La Política Exterior y Militar de los EE.UU en África (1960-2010): Del Tercer Mundo a un "Nuevo Oriente Medio Petrolífero"

Abstract

Africa has traditionally been "the lost continent", the most backward continent in all areas, despite its proximity to Europe, a continent that gives the feeling of being outside all the developments in the world, isolated and impoverished endemically predators in their vast natural resources. But for the geopolitics and global geo-strategy, Africa has gone from being "pie" divided between the European powers in Berlin in 1885, a docile and inhabited continent "almost kids," and colonized, a person who attended the two world wars while contributing to them and being war scenario without the least benefit. Afterwards, decolonized Africa is a continent, an area hardly relevant for the Cold War until its complete decolonization, as in the 1970's, and finally from 1990 a second-order scenario in the global geo-strategy.Since the 1980s became known as "the continent of hunger," and in the 1990's was added to their woes the terrible genocidal ethnic strife and frequently covered by news Western world with the passivity of most occasions. But with the beginning of the XXI century, Africa is becoming quietly, almost secretly, and primarily for foreign policy and U.S. military policy, rediscovered in a territory, a territory in which Washington had so far acted only secondary and secretly but in the longer plans to move openly until now was the Western power politically and militarily more present in Africa, the most interested in this continent: France. In addition to the substantial resources that have traditionally been given any importance to Africa (diamonds, minerals, precious stones), two new and very powerful resources that the U.S. have been redesigned as if by magic, its geostrategic African: coltan, and especially oil, an oil begins to be extracted from the seabed off the West African coast, because now it profitable as a very expensive operation, an oil that now flows from Africa in large numbers to the whole world, mainly to USA. States, Europe and China. Hence, in addition to an overview of the history of U.S. policy for Africa in the last fifty years, I ask a very plausible hypothesis for today: "After being a forgotten continent for decades, Africa is today a" new Middle East "for the U.S.?