Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror and Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden: The United States, the Horn of Africa, and the Demise of Détente

The end of the Cold War and the subsequent opening of East European archives have been a boon for scholars who study East-West relations in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the topics that have attracted a good deal of attention among students of international history is the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Third World. A rich set of local, regional, and international dynamics and actors contributed to a complex set of motives for the superpowers to become involved in remote areas. Two recent accounts try to shed more light on the issue through markedly different approaches: Elizabeth Schmidt's Foreign Intervention in Africa offers a broad synthesis based on well-known secondary accounts regarding U.S. motivations for engaging in Africa, whereas Louise Woodroofe's Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden provides a detailed study of U.S. reactions to the Horn of Africa crisis from 1974 to 1978, based almost...