TERENCE CORRIGAN: SA must avoid appealing to morality in relations with US - Business Day
Terence Corrigan
Ebrahim Rasool, who is set to take up SA’s ambassadorship to the US, will no doubt be seized with how he will use this office to engage with the changed realities of the US — how to order SA’s relationship with the impending second presidency of Donald Trump.
In this he is joined by a raft of commentators and whatever other community of South Africans notices such things. The prospect of a second Trump presidency has been met in many quarters with something verging on hysteria. To his credit, Rasool has come across as remarkably sanguine.
He has described himself as SA’s “explainer-in-chief”. This, he told an interviewer, was part of reasserting the country’s global role as a “moral superpower”, a role he believes has been lost owing to the various challenges SA has experienced in recent years.
It is difficult to know whether he genuinely believes this, as he has previously used exactly this formulation to describe the country. “I don’t think South Africans have realised how well poised we are to become a moral superpower,” he said at a leadership summit in 2014. At the time he represented the country on behalf of the government of then-president Jacob Zuma.
By then, the ongoing ravages of “state capture” were clearly visible. In fact, the ambassador’s comments followed mere months after the public protector’s report, “Secure in Comfort,” which set out in detail the extravagant expenditure of state funds on Zuma’s private Nkandla homestead.
Still, the moral claims of SA foreign policy have a long pedigree. In a 1993 article published under Nelson Mandela’s byline, SA was committed to advancing human rights as “the light that guides our foreign affairs” and to being at “the forefront of global efforts to promote and foster democratic systems of government”.
This was probably never realistic — and a unique moral standing was always going to be a transitory phenomenon. SA’s authorities rapidly jettisoned this posture in actuality and even in rhetoric. After all, to be convincing, moral positions must be universally upheld and SA was simply too committed — for historical or ideological or geopolitical reasons — to do so regarding old and new allies.
Thus, then deputy foreign affairs minister Aziz Pahad could declare after visiting China: “I think we all agree that there are specificities in each country which are not universal forms of human rights.”
That was revealing. Logically, if a “human right” is not “universal”, it is by definition not a human right at all — or it might be recognised as such but the SA state is consciously not going to hold certain transgressors to account. Either way, this reasoning made nonsense of the notion that SA was wedded to moral principles.
On democracy promotion, the country’s diplomatic stance has been uneven and of limited consequence. If anything, the complicity of the SA government in subverting a democratic challenge to the incumbency of Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe fatally undermined the moralistic narrative. Criticism of Zanu-PF “is not going to happen as long as this government is in power”, said then foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma. And earlier this year, former international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor would deny even knowing what an authoritarian country was — a definition was not in her “logbook”.
In mitigation, SA can at least claim to be acting as any normal state, not least like the US. As Samuel P Huntington argued, “Hypocrisy, double standards and ‘but nots’ are the price of universalist pretensions.”
Equally importantly, the SA state has failed its own citizens in many respects. True, there were considerable achievements in the maintenance of a constitutional democracy. But there is also a record of anaemic economic performance, dire policy missteps (such as the Thabo Mbeki-era approach to HIV/Aids) and the systematic abuse and suborning of state institutions as the ANC strove to assert its “hegemony”.
The consequences are reflected in a country whose state is unable to perform many of its responsibilities — having even a very tenuous ability to exert physical control, as was apparent during the riots in July 2021 — and whose future progress is far from assured.
Domestic failings invariably spill into foreign projection, and a state unable to manage itself is ill-positioned to speak with authority on the management of global affairs.
Remember, too, that SA is a sovereign state with agency in its foreign affairs. Over the years it has chosen a close association with authoritarian peers. It has also — relevant to Rasool’s mission — adopted numerous positions at odds with those of the US.
The posture of the SA state towards the US has been ambivalent, and not entirely friendly; the posture of the ANC has been overtly and aggressively hostile. For example, the proposed renaming of Sandton Drive to Leila Khaled Drive is expressly intended by the ANC as an insult to the US. For better or worse, this is all now part of the fabric of the relationship.
All told, the new SA ambassador in Washington would be well advised to avoid appealing to morality. It is an artefact of the 1990s and is now grotesquely unconvincing. Nor is “explaining” entirely helpful; the stances of the SA state are clear. It’s the reality, not the perception, that is the issue. Besides, as the aphorism goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
To his credit Rasool has identified the tenor of the relationship under a Trump presidency as “transactional”, with economic matters featuring prominently. This is hardly an original insight but does seem correct in view of the incoming president’s character and business background.
To make this happen, a good dose of pragmatism and adroit use of SA’s diplomatic offices in the US will be necessary. And, recognising that SA does not see itself as a US ally or a friend, it makes sense to keep the objectives limited and prioritised. A proposition that offers dollar-and-cents benefits to the US in exchange for rand-and-cents benefits for SA may be the most compelling one.
Rather than acting as “explainer-in-chief” or a moral superhero, the success of the ambassador’s mission will hinge on whether he can master — to use a current cliché — “the art of the deal”. Think trade and tourism, not UN reform and Palestinian statehood.
The word from the US is that since SA’s elections our embassy has assumed a more visible presence. This is positive. Whether Rasool can parse that into gains for the country will depend on how competently and realistically he, and the government he represents, attempts to position the country’s diplomacy.
Corrigan is projects and publications manager at the Institute of Race Relations.