Until now, there has not been a comprehensive survey of U.S. policy toward Africa for either the specialist or the general reader. Now, happily, there is. Herman J. Cohen (‘Hank’) has just published U.S. Policy Toward Africa: Eight Decades of Realpolitik, covering fourteen U.S. administrations. It is hard to think of anyone as qualified as Ambassador Cohen to undertake such a work. A career Foreign Service Officer, Hank Cohen was, inter alia, charge in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ambassador to Senegal, senior director for Africa at the National Security Council, and assistant secretary for Africa at the U.S. Department of State.

The former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Herman J. (Hank) Cohen wrote an important article in African Arguments entitled “Time to Bring Eritrea in From the Cold.” For those involv…

In the daily Africa in Transition blog, on February 6, 2019, Ambassador Michelle Gavin, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Program, harshly criticized the United States government’s policy toward the December 2018 presidential election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In an Expert’s Brief I published yesterday, I reflected on Nelson Mandela’s achievements as the father of the democratic, non-racial South Africa that replaced the odious and repressive apartheid sta…

Who knew that Leonard Cohen flew to Israel during the conflict to sing to Israeli troops?   From Disaster to (Limited) Victory. An Egyptian officer’s view of the Ramadan War.