Constructive engagement

Abstract

Abstract taken from Dissertation Abstracts International, vol 49, no 10, April 1989, p. 3146-A

This dissertation traces the development of Constructive Engagement from its theoretical foundation as a reaction to the confrontational Carter administration South African policy to its demise in the second Reagan term. Designed by Chester Crocker and based exclusively on his pre-1980 election writings, constructive engagement's major goal was to support an assumed process or evolutionary change within South Africa which would lead to a non-racial, pro- Western, and capitalist state. This policy was process rather than result-oriented and it assumed a longterm effort on the behalr or both the South African government and the United States

Crocker's policy had two immediate aims. First, it strove to facilitate a stabilized regional atmosphere behind which the Republic could more easily eradicate its apartheid system. As part or this aim, the US worked both to achieve a Namibian independence in tandem with a Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola and to facilitate normalized relations between South Africa and Mozambique. If these aims were accomplished, in Crocker's view, South Africa would feel more secure in initiating domestic reform, and not incidentally, the US would achieve a major strategic triumph over the Soviet Union in southern Africa. Second, constructive engagement worked to build South African confidence in the ability of the US to act as an "honest-broker" in affairs concerning the Republic. Crocker believed that once this confidence was secured, the US would obtain major influence with the South Africans and that it could then utilize this influence in future dealings with Pretoria over the final dispensation of the future South African state

Although constructive engagement was in many ways an unusually subtle policy, it ultimately failed because of a number of misperceptions, misjudgments and incorrect assumptions concerning the Soviet and Cuban role in southern Africa, the domestic environment within South Africa, the nature of evolutionary change and its relationship to political violence, and finally, the ability of the United States to participate in [and] to consummate a complex and longterm foreign policy of an ambiguous and controversial nature