This chapter examines the diplomacy before, during, and after the 1980 majority rule elections in Zimbabwe. The pre-election diplomacy focused on ceasefire violations and the large number of unreported South African troops in Rhodesia before the election. The diplomacy of Lord Soames in dealing with this issue, and the issue of violence and intimidation by the different nationalist parties, especially from ZANU, meant that the elections were a tense situation. Lord Soames’ handling of the election observers is discussed, as is his meeting with Robert Mugabe once Mugabe’s overwhelming victory was known. The chapter then looks at Anglo-American relations with Zimbabwe in the first two years of independence. The focus is on the British and American responses to events in 1982, primarily the problems created in Britain among Conservatives over the reports of the torture of detained white officers, some of them British citizens, who were charged with sabotage against Zimbabwe’s Thornhill Air Force base. In addition, the firing of Joshua Nkomo from the government, and his exile to London is discussed.

This chapter examines the diplomacy before, during, and after the 1980 majority rule elections in Zimbabwe. The pre-election diplomacy focused on ceasefire violations and the large number of unreported South African troops in Rhodesia before the election. The diplomacy of Lord Soames in dealing with this issue, and the issue of violence and intimidation by the different nationalist parties, especially from ZANU, meant that the elections were a tense situation. Lord Soames’ handling of the election observers is discussed, as is his meeting with Robert Mugabe once Mugabe’s overwhelming victory was known. The chapter then looks at Anglo-American relations with Zimbabwe in the first two years of independence. The focus is on the British and American responses to events in 1982, primarily the problems created in Britain among Conservatives over the reports of the torture of detained white officers, some of them British citizens, who were charged with sabotage against Zimbabwe’s Thornhill Air Force base. In addition, the firing of Joshua Nkomo from the government, and his exile to London is discussed.

This chapter analyzes the political debates in the United States about arms sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When the United States “lost Iran” in 1979, the presidential administrations of Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan identified regional instability as a threat to the security of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and “global economic health.” Both administrations turned to arms sales as a means to secure alliances in the face of American vulnerability. In this context, the burgeoning military sales relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia arrived through an Iranian workshop. Congressional debates about the sale of fighter jets and AWACS to both nations, as well as the corporate lobbying of the Bechtel Corporation, reveal important logical columns in this shift to a more aggressive foreign policy based on military relationships: the link between economic growth and US Cold War legitimacy, the importance of military sales to the US domestic economy, and the crucial place of weapons transfers in good relations with the ruling monarchies in Iran and then Saudi Arabia. When it came to the regional security of the Middle East and secure flows of its oil, this was the time when military force began to become the premier instrument of US diplomacy for a new global age.