In life, Nelson Mandela often irritated U.S. Mandela endorsed human rights as "the core of international relations" in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine just before taking office in 1994. But he also said in 1998: "My foreign policy is determined by the past. . . . The relations I have had with the country, the contributions they have made to our struggle. "We will never renounce our friends," Mandela said in February 1996 during a visit to Robben Island with Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. He said he would invite both Castro and Gaddafi to South Africa despite pressure from the United States to abandon his support for them. Castro did visit South Africa during a conference of nonaligned nations in 1998, but Gaddafi never came. Mandela visited Libya several times after his release from prison in 1990, partly to raise funds for the African National Congress, according to a definitive biography by the late British journalist Anthony Sampson. "Mandela was profoundly loyal to those who supported the liberation struggle, even if it was in their narrow self-interest to do so and when it had little or nothing to do with nonracial democracy," said John Campbell, senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Even the administration of President Bill Clinton, who attended the memorial service Tuesday, did not escape Mandela's finger-wagging. In October 1997, as Mandela was preparing to visit Libya, the State Department said it would be "disappointed" if he went ahead. Mandela replied at a banquet in Johannesburg: "How can they have the arrogance to dictate to us who our friends should be?" When he visited and embraced Gaddafi, he criticized "countries that play policeman of the world" and said "those who object to my visiting Libya have no morals." Mandela and Clinton also differed over whether to give another term as United Nations secretary general to Egyptian politician Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Though Boutros-Ghali had widespread support, the Clinton administration blocked his reappointment. Mandela was, however, partly mollified by the selection of Kofi Annan from Ghana. Another point of contention was a plan in early 1997 for the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) to sell tanks worth $650 million to Syria, angering both the United States and Israel. Again Mandela asserted his and South Africa's right to go ahead. "We will conclude agreements with any country whether they are popular in the West or not," he said. The enemies of countries in the West are not ours. Mandela remained a staunch supporter of Clinton despite the friction over diplomacy. And the personal relationship between the two overshadowed their differences on diplomatic issues. Mandela's strong sense of loyalty didn't guide his foreign policy alone. "This loyalty was mirrored by his unstinting and uncritical loyalty to the ANC after he left office and as the party diverged from his path," Campbell said. It is as though he could not imagine those who had supported the ANC could be fundamentally undemocratic.