It seems that some things will never change. One certainty is that American policy toward Africa will nearly always be reactive, and worse yet, those reactions will be slow. Not slow as in deliberative and nuanced, but rather slow as in indecisive and apathetic. The latest example of this American dithering on Africa comes in the case of the crisis in Guinea. More than a week after that country exploded in violence as the result of security force crackdowns on protesters, Hillary Clinton finally weighed in on behalf of the United States with what seems to me to be both a perfunctory and obvious statement calling for an end to violence and for military junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara to step down. The phrase “a day late and a dollar short” comes to mind.
