When he took office in 2001, did Africa figure much in his foreign policy?
It really didn’t. He said very little about Africa. The administration’s basic approach coming into office was that it was not going to get very engaged in what was called “nation-building.” He had not said very much about debt relief and in the early days of the administration, what some senior officials said and did in relation to the HIV/AIDS crisis was actually not very helpful. So the expectations at the beginning of the administration were not very high at all. There were not too many new initiatives at that point. What changed? Things began to change early on. There were some signs, even in 2001, that they were going to take debt relief more seriously. The World Bank pushed an initiative to move toward more grants [as opposed to loans]. After September 11, all sorts of things began to change on the foreign policy front. They began to be more interested in Africa for a variety of security and military reasons, but also in terms of fighting poverty. The first manifestation of that
