A lopsided diplomatic appreciation of SA’s national interests

Dan Motaung

Johannesburg - Could it be sheer coincidence that Dr Gregg Mills and Ray Hartley published a thinly veiled West-centric apologetics berating the recently released South African ‘National Interest’ framework document for embracing ‘undemocratic states’, on the day of the arrival of the American Secretary of State Anton Blinken in South Africa on August 7, 2022?

This could not have been coincidental. Reinforcing this view was Mills and a coterie of African opposition political parties’ co-authored opinion piece (published on 28 July) openly calling for the African continent to rally behind the defence of Ukraine.

Mills and Hartley also published a piece in the Daily Maverick (07 July), titled ‘South Africa and the Russian Federation — Pause before Engaging’, lamenting South Africa’s continued trade with Russia. The self-righteous anti-Russian discursive order has notably found resonance in South Africa too.

The answer lies in the common thread in the voices of the three. They fiercely urge South Africa and Africa to cast their lot with Ukraine and, by implication, Western geopolitical interests, although, through a sleight of hand (to appropriate Mills and Hartley’s phrase) Mills/Hartley are quick to disavow their support for the Western course.

Taking refuge in generalities, they argue that ‘the West does not own democracy; it belongs to the world of free peoples’; an ahistorical formulation not borne out by the experience of the people of Nicaragua, among many other nations.

Decoded, their message was pitched for soft-landing for the American Secretary of State, whose hastily arranged African three-nation visit was clearly to counter the impact of the recent visit of Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov. That much is at stake for the interests of imperium is too obvious to be missed.

Calling out South Africa’s alignment with states they consider undemocratic, they accuse the government of selective interpretation of the country’s constitution in the formulation of the National Interest framework, implying that it is therefore shunning those provisions which conflict with its preferred but ‘questionable’ foreign policy orientation.

To lend colour to this accusation they cite South Africa’s ties with Zimbabwe, China and Russia as an example of the country embracing nations whose suspect democratic history goes against the grain of our own constitutional framework.

Despite the sheen of moral plausibility, their thesis fails the litmus test of the historical record on many levels. Since its democratic breakthrough of April 1994, South Africa has unabashedly upheld the tenets of progressive internationalism and solidarity.

These tenets predicate South Africa’s quest for a fair and equitable world. The National Interest document at which the authors are throwing scorn does nothing to depart from these known principles as informed by our noble liberation tradition.

It is a history which goes back to the 1955 Bandung Conference as well as the 1961 founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, both of which were landmark historical developments in the formation of the political subjectivities of the formally subordinated nations of the world.

The assumption that the US is a high water mark of ‘democracy’ as opposed to ‘the autocratic’ or ‘authoritarian’ China, Russia, /Zimbabwe and many other nations seen to be opposed to the American interests such as Iran is less factual, ahistorical as well as ideological and therefore off key appreciation on the authors’ part.

Ironically, it is thanks to the toxic, one-upmanship geopolitical calculus of the Western nations under the American leadership that the modern world has been hurtled into a permanent state of instability since the emergence of the latter as the unipolar power following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The cases of Iraqi, Libya, Cuba, Syria, are but a few examples among many where America has run roughshod over the sovereignty of nations it deems hostile to its global interests.

The tendentious interpretation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011) to collapse the Ghaddafi regime by Western nations remains a blot on the UNSC’s copybook. The people of Palestine have corpses and bodily scars to attest to the hypocrisy and double standards of American foreign policy.

According to the UN data, the United States has vetoed dozens of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions critical of Israel, including at least 53 since 1972. This is hardly an epitome of the democratic personality to be graced with silence.

The authors’ silence on the continued pernicious influence of the US in world affairs is staggering. From the authors’ invidious depiction of Russia, China and Zimbabwe, one could be forgiven for assuming that the Western countries have been consistently orthodox, upright and unbending in defending the practice of democracy. The inverse is true. Western nations have clearly understood the maxim that nations have permanent interest, not enemies.

One of the few individuals worthy of the name journalist, John Pilger, reminds us that, “when the late Saddam Hussein was still in power and being courted and armed to the teeth by ‘us’, notably with the technology to build weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi Kurds massacred by him were slow news.

“However, in 1991, when Saddam displeased his sponsors in Washington and London by attacking another of their clients, Kuwait, and was now an official enemy, the plight of the Iraqi Kurds suddenly became a great charitable cause in the West.”

America’s notion of democracy has been on full international display since it de-platformed the Russian media, banned independent media voices which dared to report the events in Ukraine as they see them as well as removed social media users who raise awkward questions about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Noam Chomsky states that, “if…the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality”.

Censure of South Africa for its continued relationship with Zimbabwe on account of the latter’s alleged undemocratic politics needs to go the whole hog to condemn Great Britain’s reneging on the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 in terms of which it had undertaken to finance the land reform programme of Zimbabwe.

Indeed, as the platitude goes, ‘history has no blank pages’. Even the former mayor of London and the outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, conceded as much in one of those rare moments of candidness when he wrote that, ‘Britain fouled up by failing to honour the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement which guaranteed compensation for its settler farmers in independent Zimbabwe…’.

The current Russo-Ukraine War similarly has its roots deep in the history of Western betrayal of the post-Cold War dispensation in which NATO promised the then Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, never to expand so much as ‘one inch to the East’.

Yet from 1999 NATO swallowed up Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic amid much debate and strong Russian objections. From then on NATO would brazenly encircle Russia. With this move, as American author M.S. King explains, ‘the potential for anti-Russian missile bases and adversarial armies had just taken a giant leap eastward, and there wasn’t a damn thing Russia could do about it’. From this moment on the die was cast: Western governments and media cast their relationship with Russia in Manichean terms.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse, author of the book ‘America’s Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory’, argues that the “‘New Cold War’ did not start with Russia’s involvement in the breakaway of Crimea and Donbass from Ukraine, after Ukraine---next door to Russia---had suddenly turned rabidly hostile towards Russia in February 2014’. Zuesse further submits that what the West, in its typical hypocrisy, said was a ‘revolution’ was a coup to dislodge a democratically elected, neutral government of President Victor Yanukovich, and replace it with rabidly anti-Russian, NATO puppet who would do the latter’s nefarious bidding to threaten Russian existential interests.

The authors reduce Africa’s UNSC divided vote on the Russia/Ukraine conflict to the notion of ‘democracy’. But as many analysts have amply demonstrated, democracy is the least of the West’s worries to serve its agenda.

All the 27 African nations which have voted with the Western-sponsored UN Resolution to condemn ‘the Russian invasion’ of Ukraine are allies of the U.S. who are currently benefiting from its ‘largesse’ on a range of matters.

The U.S. has forged close military ties with these putatively democratic African states, including them in turn hosting American military bases and doing joint military operations against jihadists--- which are often the beneficiaries of American armaments!

Interestingly, some of these 27 African nations would not fit the category of democracy according to the Western definitions. These include Côte d’ivoire, Gabon, Libya, Chad, Egypt, Mauretania, Rwanda, and Somalia.

The US’s relations with the developing nations of Africa invokes the words of the South African bard, Mazisi Kunene, that ‘those who feast on the fields of others often are forced into gestures of friendships they do not desire’.

Whether Mills and Hartley calculated their one-sided analytic piece as a shot in the arm for the visit of the American Secretary of State or it was just an ongoing discursive project forming part of the Russian demonology agenda, the results are the same.

They exhibit no posture of working for a fairer world based on the principles of justice, fairness and equality of nations. Their central argument cleaves to the dominant hegemonic project which at once legitimates and underpins the current self-serving Western mono-thematic agenda.

However, ultimately, history will show that South Africa was justified to formulate its National Interest to advance the idea of a better Africa and a better world.

Dan Motaung - Researcher, Social Commentator and Archivist of The 70s Group, which is inspired by thought leaders and liberation activists of the late 1960s and 1970s who created a consciousness that fostered the fight against racism.