Jimmy Carter lives! So proclaims Nancy Mitchell in Jimmy Carter in Africa, her massive, exhaustively researched reclamation of Jimmy Carter, Cold Warrior and vanguard of international human rights. Carter has, Mitchell contends, been wrongly critiqued as a weak President who stood paralyzed in times of international crisis as his two main foreign-policy advisers, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, battled over the direction of the United States in the post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate national malaise. In actuality, Carter was a staunch Cold Warrior, deep thinker, and ardent supporter of human rights who deserves recognition for significant foreign-policy achievements, particularly in war-torn, postcolonial Africa.

Mitchell, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, adds a significant contribution to the growing historiography of the détente years of the 1970s and the importance of the global South to US foreign policy. Following in the footsteps of her mentor, Piero Gleijeses – the author of several groundbreaking works on the United States, Cuba, and southern Africa based on research in the (as yet unopened) Cuban archives – Mitchell's research is exhaustive and truly impressive, mining over thirty archival collections across four continents to produce the epitome of a sweeping, international multi-archival study. Mitchell also conducted interviews with critical members of the Carter administration, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Andrew Young, and the former President himself, along with international actors such as Kenneth Kaunda, the former President of Zambia. Her close reading of the documentary evidence leads Mitchell to disagree with conventional assessments of Carter. He was not naive, indecisive, or soft on Communism. Likewise, she contests the arguments of Brzezinski and historian Louise Woodroofe, who both argue that the end of détente and the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty lay “buried in the sands of Ogaden,” where the US-backed Somalis were soundly defeated by the Soviet-supported Ethiopians.Footnote ¹

Thus Jimmy Carter in Africa focusses in minute detail on two case studies: Rhodesia and Ethiopia, the two most incendiary infernos on the African continent during the latter years of the 1970s. The former was a complicated situation involving Ian Smith and a white minority population holding out against various black African liberation forces, while the latter conflict witnessed Somalia invade revolutionary Ethiopia. The Carter administration inherited a mess left behind by President Gerald Ford and the shuttle diplomacy of his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who tried – and failed – to shape the outcome of the Angolan civil war and also to bring a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Rhodesia. Carter was at his best, Mitchell argues, when he was well prepared and had time to plan, as in the case of Rhodesia, where the United States helped to bring about a negotiated settlement that resulted in multiracial elections and the creation of Zimbabwe in 1980. When confronted with new and unforeseen crises, as in the Horn of Africa (and, subsequently, the Iranian Revolution), Carter was flummoxed. “Studying Carter's response to these African crises,” Mitchell argues, “clarifies his core values as well as the strengths and weaknesses of his leadership” (8).

When Carter became President in 1977, the Rhodesian Bush War was nearing its end. In his efforts to bring peace to one of the last remaining bastions of white minority rule on the African continent, Kissinger had paid attention only to Ian Smith, Rhodesia's intransigent Prime Minister, and the Carter administration sought to include all parties in negotiations, including Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe. Perhaps simplistically, Carter – who was greatly influenced by his upbringing in the US South as well as by the experiences and insights of Andrew Young, his ambassador to the United Nations – saw the situation in Rhodesia, as well as that in neighboring South Africa, through the lens of both the civil rights movement and the Cold War. Yet more was at stake in Rhodesia than black majority rule. As Mitchell adeptly illustrates, if Cuban troops invaded Rhodesia – as they had in supporting the left-wing MPLA in Angola – the United States would have found itself in an impossible situation, either having to do nothing or having to support the white minority regime, with either action resulting in disaster.

This work is deserving of several minor but important critical quibbles. First, the book is far too long for the story it tells – its length could have been halved and its contribution would not have been marred. At over eight hundred pages, Mitchell's book – which covers just four years and two case studies – will be of interest only to the most specialized of US foreign-policy history specialists, and will not be accessible for almost all others. This is not a text, for example, that would be appropriate for undergraduate classrooms. There is much repetition, as Mitchell relies on several select quotes over and over, and this book is a reminder that sometimes less is indeed more. A more succinct story would have been more accessible and exciting. Second, due to its size the narrative at times drags and thus lacks dramatic tension, and the prose is mainly workmanlike, with some strikingly awkward constructions. For example, it is hard to take seriously the following sentence, which tries to be clever in describing the changing loyalties of the United States from Ethiopia to Somalia: “It was tempting for Washington to imagine a square dance in the Horn of Africa: ‘Switch your partner, do si do!’” (680). Finally, Jimmy Carter in Africa is without question the most traditional of diplomatic histories, focussing on the policymaking elites in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere. There is almost no discussion of the myriad activist organizations, such as the American Committee on Africa or the Washington Office on Africa, which pressured both the Carter administration and Congress while also raising public consciousness. Some engagement with the influence of non-state actors would have added depth and nuance to this fascinating story.

Despite some shortcomings in style and size, Mitchell's book is most impressive and offers a strong revisionist retelling of Jimmy Carter as a competent and misunderstood Cold Warrior. The policies of various presidential administrations towards the white-minority-ruled states of southern Africa during the 1960s and 1970s were deeply flawed, and Carter offered a fresh approach to incredibly complicated regional struggles whose lingering effects are still felt on the African continent to this day.