How the relatively new administration in the United States, U.S, sees the rest of the world did come up for intense scrutiny in the controversy that surrounded the decision of the Norwegian-based Nobel Committee to award this year's Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama. Defending their decision to give the prize to someone who had only been in office for just under ten months, the Committee pointed to what it said was President Obama's efforts to, among other things, re-engage the Islamic World, as well as many other parts of the international community that had fallen out with America and the West.

Since its inception on January 20, this year, Mr. Obama's Democratic, "left-leaning" administration has indeed taken the initiative to try to open, or re-open, avenue for dialogue between the global super-power, i.e. the U.S., and a number of countries scattered across the Middle East, Asia, Europe, the Americas and, of course, Africa.

By seeking to create an amenable atmosphere for the holding of discussions between Washington and the likes of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Burmah, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is being seen as handing U.S. diplomacy a new impetus, one that lays greater emphasis on the use of the carrot than the stick in resolving the world's many problems.

Political commentators say there is now a conscious shift in U.S policy, a new thinking, they call it, aimed at down-grading American policy over the last eight years, which relied on might and threats as an instrument of foreign policy.

In the case of Africa, where President Obama has his paternal ancestry, two trouble-spots have concerned Washington the most. One is Sudan, which because of its size as the continent's largest country, and added to its huge oil and other natural resources, is of stragetic value to the U.S. Erstwhile conflict between northern and southern Sudan, as well as the five-and-a-half-year-old conflict in the western region of Darfur, have been one of the main causes of friction between the U.S. and Sudan.

Only recently, the Obama administration said it wanted to reverse its predecessor's hard stance towards the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, to include the use of incentives and more direct negotiations between the two capitals, in order to improve the chances of an amicable settlement in Darfur and carrying out to the letter the agreement reached between north and south in 2005, aimed at ending over two decades of conflict between the two sides.

As for the horn of African country of Somalia, which is the second major source of concern to the U.S in Africa, the policy of the United States is less clear. Under the administration of the younger Bush, from January, 2001, to January, 2009, Washington's Somalia policy was, at best, fraught with contradictions and confusion. Before that, there were another eight years under Mr. Clinton, and it seems to have been during that time that the Americans resolved never again to allow their forces to be too directly involved in combat operations on the continent.

The last U.S. leader to deploy American ground troops to fight in an African conflict, whether serving as part of a United Nations peace-keeping force or not, was President H. W. Bush, Bush-senior. It was to Somalia that those troops were sent; but, its brutal aftermaths did form the basis of a serious policy review, which, even in the face of an alleged take-over of Somalia by Al Qaeda and hard-line Islamists, rested on the use of proxies in the most extreme of cases.

If you argue that U.S. ties to Somalia actually dates back to the heydays of the Cold War, then, the logical position to take would be that Washington needed the likes of the late Somali leader, Mohammed Siad Barre, as the regional ally who could serve as a counter-weight of sorts to the hegemony which the defunct Soviet Union was trying to create in east Africa through its main ally, Ethiopia.

Following the overthrow of Mr. Barre and the eruption of all-out civil war in Somalia in 1990, U.S. interest in the country and its problems, waned.

Then, famine set in during the early 1990's, and the U.N. was called upon to intervene with food aid and other life-saving supplies. But, first and foremost, some degree of peace had to be restored in and around the capital, Mogadishu, if the international community was going to be able to save the starving and the sick from dying. President Bush, also known as Bush-41, concluded that the U.S. was best-placed to provide the U.N. mission with both the logistical and military support required by such an exercise, and so, he obliged. At the time, his administration was also on its last legs, and with imminent defeat in a re-election battle already on the cards, Mr. Bush needed some success story of his own - even a semblance of success, from any quarter, domestic or foreign - it didn't really matter.

The long and short of the saga, as it were, is this: a mission which was originally meant to end the famine went tragically wrong as the American Black Hawk helicopter was brought down by nationalist Somali insurgents, loyal to the leader of one of the two main rival warlords at the time, General Mohammed Farra Aideed. At that point, U.S. and U.N. peace-keepers allowed themselves to be sucked into the mainly clan-versus-clan conflict. They launched a massive man-hunt for General Aideed, and fierce clashes broke out all across Mogadishu between the peace-keepers and the insurgents. In the end, twenty-four American soldiers and 136 U.N. troops died. The continued presence of the U.S. forces on Somali soil was made the more untenable by the number of ordinary people that were also killed in the battle - hundreds, if not thousands.

The relatively high American casualty figures provoked an uproar in the United States, more so, the television images of lifeless, and sometimes, headless bodies of U.S. soldiers been dragged along the streets of Mogadishu by cheering crowds of Somalis. That was in late 1992.

In early 1993, President Clinton withdrew the troops, never to return to Somali soil. It was argued back then, and still is today, that there was a much more strategic rationale behind the decision, those seventeen years ago, to send in U.S. forces: namely to neutralize Al Qaeda, which was thought to have a hand in some of the forces fighting there.

The truth about the conflict in Somalia, especially since it started to take on the hallmarks of a failed state, is that alliances are sometimes fluid there. The consequence for the U.S is that it has found inself taking apparently contradictory positions. For example, when U.S. forces arrived in Mogadishu in 1992, they felt compelled to work with the faction loyal to General Aideed's main rival, Mr. Ali Mahdi Mohammed, because General Aideed's faction was thought to be the ones with the closest links to Al Qaeda.

Again, in June, 2006, a group called the Union of Islamic Courts, U.I.C. defeated a fractuous secular military coalition known as the Anti-terror Alliance, and took power in Mogadishu. The U.S. opposed the regime set up by the U.I.C., and is also widely believed to have financed an unsuccessful military come-back by the leaders of the Anti-terror Alliance against the Courts.

Following the failure of the secular alliance to re-take the capital, Washington shifted its attention to neighbouring Ethiopia, the main military power in the region. It gave its backing to the Ethiopian army, which invaded Somalia in November, same year, and ended the Islamic Courts' hold on power.

However, matters took another twist, after the leader of the Islamic Courts, Sheikh Sheriff Sheikh Ahmed, made a come-back, signed a peace deal with Somalia's internationally-backed Transitional Federal Government, T.F.G., and was subsequently allowed to contest and win the office of Somali president. Ironically, it was Washington's decision, late last year, to give the former leader of the Courts public support, plus a series of armed shipments, in the face of another, more radical Islamic group which wants to overthrow him.

From all indications, the Obama administration, which is still short of its first twelve months in power, seems to be in no mood just yet to abandon the approach adopted by its predecessor on Somalia. As the U.S. president would say, the leadership of the Somali insurgency hasn't yet decided to "unclench their fists," and are still too deeply rooted in their relationship with Al Qaeda.

So, in keeping with the policy of old, Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, announced a couple of months ago, that her government had already shipped about forty tons of military supplies to President Sherif's government, in response to a call by the African Union, A.U., for help to enable the T.F.G. fight off the Al Shabbab insurgency.