Retrenchment and Recalculation: South Africa and the Angola-Namibia Agreements

Abstract

A long-sought peace settlement in southwestern Africa became feasible in 1988, when the rising costs of unwinnable war combined with economic constraints within intervening powers, to create strong incentives for military disengagement. Cuba and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and South Africa, on the other, could each claim recent battlefield victories, and present military withdrawal to their domestic constituencies as confirmation of goal achievement. Moreover, Pretoria will have earned new international acceptance and prestige by virtue of its participation, alongside Angola and Cuba, plus American and Soviet "observers," in the control commission overseeing the implementation of the Angola-Namibia Agreement. For the first time since the rupture of Soviet-South African relations in 1956, Soviet diplomats were talking to their South African counterparts, and doing so in South Africa.