Joan Swart’s letter (“South Africa’s Iran ties reflect strategic autonomy”, March 10) refers.
Much of what Swart says of the international situation makes sense. And yes, regime change in Tehran is unlikely. US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have gravely miscalculated, or rather the latter has dragged the geopolitically ignorant Trump into a quagmire he does not understand.
Swart’s comments about South African foreign policy are another matter, though. South Africa did not have to wait for the US-Israel conflict with Iran to find itself on the “wrong side of history”, it has been on the wrong side since at least 2010.
From 1994 to 2010 South Africa acted like, and indeed was, an aspiring middle power with a more or less sensible foreign policy, leaving aside wobbles like the pro-Mugabe “quiet diplomacy” and quixotic expressions about “struggle friends” such as Cuba and Libya, which were not taken too far and the West generally discounted, though the Zimbabwe issue did become an irritant in Washington’s eyes.
Pretoria saw itself as a significant player in multilateral structures and made some important contributions. To all intents and purposes, South Africa was non-aligned. In 1998 it hosted the Non-Aligned Movement summit, but then deputy president and later president Thabo Mbeki was clearly comfortable in his interactions with the developed West.
With former president Jacob Zuma and the entry into Brics much changed. Not only did South Africa become increasingly ideologically aligned with Russia and especially China, though attempts were made to cloak this as “Global South diplomacy”, it also increasingly based its foreign policy choices on ideological grounds.
This was not a forward-looking policy; it was clearly atavistic and represented a misreading of the situation in Asia-Pacific, which had long since moved on, though Beijing clearly encouraged these fantasies. When Russian President Vladimir Putin seized control of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, the ANC more openly sided with Russia and came to its defence, for example, when there was talk of expelling Russia from the G20.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has since steered South Africa into a disastrous confrontation with Washington that goes far beyond Trump, and the US view of South Africa as a “bad actor” is now bipartisan. Pretoria may claim “strategic autonomy” and nonalignment, but the facts belie these claims.
As for Beijing’s “cautious posture”, one lesson at least is that alignments with Russia and China failed to save Venezuela and Iran from the consequences of their own folly. But try telling that to Luthuli House. In a fragmented and violent world, South Africa’s position is likely to be seen less as one of “autonomy” but rather that of an “outlier”.
Francois Theron
Via Business Day online
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