Foreign Policy of Mobutu Sese Seko - United States

United States

For the most part, Zaire enjoyed warm relations with the United States. The United States was the third largest donor of aid to Zaire (after Belgium and France), and Mobutu befriended several U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Relations did cool significantly between 1974 and 1975 over Mobutu's increasingly radical rhetoric, including his scathing denunciations of American foreign policy, and plummeted to an all-time low in the summer of 1975 when Mobutu accused the CIA of plotting to overthrow his government. Eleven senior Zairian generals and several civilians were arrested while a former head of the Central Bank was condemned (in absentia). However, Nzongola-Ntalaja, one of Mobutu's staunchest critics, speculated that Mobutu invented the plot as an excuse to purge the military of officers who might pose a threat to his rule. In spite of these hindrances, the chilly relationship quickly thawed during the Angolan Civil War when the U.S. government began aiding the anti-Communist FNLA, led by Mobutu's Holden Roberto.

Because of Mobutu's poor human rights record, the Carter Administration worked to put some distance between itself and the Kinshasa government; even so, Zaire was the recipient of nearly half the foreign aid Carter allocated sub-Saharan Africa. During the first Shaba invasion, the United States played a relatively inconsequential role; its belated intervention consisted of little more than the delivery of non-lethal supplies. But during the second Shaba invasion, the U.S. played a much more active and decisive role by providing transportation and logistical support to the French and Belgian paratroopers that were deployed to aid Mobutu against the rebels. Carter echoed Mobutu's (unsubstantiated) charges of Soviet and Cuban aid to the rebels, until it was apparent that no hard evidence existed to verify his claims. In 1980 the House of Representatives voted to terminate military aid to Zaire, but the Senate reinstated the funds, in response to pressure from Carter and American business interests in Zaire.

Mobutu enjoyed a very warm relationship with the Reagan Administration (through financial donation); during Reagan's presidency, Mobutu visited the White House three times, and criticism of Zaire's human rights record by the U.S. was effectively muted. During a state visit by Mobutu in 1983 Reagan praised him as "a voice of good sense and goodwill."

Mobutu also had a cordial relationship with Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush; he was the first African head of state to visit Bush at the White House. Even so, Mobutu's relationship with the U.S. radically changed shortly afterward with the end of the Cold War; with the Soviet Union gone, there was no longer any reason to support Mobutu as a bulwark against communism. Accordingly, the U.S. and other Western powers began pressuring Mobutu to democratize the regime. Regarding the change in U.S. attitude to his regime, Mobutu bitterly remarked: "I am the latest victim of the cold war, no longer needed by the U.S. The lesson is that my support for American policy counts for nothing." In 1993 the U.S. State Department denied Mobutu a visa after he sought to visit Washington, D.C. Shortly after this, Mobutu was befriended by televangelist Pat Robertson, who promised to try to get the State Department to lift its ban on the African leader.