Foreign Policy Archives - Not Even Past

Review of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (2018) by Megan Black

In The Global Interior, Megan Black uses the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) controversial history to examine how the U. S. government wielded political and economic power to access natural resources in the American West and influence international policy. The book’s title illustrates the irony of a department responsible for internal affairs being involved in foreign policy. Covering the Department of the Interior’s evolution over the course of two centuries, Megan Black examines its effectively colonial approach to securing access to resources and expanding U. S. power, from the occupation of the American West to the recent use of technologies such as Landsat satellites to map resources and open them to private American companies.

Created in 1849, the Department of the Interior’s initial objective was the development of the American West. In the wake of military-led expansion, control over territory passed into the civilian hands of the Interior, creating a benevolent cover-up that concealed a colonial enterprise. The Department of the Interior assisted in the colonization of territory expropriated after the Mexican-American War and facilitated the expansion of capitalism into Indigenous lands. However, the closing of the Western frontier in the 1890s forced the Interior to expand its activities overseas under the guise of national security and based on the colonial framework. Hence, the activities of the Interior supported cooperation with developing countries to trade and extract minerals essential to American industry during the 20th century. For instance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s established relationships with Latin America in part through cooperative mineral ventures and land-use planning. The Department of Interior’s procedures for exploiting resources were replicated by the United States in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, and other sites around the world.

Black analyzes both the hard and soft edges of Interior’s global strategy. The Department simultaneously supported the exploitation of natural resources and nature conservation programs, providing intelligence about natural resources in a way that would benefit US commercial exploitation. In the mid-1960s, Stewart Udall, a DOI official, promoted multiple conservation programs across Latin America while offering technical support to foreign governments interested in developing their mineral economies. Subsequent decades saw the Department of the Interior extend US influence into the developing world’s agricultural sector since modern farming depends on mineral fertilizers like phosphorus and nitrogen.

*Stewart Udall (right) and Lady Bird Johnson touring Grand Teton National Park, August 1964. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Due to the geographical scale of its influence, the Department of the Interior’s work was often accomplished through support for private economic activity. However, President Reagan’s deregulation policies in the 1980s also had an impact on the Interior’s funding. Stigmatized as a costly middleman, Interior had to reduce its role. At this point (and towards the end of the book), Black turns her narrative back towards the heartland of the United States to examine an unusual organization: the self-styled “Indigenous OPEC.” Black shows how the Interior’s retreat and the emergence of a market system in its place led Indigenous communities to organize themselves as capitalist institutions in dialogue with private companies. Curiously, the wastelands allocated to Indigenous people by the Interior ended up being rich in minerals, including oil.

Using the tools of environmental history, The Global Interior contributes to debates about environmental politics and international relations, demonstrating the intricacies of cooperation and unilateralist policies. The Global Interior draws a connection between mineral policy, varying forms of colonialism, and international conservation. The book argues that U. S. environmental policies are designed to accrue economic benefits and ensure access to natural resources around the world. Black highlights the tension between environmentalism and economic production.

Daniel Silva is a Ph.D. student in Geography and Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. He conducts research on land use change, environmental policy, and agricultural economics. Co-authored policy briefs and papers with a focus on the Brazilian Amazon and the Cerrado biome.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

by Amina Marzouk Chouchene | First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum

The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was colored and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.”[1] Cultural artifacts such as music, films, cigarette cards, and fiction have long constructed and reflected this rosy vision of the empire as a place of adventure and excitement. Against this widely held view of the empire, Jeffrey Auerbach identifies an overwhelming emotion that filled the psyche of many Britons as they moved to new lands: imperial boredom. Auerbach defines boredom as “an emotional state that individuals experience when they find themselves without anything particular to do and are uninterested in their surroundings.”[2]

Unenthused British Men and Women in India (via Wikimedia Commons)

Auerbach identifies the feeling as a “modern construct” closely associated with the mid-eighteenth century. This does not mean that people were never bored before this, but that they “did not know it or express it.”(p.4) Rather, it was with the spread of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment emphasis on individual rights and happiness that the concept came to the fore.

In a well-researched and enjoyable book, the author argues “that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment.”(p.4) In other words, instead of focusing on the exploits of imperial luminaries such as Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Robert Clive, David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes and others, Auerbach pays particular attention to the moments when many travelers, colonial officers, governors, soldiers, and settlers were gripped by an intense sense of boredom in India, Australia, and southern Africa.

Imperial Boredom by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

In five thematic chapters, “Voyages”, Landscapes,” Governors,” Soldiers”, and “Settlers,” Auerbach shines new light on the experience of traversing, viewing, governing, defending and settling the empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. (p.6) The monotonous nature of the sea voyage, dreary and uninteresting imperial lands, daily routine, depressingly dull dispatches, mind-numbing meetings are some of the sources of an utter sense of imperial boredom.

Although Auerbach’s book traces imperial boredom from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, he makes it clear, from the beginning, that the sense of boredom experienced by many Britons in new colonial settings was much more profound during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the latter was marked by a series of bewildering social, cultural, and technological changes that stripped the empire of its sense of novelty. The development of new means of transport such as steamships, the rise of tourism, and the proliferation of guidebooks jeopardized the sense of risk, newness, enthusiasm that had long been associated with the British imperial experience. (p.5) Consequently, while “the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the nineteenth century was far less exciting and satisfying project.”(p.77)

Map of India from A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon Guidebook, 1911 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Additionally, Auerbach suggests that imperial boredom arose out of a yawning gap between the rosy vision of the empire as a thrilling experience, largely fostered by nineteenth-century fiction, and the realities on the ground. Instead of pure entertainment, colonial officers and governors were fed up with the excessively ceremonial and bureaucratic nature of the empire. They were bombarded with a burdening volume of paperwork and monotonous public duties such as hospital visits, school inspections, and state dinners.(p.8) Soldiers were engaged in mere skirmishes and spent most of their time in barracks suffering searing heat. Rarely were they able to resist the temptations of alcohol. Others deserted the army and went missing “searching for simple and transitory pleasures that might alleviate their monotony.”(p.116) Settler women incessantly complained about the dullness of their lives, interspersed with unexciting social rituals and prohibitions on contact with indigenous people.(p.9)An interesting case in point is that of British women in India, who rarely learned an Indian language or interacted with the local population due to “an imperial culture increasingly rooted in difference and aloofness.”(p.150) As a result, experiences of solitariness and a consequent sense of boredom were a ubiquitous feature of their lives. For example, Maria Graham, who visited Calcutta and Madras in 1810, complained about her inability to know any Indian family due the “distance kept up between Europeans and the natives.”(p.150) Thereupon, she was bored.

A woman sits alone in a field, 19th Century India (Photo Credit: British Library Board via CNN)

All of these examples are compellingly relevant and illustrative of some of the colonial circumstances that drove Britons mad with boredom, challenging one of the enduring myths about the British Empire as a site of exciting adventure.

[1] Jeffrey Richards, “Boy’s own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s.”Imperialism and Popular Culture. edited by John Mackenzie, Manchester UP, 1986, 143.
[2] Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom.

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The November feature: History Between Memory and Reconstruction
Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?
Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné (2016)
The Public Archive: Mercenary Monks
Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India
The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

The Gorbachev Factor by Archie Brown (2003)

By Marcus Golding

The fall of the Soviet Union is usually understood from two angles. One argues that the Soviet state could not keep up with the United States’ military superiority and, therefore, collapsed under economic strain. The other perspective suggests that western Europe and the U.S., and specifically the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), played a crucial role in pressuring diplomatically for the end of the “Evil Empire.” Archie Brown suggests that there is another interpretation that rules out military or diplomatic pressures in explaining the undoing of the Soviet Union. Brown argues that the end of the system was exclusively due to the political (glasnost) and economic (perestroika) reforms launched to reform the state. In this process, the author contends that the implosion of the Soviet Union had more to do with the will of one man than with any outside forces in play.

The Gorbachev Factor is a compelling and persuasive analysis that underlines the agency of Mikhail Gorbachev as the most crucial factor explaining the end of Soviet rule. The book is a painstaking examination of Gorbachev’s leadership as a head of state, and the importance of his policy reforms in enacting the political transformation of the Soviet system. As the author argues, despite the structural problems of the USSR during the 1980s, there was no sign of an impending collapse. However, the central thesis of the book is that Gorbachev’s interest in seeking political and economic change led him to believe that those goals were unattainable unless the whole system was transformed. By analyzing the changes introduced by the Soviet leader in the political structure of the state, the economy, the center-periphery relations, and in foreign policy, Brown successfully shows how the Soviet system transitioned from a relative stable state of decline into a phase of terminal crisis. Despite failing to prevent the end of the USSR during his term (1985-1991), Gorbachev oversaw the emergence of political pluralism, the democratization of the former Soviet Republics, and the inauguration of a new foreign policy with the west that ended the Cold War.

From the four areas he deemed necessary for a complete transformation of the system, Brown identifies political reforms and the reformulation of Soviet foreign policy as the most successful ones. The introduction of contested elections to create a legislature with real powers in 1988 is perhaps the most significant reform in explaining the growing democratization of the Soviet Union but it also accounts for the gradual erosion of state control over the political process. Domestic political changes also reflected a new foreign policy mentality. Gorbachev reconfigured Soviet diplomacy by emphasizing the freedom to choose and by renouncing violence as a way to sustain other communist regimes in power. As Brown contends, the Gorbachev factor in Soviet foreign policy cleared the way for the overthrow of Communist systems in Eastern and Central Europe from 1989 on.

The liberalization of the system presented Gorbachev with intractable problems. In relations between the central Soviet state and the non-Russian republics within its borders, the delegitimization of Marxism-Leninism triggered by the political reforms, and the revelations of the failures and atrocities of the Soviet system, left an ideological vacuum for which nationalism was the most obvious candidate. Unable, or unwilling to control the centrifugal forces unleashed by his reforms, Gorbachev’s ability to keep the Soviet Union intact imploded when political rivals, such as Boris Yeltsin, torpedoed any opportunity for a union-wide arrangement. In the implementation of economic reforms, Gorbachev’s zig-zag approach not only proved to be ineffective because of the opposition of the ministerial bureaucracy to the full implementation of his policies, but also because the Soviet leader was more hesitant and less clear on how to proceed towards the gradual adoption of a market economy.

Mikhail Gorbechev (left) with President George Bush (right) – (via Wikipedia)

Finally, Gorbachev’s personality played a key role in the political transformation of the system. His status as a consensus-builder served him well to implement several reforms without facing concerted resistance from the Communist Party or the emergent cohort of Soviet dissidents and liberals. However, this same trait later exposed Gorbachev to the attack of radicals on both sides of the political spectrum, undermining his power. This, coupled with the misplaced trust in some of his appointees, seriously complicated Gorbachev’s plans to control the transformation of the system.

Brown’s book succeeds in providing a refreshing and persuasive angle that underlines the domestic causes in the demise of the Soviet Union. The author relies primarily on personal interviews and memoirs from the most influential Soviet political leaders of the time (including Gorbachev) to build his argument. For anyone interested in this momentous historical process of the 20^th century Brown’s insightful interpretation will not disappoint.

Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra

By Roy Doron

On November 19, 2016, President Barack Obama, speaking on the transition of power to Donald Trump said “once you’re in the Oval Office … that has a way of shaping … and in some cases modifying your thinking.” The 2016 election will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most unconventional and even bizarre elections in American history. When Trump emerged victorious, he did so on a platform that promised to rethink virtually every aspect of American foreign policy, from free trade agreements to environmental treaties. Though the scope of Trump’s promises are unprecedented, his election was not the first time a candidate openly challenged U.S. foreign policy goals.

Richard Nixon campaigning (via Wikimedia Commons).

On September 8, 1968, Richard Nixon, then Republican candidate for president, issued a statement calling on the United States to take a central role in intervening in the Nigerian Civil War and the growing humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding in secessionist Biafra. Titled “Nixon’s Call for American Action on Biafra,” the candidate called the Nigerian government’s war against Igbo secessionists a genocide and demanded that the United States take a leading role in stopping what he termed “the destruction of an entire people.” “While America is not the world’s policeman,” he declared, “let us at least act as the world’s conscience in this matter of life and death for millions.” (Kirk-Greene, 334-5). But the clarity of the candidate’s call to arms soon had to confront the realities of the office of President. The demands of America’s Vietnam-era foreign policy forced Nixon to abandon his personal sympathy for Biafra.

Many in the United States and in Nigeria and Biafra saw candidate Nixon’s statement as a call for active intervention in the war, which by the end of 1968 had turned increasingly in Nigeria’s favor. Nigeria’s civil war began when Biafra declared independence on May 30, 1967 after a protracted crisis that included two coups and ethnic violence that claimed the lives of thousands, mostly Igbo from Nigeria’s southeast. Though Biafra enjoyed several early successes, the war quickly turned into a protracted blockade against the Igbo heartland, with thousands of civilians dying every day from starvation and disease in the beleaguered enclave that Biafra had become.

Children receive a food ration in Nigeria in 1968 (via Wikipedia Commons).

To counter the military losses, the Biafran leadership embarked on a global public diplomacy drive spearheaded by MarkPress, a Swiss public relations firm owned by the American William Bernhard, calling the blockade and ensuing starvation genocide. MarkPress’ access to global media outlets helped the Biafrans garner significant attention in an already chaotic year in world history. The Tet offensive in February 1968 created a seismic shift in American support for the war in Vietnam, turning the majority of the population against it for the first time. This was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy only two months apart; the latter’s occurring in the middle of a tumultuous election campaign. In Europe, student protests in Paris almost brought down Charles De Gaulle’s government, while a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring.” However, with nightly news broadcasting images of starving children directly into homes around the world, many groups rallied to the Biafran side, with protests in cities around the world and benefit concerts featuring Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez.

The Prague Spring was part of the global crisis of 1968 (John Schulze via Flickr).

These efforts, however, had little effect on government policies, because the Nigerians and their allies in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), eager to prevent a repeat of the Katanga Crisis in Congo, blocked most deliberations on the war in the United Nations, insisting that the matter was an internal African one. Biafra, led by the eloquent and charismatic Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, sought to use the humanitarian crisis to create a global outcry that would force Nigeria to come to terms with the secessionists and guarantee Biafra’s independence. Failing that, Ojukwu hoped for internationally recognized relief corridors that would be protected from the Nigerian military. However, any large scale international intervention would require either a ceasefire or a demilitarized zone. For the Nigerians, led by General Yakubu Gowon, any agreement for relief was preconditioned on Biafra renouncing secession and the ending of the war. In fact, despite frenetic efforts at two hastily convened OAU peace conferences in May and August 1968, the sides could not agree on either an end to the war or on any agreement to address the humanitarian concerns.

In the United States, the Lyndon Johnson administration was inundated with demands to help Biafra but could do little but support relief efforts led by the Red Cross, Joint Church Aid and Caritas. Walt Rostow, Johnson’s National Security Advisor, summed up the administration’s effort by saying “we are doing everything we can, which is very little.” Nixon’s statement, coming from a candidate that most believed would win the election in November, gave hope to many on the Biafran side that a new American administration would take a more active role in helping the beleaguered secessionists. For Ojukwu and Biafra, Nixon the candidate was a friend and they hoped that President Nixon would continue to be one.

Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (via Logbaby).

Though Nixon was personally sympathetic to Biafra, once he became president he could do very little to change the course of the conflict or to influence humanitarian efforts beyond what Johnson had done before him. In fact, like Johnson, Nixon attempted to assist in convening another round of peace talks, but, according to Nigerian historian George Obiozor, during a visit to London in February 1969, Nixon sacrificed his commitment to Biafra in order to secure British support for America in Vietnam. Nixon continued to personally support Biafra, despite his inability to translate it into policy. In one briefing document, he wrote in the margins “I hope Biafra survives!”

Candidate Nixon’s comments on Biafra showcase the limitations of a serious presidential candidate’s ability to transform foreign policy once they arrive in the White House. Many in Biafra hoped for a more interventionist United States and Nixon’s election gave hope for Biafra to hold out well into 1969, until it became clear that Nixon’s policy would closely mirror Johnson’s. When the war ended on January 15, 1970, the death toll, by most accounts, had reached a million people, most from the humanitarian crisis, and helped create organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières. Though the effects of Nixon’s 1968 comments cannot be quantified, his inability to translate them into policy illustrates the limitations of even the world’s most powerful executive.

Roy Doron (UT Austin History PhD, 2011) is an Assistant Professor of History at Winston-Salem State University. He is author, with Toyin Falola, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, part of Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa and a forthcoming history of the Nigerian Civil War with Indiana University Press.

Sources:

H. M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (1971).

George A. Obiozor, The United States and the Nigerian Civil War : An American Dilemma in Africa, 1966-1970 (1993).

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