" Regan was able to discourage Congress' previous prohibitions for aid to UNITA and instead launched into the covert plan to leverage American weight on the side fighting the Marxist supporters. The Soviet Union reacted quickly; Cuban expeditionary forces were sent to the region in their satellite guerilla's aid and, in the bloody fight between ethnic groups in Angola, the larger Soviet-American conflict played out.
In 1987, the struggle came to a head. The United States assumed its supportive role for UNITA as reason preside over the tripartite negotiation that would end the civil war. At the bargaining table were also Cuban and South African forces, reaffirming the battle as one led by other issues more than directed by the cause of Angolan success. Cuba agreed to leave Angola, ultimately, but South Africa also agreed to relinquish its control over Namibia. Twenty years earlier, Marxist South-West Africa People's Organization launched its own guerilla war for independence there, but only 1988 did it appease its United Nations responsibilities by providing the nation state its freedom in accordance with the peace plan for the region. Despite South African Afrikan and United States' efforts, two new nations left the long struggle with their own independence - and as Marxist regimes.
The scripts that soared through Washington and South Africa - calls for U.S. foreign policy that would resist the threatening spread of Marxism and communist ideologies - failed on a massive front, putting into question the ideology with which American policy had dealt with the southern region of Africa in its entirety. "This assessment," one of hopeful democratic success, "turned out to be wrong." Yet, United States leaders had remained blissfully unaware of the failing cause and struggling forces around Luanda until it all fell apart. At that point, the American support of South Africa, which had long inhabited Namibian territory in an effort ward off another Marxist state in the surroundings (for socio-cultural reasons directly at odds with American civic philosophy but scripted out of support proposals), also shifted. Suddenly, the country that birthed the Namibian Marxism was also the threat that sought to build armaments at odds with American military desires. Despite growing arms, however, even South Africa could not ward off change forever, and soon the ANC-led government gifted American with a new "proven friend."
As the Reagan Doctrine saw a return to the Nixon-Kissinger "tilt" to Southern Africa, the post-Reagan American concerns have returned foreign policy to that region in parallel to the pre-Reagan idea. "For the rest, both the first Bush administration and President Clinton tended to rely heavily on the French and the British to play the leading mentoring roles in their former colonies."...
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