In Africa, Kissinger was known for his failures
In the summer of 1975, just a few months after the fall of Saigon, Henry Kissinger looked for a way to salvage his reputation as Secretary of State.
At that moment, Angola, a poor, vast country in the sub-Saharan part of Africa, exploded into civil war.
Mr. Kissinger sensed an opportunity. After being disgraced by the loss of Vietnam, he turned his attention to another developing country in turmoil. Using some of the same tools he deployed in Southeast Asia—covert action, realpolitik analysis, and an unwavering faith in his own intelligence—he pushed the United States into a war he knew little about.
“Until then he thought Africa was completely irrelevant,” he said Nancy Mitchella North Carolina foreign policy historian.
He was dismissive of the State Department’s own Africa experts, Ms. Mitchell said, calling them “missionaries” and “do-gooders.”
In Angola, Mr. Kissinger worked with South Africa’s apartheid government and one of Africa’s most notorious dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, to defeat Angola’s leftist rebels. But those rebels enjoyed popular support and soon the help of thousands of Cuban troops – a turn Kissinger could not have predicted.
“Kissinger thought he could easily win in Angola,” Ms Mitchell said. “And he lost.”
That was the beginning of a series of misjudgments that would characterize Mr. Kissinger’s clumsy attempts to steer events on the African continent. The Angolan war had raged for years and cost the lives of at least half a million people. And the same left-wing rebels that Mr. Kissinger tried so hard to defeat through African proxies ultimately won.
The year after that war began, in 1976, Mr. Kissinger became captivated by the idea of bringing peace to Rhodesia, another southern African country embroiled in a war of liberation. He failed there too.
“Kissinger’s diplomatic achievements were quite astonishing,” wrote Peter Vale, a South African scholar a piece in the East African. “But its record in the Global South – especially in Africa – is dismal.”
Rhodesia’s failure followed the same path as Angola. Mr. Kissinger simply did not understand the popularity – and power – of the black liberation movements.
“When Mugabe’s name came up at a meeting, Kissinger asked, ‘Who is that?’ said Mrs. Mitchell.
Robert Mugabe would become a legendary and controversial figure across Africa and the longest-serving president of Zimbabwe, the country that emerged after white rule ended in Rhodesia.
Mr. Kissinger largely stayed away from Africa after that. He is now seen to have a narrow view of African affairs and is far too cozy with racist white regimes. In 1969, when he was National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon, he actually put this in writing.
“The white people are here to stay,” one line reads a groundbreaking paper his staff prepared for the CIA and other government officials.
Ms Mitchell said this document best represented the approach to southern Africa that the Nixon administration took for many years.
“Kissinger arrogantly thought that this is Africa, it’s a simple situation, that he could master it,” she said. “He left a total mess.”