’s direction. In President Obama’s ‘Person of the Year’ Time magazine interview, he mentioned everything except Africa as a priority in his second term foreign policy.

By Francis A. Kornegay
Senior Fellow, Institute for Global Dialogue, Pretoria

Before Daniel M. Kliman and Richard Fontaine of the German Marshall Fund (GMF) and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) unveiled their foreign policy advice to the re-elected Obama administration, perhaps they could have saved themselves the effort by going over the speeches of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Indeed, what may have been Secretary Clinton’s valedictory address at the Foreign Policy Group’s “Transformational Trends 2013” Forum on the 29^th of November might serve as a counterpoint to Global Swing States: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and the Future of International Order by Messers Kliman and Fontaine. In other words, the administration might do better to continue doing what it has already been doing than get itself think-tanked into a foreign policy modeled on American ‘swing state’ electoral politics.

By Francis A. Kornegay, Jr. Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center