<snip>
Behind the sunny smile and the soaring rhetoric, Reagan pursued a foreign policy whose only logic was the perpetration of a right wing platform. He kept some of Africa’s most odious dictators, and most brutal wars, running. His intransigence meant that apartheid regained legitimacy, and that Nelson Mandela remained a prisoner longer than was necessary.
<snip>
It is in the area of South Africa that Reagan’s true colours on Africa were revealed. Despite deafening clamour from all sides in 1986 that America introduce sanctions against South Africa, Reagan, with his partner-in-arms Margaret Thatcher, resolutely declined to take such an action. Desmond Tutu was so frustrated that he declared that, "the West, for my part, can go to hell".
<snip>
Reagan also believed that, no matter how loathsome a leader, the fact that he was a "bulwark against communism" meant that he was welcome to the White House. Some of the most celebrated guests of President Reagan are Mobutu Sese Seko, the avatar of kleptocracy and Jonas Savimbi, the scourge of Angola.
<snip>
http://www.eastandard.net/intelligence/intel13060411.htm