Abstract EN:

Following the inauguration of president eisenhower's republican administration in january 1953, haile selassie's ethiopia witnessed the beginning of an economic, military and diplomatic development which reached its climax at the end of the decade. The ethiopian empire was strategically located at the meeting point between the african and asian continents, on the shores of the red sea since the annexation of eritrea in 1952. Since the end of world war two, it had benefited from a recovery plan rooted in the alignments of the cold war, and motivated by a bipartisan american wish to transform this rare example of african independence into a model for other emerging countries about to break away from colonization. Nasser's egyptian revolution of 1952-54 expanded the interest the united states felt for the oil-rich middle east to the eastern horn of africa, which suddenly found itself thrown into the east-west struggle and the "pactomania" born in the 1940s first in latin america, then in europe and asia. Following the 1956 suez crisis, the middle east resolution of january 1957 (the eisenhower doctrine) considered extending the anticommunist containment ring established by the baghdad pact - whose scope was initially restricted to the near east - to the african continent. As a stronghold in the very middle of this defense area meant to assert u. S. Hegemony over both continents, ethiopia offered a rare example of stability favorable to western interests opposite the growing influence of the "non-aligned" movement born in bandung. A propaganda tool potentially capable of thwarting both sino-soviet and neutralist influences, ethiopia thus became the proxy of american diplomacy when the latter set out to isolate nasser, while the pan-african impetus triggered by decolonization gave the empire its first sense of belonging to the dark continent, itself a new target for u. S. Domestic and foreign racial policies.