Tar Baby Option

"Tar Baby" was the name given by the United States State Department to Richard Nixon's policy during the late 1960s and 1970s of strengthening contacts with the white-minority governments in southern Africa — Portugal (in relation to Angola and Mozambique), Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa. The allusion was to the Uncle Remus story in which Brer Fox tries to capture Brer Rabbit by making a tar baby. Brer Rabbit strikes the tar "baby" with his hands, feet, and head and eventually becomes completely adhered to it. The policy option, described as a partial relaxation of economic action against Rhodesia, South Africa and Portugal, and derived from NSSM: 39, was based on the presumption that apartheid and colonial rule were an unpleasant but undeniable reality and that Washington should accommodate itself pragmatically to the status quo. According to Nixon, if the United States was to be an influence for enlightened change it must do so by offering the "carrot" and eschewing the "stick". This policy would have to be pursued ad infinitum to get it to work.

References

Anthony Lake, a foreign policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter, treats the subject in depth in his book "The Tar Baby Option": US Policy in Southern Rhodesia