Kennedy Administration’s Policy Toward Ghana

From the late 1950s to the 1960s, with national independence movement surging in Africa, African strategic importance in the international arena had been more and more prominent. Ghana was the first country that won independence in Sub-Saharan Africa after the Second World War. After the independence, Ghana was faced with the development requirement of industrialization. The leader of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah put forward a development project on the Volta River aimed to improve industrialization. In order to gain advantage in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the changing international situation, President John F. Kennedy introduced a New Frontier program to supply aid and support to African countries. It became a hard test of the Kennedy administration whether to provide foreign aid to Kwame Nkrumah’s Volta River project in the neutralist states of Africa.U.S-Ghana, U.S-British and officials of the United States carried on a complexed negotiation toward the Volta River Project. Given sophisticated changes of the international situation, Kennedy administration draw diplomatic lessons from the bankruptcy of Aswan Dam in Egypt and comprehensively evaluated the political, economic, diplomatic policies in Ghana. Finally, Kennedy Administration made a decision to assist Ghana’s Volta River Project. Although American strategic objectives did not achieved after aiding this project in the short term, it received the trust of Ghana and other West African countries against Soviet Union.