Atlantic Council

J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, contributed a chapter-length essay on “Africa-United States Relations” for the Oxford Companion to American Politics, which was just published by Oxford University Press.

Edited by David Coates, Worrell professor of Anglo-American studies at Wake Forest University, the two-volume Oxford Companion to American Politics is the first reference work to provide detailed, in-depth coverage of all aspects of US politics with more than 245 entries written by top scholars and practitioners, including Bruce Cumings, chair of the history department at the University of Chicago; Amitai Etzioni, director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at the American University; Gary Clyde Hufbauer, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics; Henry R. Nau, professor of political science at the George Washington University and director of the US-Japan-South Korea Legislative Exchange Program; Robert B. Reich, former US labor secretary and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley; and Garry Wills, emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University.

In his essay, Pham surveys the history of US diplomatic, security, and economic relations with Africa since Morocco’s Sultan Mohammed III recognized the young American Republic in 1777. Reviewing US Africa strategy under President Barack Obama, he concludes: “Whether or not this ambitious agenda can be achieved in a domestic political climate increasingly dominated by economic uncertainty and fiscal austerity remains to be seen, but, in any event, it seems unlikely that the now intensified relations between the United States and Africa will be diminished in the near future.”