Constructive Engagement in South Africa: A Viable U.S. Policy

.he new Reagan administration must promptly consider its policy toward southern Africa. The Namibian negotiations remain unsettled, and because of that potential crisis the prospects for an uncontrollable regional war involving major international powers have grown. Underlying any review ofregional policy must be a clearheaded assessment of U.S. interests in and policy toward South Africa itself. Are we as a nation genuinely concerned about furthering constructive changes in that troubled, complex society, or have our protestations over South African domestic policies during the past two decades been essentially reflexive and rhetorical, aimed at UN and domestic constituencies and at easing guilt about our own social shortcomings? If the concern is genuine, then a conjunction of events—rapid changes in southern Africa since the 1974 Portuguese coup, the tentative but substantial commitment to change made by the P.W. Botha government in South Africa since it took office in September 1978, the tacit acknowledgment by career Carter administration officials that the approach initiated in the first months of 1977 had failed, the massive Reagan victory, the Senate's Republican majority, and a conservative shift in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives—gives us a momentary opportunity to launch a redirected policy intended to boost peaceful change in South Africa: a policy of constructive engagement.