The novelty of the post-Cold War strategic environment is reflected in the changing jargon of American military professionals. "Humanitarian assistance" and "peace operations" were hardly key concerns of the national military establishment in the mid-1980s, though they have become prominent a decade later. Since the early 1990s, US professional military literature has been increasingly preoccupied, some would say obsessed, with discussions of what are identified as unprecedented roles for the national military establishment.
Interventions with military forces often figure in discussions of US involvement in Africa; indeed, in the 1990s no part of the world has seen a greater number of such interventions than Sub-Saharan Africa. However, noncombatant evacuations, humanitarian relief operations, and peace support interventions tend to obscure the more enduring and more significant diplomatic and economic links between the United States and African countries. They also obscure routine military-to-military relations in the region, which have expanded in the wake of the Cold War.
The United States conducts military operations in Africa, just as it exercises diplomacy and provides aid, to further US regional objectives. The demise of the Cold War had an obvious effect on US objectives in Africa, and while each US administration is expected to put its own imprint on the nation's foreign policy, some American activities reflect enduring interests. This article identifies a set of desirable conditions that appear to have become de facto US national interests in Sub-Saharan Africa.
US National Interests in Sub-Saharan Africa
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