Ethiopia a "bulwark" against Communists and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, wrote Kissinger
In a rather candid message on how the US viewed the Horn of Africa, Kissinger said Ethiopia was the US's closest parter in Africa during a state visit in 1969
In the summer of 1969, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie embarked on his fifth visit to the US in the post-war period. He was a regular in DC by that point and the Americans often returned the favour. The following winter William P. Rogers, then secretary of state, visited Addis Ababa where he also addressed the Organisation of African Unity (precursor to the African Union). His visit came at a high-point in Cold War tensions and both the USSR and the US were seeking opportunities to gain advantage. In Ethiopia’s neighbourhood translated into tense relations with the Soviet Union’s partners and allies in Africa and the Middle East, namely, Sudan, Egypt and Somalia (which had a claim to Ethiopian territory).
Kissinger sent a note to President Nixon as the emperor arrived in Washington for his state visit, after which Selassie continued onto Atlanta and Cape Kennedy (better known as Cape Canaveral). Kissinger said Ethiopia was the US’s “closest friend in Africa”, but despite that US policymakers were concerned about Selassie’s inflated reading of his security concerns and needs and feared that his insatiable demand for arms wasn’t proportionate to the threats he faced. He suffers from a “virtual siege mentality”, Kissinger wrote to the president on the eve of the meeting. Nonetheless, Kissinger believed the emperor’s regime was a critical bulwark against what he described in rather alarmist language as “a Communist-Moslem thrust into the Horn of Africa.” Did Macron basically plagiarise Kissinger with his islamo-gauchistes quip? I’ll leave that to you.
Kissinger however was still confident that relations between Somalia under the civilian leadership of Mohammed Haji Egal, and Ethiopia, were on a stronger footing overall despite the border issues. Lower down in the note Kissinger writes: “The border truce with Somalia will probably hold because Egal is a strong, inward-looking leader.” Egal would be gone that fall and a military government which combined Somali nationalism, Islam and Socialism would emerge in Mogadishu which adopted a much more belligerent posture vis-a-vis Ethiopia.
Below is a part of the text in which Kissinger attempted to lay the groundwork for the meeting as well as what the US hoped to gain from it:
FROM: Henry A. Kissinger
SUBJECT: Your Meeting with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia -- Tuesday, July 8, 10:30 a. m.
Ethiopia is our closest friend in Africa. Our purposes in this visit are (a) to show the new Administration will continue that relationship and (b) to honor the Emperor as a moderate, pro-Western leader with a potential peacemaking role in African quarrels.
The main problem in doing this is to reassure Haile Selassie of our support without being drawn into his own parochial and exaggerated view of threats to Ethiopian security. The Emperor has an appetite for U.S. arms which we can neither satisfy under present military aid limitations nor justify in terms of our own estimate of his position. Moreover, military concerns divert the Emperor from economic development -- where we can help and where prompt action is crucial to Ethiopia's stability and thus to our interests in the country.
The Emperor
At 76, on the throne for over half a century, Haile Selassie sees himself as one of the towering figures of modern history. He assumes not only his acknowledged role as Africa's elder statesman, but also a stature and wisdom in world affairs beyond the Continent.
His outlook was clearly shaped by the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in the thirties -- his dramatic but futile appeal to the League of Nations, a bitter wartime exile, a restoration only to find court intrigue and Communist efforts at subversion. Added to these experiences was the traditional fear of Christian Ethiopia being overwhelmed by surrounding Moslems. The product in the Emperor is a virtual siege mentality, in which Soviet arms aid to neighboring Somalia, Sudan and Yemen seems larger than life. The West, he fears, will repeat the mistakes of the thirties if it underestimates the threat to Ethiopia. Thus, the Emperor sees a common interest with the U.S. in making Ethiopia a bulwark against a Communist-Moslem thrust into the Horn of Africa. [I added the bold]
To these views (and most others) the Emperor brings both a passion from tragic experience and a sensitivity born of a royal self-esteem. Yet, as you know from your earlier meeting with him, these deeper qualities that determine his thinking may be deceptively obscured beneath a quiet, almost somber exterior in his personality.
Ethiopia's Domestic Situation and Foreign Policies
At home the Emperor is caught, like most modernizing monarchs, in a dilemma of his own making. He has built a modern state from feudal fragments, surrendered some prerogatives to a constitution, and educated an urban elite -- all in the interests of a stronger nationhood against the external danger. Now he is finding, inevitably, that these steps have only created greater political momentum -- particularly among the young --toward a surrender of autocratic powers which he is determined to preserve.
Thus the student riots this spring at the Imperial University in Addis Ababa, and a growing concern (which we should share) that the Emperor's death will usher in a period of political chaos. Basic reform of the government is probably not possible while the Emperor is alive. But a serious effort to spur economic development could provide an escape valve for the volitile energies and frustrations in Ethiopia. The Emperor took a halting step in that direction last February by bringing younger progressives into key economic jobs in his Cabinet. These men could make the difference between orderly change and a blow-up in Ethiopia. As with the Shah of Iran and his reformers over the last decade, we have a stake in their success. It remains an open question whether the problem is soluble. Modernization may make royal rule impossible but failure to modernize may produce an explosion.
Beyond this dissidence at the center, the Emperor's most immediate problem is the continuing insurgency of the Eritrean Liberation Front -- an irredentist Moslem movement claiming the extreme northeastern corner of Ethiopia. The Front is armed by radical Arab states and is increasingly sophisticated at sabotage. Harsh reprisals by Ethiopian troops have also helped to strengthen the appeal of the insurgents among the local population of Eritrea. The army seems well able for the moment to prevent any major gain of territory by the insurgents, but the rebellion is a worry and a drain on valuable resources. The outcome will depend to some extent on the degree of assistance coming to Eritrea from across the Red Sea - Yemen and Aden especially.
The Ethiopians fear greater support for the Front from the new leftist regime in the Sudan, just as they suspect continuing Somali irredentism on the southern border despite the recent detente between Haile Selassie and Prime Minister Egal of Somalia. Ethiopian foreign policy, in fact, has banked heavily on the detente with Somalia to free their flank while facing the extension of Soviet influence, via the Arab states, into the Red Sea Basin. The border truce with Somalia will probably hold because Egal is a strong, inward-looking leader. But the new radical government in the Sudan and the Soviet courtship of Southern Yemen compound the Emperor's fears.
Our best intelligence judges, however, that (1) the Sudanese leftists have their hands too full at home (including their own insurgency in the Southern Sudan) to pose a major threat to Ethiopia, and (2) the Soviets are still on shifting sands in Southern Yemen, where a Yemeni detente with Saudi Arabia, already developing, could all but cut the Russians out.
Aside from regional concerns, the Emperor continues to be a strong supporter of UN peacekeeping and African Unity. He was a founder of the OAU. Both the OAU and the UN Economic Commission for Africa have head-quarters in Addis. You will recall the Emperor has made several -- albeit unsuccessful -- efforts to mediate the Nigerian civil war on behalf of the OAU.