Voice of America quotes Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham on Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Kenya and Africa’s strategic value to the United States:
The attack at the embassy in Kenya and one carried out at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were a “wake-up call” for the United States, said Peter Pham, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.
“A call for a course of correction on our perception of Africa,” said Pham.
He said the attacks prompted the U.S. government to take a closer look at its engagement in East Africa.“They came less than two years after a Department of Defense document on U.S. strategy in sub-Saharan Africa declared, amazingly, for those of us who know, love and work on Africa, that in the eyes of the planners who wrote that document, that Africa had and I quote ‘little strategic value for the United States,’ ” said Pham.