PETER BRUCE: SA has no small task regaining diplomatic ground

There’s a sort of stunned silence around the world at the pace of change in the politics of the US.

It is still the greatest military power on earth. You’d kind of be hoping, given the evident fascism and despotism at the top of the world’s other two superpowers, that in a democracy such as the US rapid political change will be accompanied at least by composed body politic accustomed to transition.

But that would be to reckon without Donald Trump. What he does to America is one thing. What he could do to the rest of the world is formidable. What he could do to SA is unthinkable. We’re in enough trouble in the US already. Right now, new trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau is leading a delegation in Washington for a scheduled Agoa meeting, but also to lobby Congress not to pass a bill requiring President Joe Biden to conduct a full review of US relations with SA. 

It is no small task, and the sorry state of our relationship all started with one small misstep. On February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, our foreign affairs department put out a statement calling on the Russians to withdraw. “SA calls on Russia to immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine in line with the UN Charter,” it said. It didn’t go as far as to condemn the invasion. 

However, on the orders of President Cyril Ramaphosa the statement was quickly withdrawn and SA was to go on a damaging journey, refusing to condemn the Russians, hosting a Russian weapons freighter in Simon’s Town and, at the same time, rapidly reinventing its foreign policy stance from human rights and democracy to non-alignment and, more recently and entirely self-serving, “active” non-alignment.

That “active” non-alignment allowed us to intervene in the Gaza war directly against Israel and, in the case of Ukraine to stand off and to try to negotiate a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. In the process diplomatic ties with Russia have tightened and Ramaphosa won deep admiration from the Chinese leadership for hosting a Brics summit in 2023 that saw the group begin to expand its membership and position itself as an “alternative” to the West.

All of this has irritated the Americans on both sides of their politics and our ability directly to influence events in the US is diminished and confined largely to the White House itself. Whatever happens, that ends in January even if vice-president Kamala Harris manages to beat Trump in November.

It is probably too late now for Ramaphosa to reprise his peace mission of last year. But Pretoria should try to use every opportunity it can to reposition its position on Ukraine.

How will our foreign policy respond? If Trump returns to the White House he will double down on US support for Israel, greatly sharpen trade tensions in Asia and Europe and create new uncertainties in the Western Pacific. But his first test would most likely be to force, somehow, a cessation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Trump has Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s support. That’s now been complicated by Harris’s early bounce in some polls since Biden pulled out of the race on Sunday and nominated her. But the race is still Trump’s to lose. Like Biden, Harris is committed to Ukraine. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are extremely critical of US support for Kyiv.

Trump boasts he could end it all in a day. We may have to accept that he could be a powerful catalyst to peace if only because he would stop funding Ukraine and stop sending it weapons. The Europeans cannot afford the spend.

The West has pledged a headline figure of $380bn to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. Almost $200bn has come from the US. As it is, it is clear Ukraine and the Russians have fought themselves to a kind of standstill. Ukraine cannot now “win” the war.

The historian Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow at Stanford University, says where wars start with an attack they are either quickly won or it becomes a war of attrition. And, he says, there are two vital elements to a war of attrition — the will to fight and the capacity to fight. 

“I wouldn’t want to be in a war of attrition with Russia,” he said recently. Putin doesn’t care about his casualties, and the Ukrainians are not allowed to use their Western weaponry to deplete Russia’s capacity to fight. It cannot strike inside Russian territory using Western weapons. So what’s the point of it all then? And is there a way back for SA to regain some lost diplomatic ground in the West?

In a way, Western support has had more to do with trying to enfeeble Putin than winning back territory. In fact, soon after the invasion began (I was disappointed to hear agriculture minister and DA leader John Steenhuisen refer to the invasion last week as “the war between Russia and Ukraine” — is this the new GNU-speak?) there were peace talks which Ukraine and the West walked away from. 

Russia was still insisting Ukraine pledge not to join Nato, but Ukraine had humiliated the Russians, united Europe and Nato and brought the EU and the US closer. Territory though, says Kotkin, “is not how you win a war of attrition”. Had the much-hyped Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023 succeeded it would have turned a 1,000km front into a 2,000km front, an impossible task for Kyiv.

This is the stalemate the new occupant of the White House will have to face up to. Any peace deal would simply have to cede territory to the Russians. The only tit for that tat would have to be guarantees of future Ukrainian sovereignty and its freedom to join Nato or the EU.

It is probably too late now for Ramaphosa to reprise his peace mission of last year. But Pretoria should try to use every opportunity it can to reposition its position on Ukraine. The Americans will inevitably harden. They already know you can win a war and lose the peace, as they recently did in Afghanistan. Or lose the war and win (over time) the peace, as in Vietnam. And when the music stops let us not be still standing.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.