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On the anniversary of Russia’s attempted anschluss of Ukraine, President Joseph Biden joined President Volodymyr Zelensky for a stroll through Kyiv, a city, the sirens reminded us, facing the same terror Londoners faced when Hitler unleashed his V2 rockets in the closing stages of World War II.

Pretoria marked the occasion by conducting exercises with a Russian frigate on which was painted Z, President Vladimir Putin’s swastika. A highlight of the exercise, we were told, would be the launch of a hypersonic Zirkon missile, one of the vergeltungswaffen— vengeance weapons — Putin hopes will make Russia great again. The plan was later scrapped.

A year ago, the Department of International’s Relations and Cooperation called on Russia to “immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine in line with the United Nations Charter.” On Thursday, South Africa refused to join 141 members of the UN General Assembly in reiterating that call. No surprise there.

Last month Naledi Pandor, the minister of foreign affairs, welcomed Putin’s Ribbentrop, Sergei Lavrov, and said it would be “simplistic and infantile” to call on Russia to comply with the Charter while arms were pouring into the region, an argument South Africa’s UN representative duly repeated on Thursday.

Does the Minister really believe that if the West stopped helping Ukraine defend itself, Putin would meekly call off the whole thing off? 

What’s infantile is calling “friend and partner” a regime that has set a legion of Eugene De Kocks  recruited by the loathsome Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group upon the population of an utterly unthreatening  neighbour. 

Its great men gone, the ANC’s moral blindness is indicative of how deeply the old Russia colonized the minds of the movement’s lesser cadres. The imishini Putin’s predecessors supplied Umkhonto did little to free SA. The ideology that came with the guns, which Putin has disavowed in favor of neo-medievalism, has helped ensure that SA remains the most unequal society on earth 

True, Russia’s generals are the same as ever. They proved as useless in their opening drive on Kyiv as they did against the SADF on the Lomba River in 1987 . The nimbler Cubans had to save the day. The only real favor Soviet Russia ever did for the disenfranchised South African majority was to collapse.

On September 4, 1939, Prime Minister JBM Hertzog, founder of the National Party, proposed that South Africa remain neutral when Hitler invaded Poland.  “To him”, Herman Giliomee wrote in his definitive history, The Afrikaners, “Britain and France had brought war on themselves with the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles in 1919.”

Hertzog had a point about Versailles. The same point could be made about Western policy after the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. In each instance, hubris and path dependence blinded the victors. John Maynard Keynes and Jan Smuts tried to warn them in 1919, as did George Kennan in the 1990’s. That these warnings went unheeded may help explain the subsequent rise of Nazism and Putinism, but it does not absolve Hitler of his depravity, nor Putin and his siloviki — mostly ex-KGB hoods like old Mozambique hand Igor Sechin  —  of theirs. The distinction between explain and excuse eluded Hertzog then and eludes the ANC now.

Putin has justified his invasion on multiple grounds. Zelensky, though Jewish, is a Nazi. Ukraine is not a country. And here’s what Lavrov had to say in March last year: “This is not actually about Ukraine at all. It reflects the battle of what the world order will look like. Will it be a world in which the  West will lead everyone with impunity and without question or will it be something different.”

That Pretoria should want an overhaul of the global order is laudable. An international system that still largely reflects the world as it was in 1945 is long overdue for rebalancing.   By century’s end four in every ten human beings will be African. Without Africa’s minerals and forests, and unless Africa can achieve low-carbon industrialisation, the planet doesn’t stand much of a chance against climate change and associated upheavals. 

The world needs new rules. The question is who should write them.  In South Africa’s case the people’s choice does not seem to match the ANC’s. Late last year, pollsters for the Munich Security Conference, a think tank, asked citizens of 11 countries: “Whose rules would you prefer to live by?” US rules, said 29 percent of South Africans. Europe’s, said 21 percent. Russian and Chinese rules were the choice of 6 percent and 7 percent respectively. “Economically developing countries” accounted for the balance.

So it would seem that by a rather large margin South Africans don’t want a new world order designed by the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party.  Nor, according to the same poll, do Brazilians and Indians. And who can blame them? Do you want to live in a world where the rules are written by people who poison their critics with polonium and throw them out of windows like Ahmed Timol, and where a tweet can land you in a labour camp?

There may be a lot of hypocrisy in the West, but, to borrow Le Rochefoucauld’s maxim, the West’s hypocrisy is a vice that at least pays homage to virtue. The Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was a crime, pure and simple, but the two leaders genuinely thought they were liberating Iraqis from a murderous despot. They were reckless, deceitful and stupid, but weren’t trying to rub a country off the map because they believed it had no right to independent existence. And, by the way, how many African lives did Russia, or China, save from HIV/AIDS?

Will Pretoria pay a price for clinging to Putin’s apron strings? The congressional resolution five mostly first-year Republicans introduced last week is nugatory as it stands but may be an omen of trouble when the African Growth and Opportunity Act comes up for renewal in 2025. The administration is smarter than that and will keep trying to engage constructively. US policy makers are less worried about SA’s foreign alignments than the spectacle of it slouching towards Venezuelan dystopia.

Biden, as Treasury secretary Janet Yellen demonstrated on her recent African tour, would like to maintain the polite fiction that Washington’s renewed attention to Africa is driven by a recognition of Africa’s indispensability in meeting the globe’s challenges rather than any motive as shabby as big power competition.

Besides, if the US and its allies were to make make too much of Putin’s attempts to raise Russia’s profile in Africa, they would, in a sense, be letting him own them. Judo champion that he once was, he would be getting them to concede that Russia is once again a great power, rather than what it is: a kleptocratic, resource-dependent rogue state with a GDP the smaller than South Korea’s, whose best minds are fleeing and which commands global attention principally because of its capacity, and propensity, to kill people.  

Published in Business Day February 27, 2023

The trick in analyzing elections and the campaigns leading up to them is to distinguish between noise and signal. The latest US midterms, which conclude on Tuesday after some weeks of early voting, have been toxically noisy and have featured some unusually noisome candidates on the Republican side. But whatever the outcome when the votes are finally tallied, it would be premature to see them signaling the demise of American democracy, a hardy beast.

Yes, 300 top-tier Republican candidates, give or take, either denied or refused to affirm that President Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, preferring out of cowardice or cynicism, or in a fever dream, to go along with his predecessor’s Big Lie. Some played word games when asked whether they would accept their own defeat. And, yes, some were running for, and winning, state house offices with powers to decide whose votes they will count next time. 

But none of these clowns is likely to overthrow the Constitution, packed though the Supreme Court may be with Donald Trump’s selections. Over time, the courts and old-fashioned politics, once the Democratic party relearns how to do them properly, will right the ship.

Why then did Biden see fit to deliver a national address on Thursday decrying the threat to democracy posed by conspiracy-spinning “MAGA Republicans”, their gunned-up bully boys, and the derangement they seem to trigger in the likes of hammer-wielding David DePape, would be torturer of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? This was the president’s second big speech on the subject in two months, and possibly one too many. However sincerely meant, it smacked of desperate electioneering, a last-minute move to scare up votes.

Americans, the polls say, are concerned about the health of their republic in the wake of the January 6^th, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill, but the congressional hearings on that episode and how Trump instigated it seem to have squibbed. Right now, the spiraling cost of living, petrol in particular, worries voters a lot more.  That does not mean they are done with democracy. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and others on the NatCon — national conservative — right, may salivate over Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Most of their fellow citizens do not. 

If, when the votes are counted – it could take a while – the Democrats no longer control the House of Representatives (which is almost certain) and the Senate (which is more than conceivable), they can console themselves that this is what nearly always happens to a president’s party halfway through his first term, especially when his favorability ratings are underwater, as Biden’s are, and fewer than one in five voters think the country is “on the right track”.

There was a moment in the (northern hemisphere) summer when the odds looked beatable. Biden had scored some notable legislative wins with measures to control drug prices, invest in green infrastructure, reshore the manufacture of computer chips, ease restrictions on domestic energy production and ramp up tax collection from the wealthy. These should have scored well with swing voters and the various factions of the Democratic base, if not with all equally.

The Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority helped by stripping America’s women of control over their own bodies, freeing the more medieval states to reimpose draconian abortion bans which had been unconstitutional since the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. That looked like a gamechanger for the Democrats, especially after voters in heavily Republican Kansas decisively blocked their legislature from going full Handmaid’s Tale.

In recent weeks, however, generic polls – as opposed to those tracking individual races — showed momentum building for the Republicans who had done themselves some good by dialing back their abortion jihadism and 2020 election denial. Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who advised the ANC in 1994, credited a barrage of Republican messaging, reinforced by Fox, the party’s propaganda arm, that painted Democrats as “pro-crime”.

Crime is an issue on which Democratic elites have left themselves flat-footed as the party of “defund the police”, an idea deeply unpopular with working class voters of all backgrounds for whom rising rates of murder and robbery post-pandemic are part of their lived experience. For Republicans looking to pick up swing votes in ethnic constituencies that Democrats have tended to take for granted, crime is a winner. It also works with bigots for whom crime is code for persons of colour.

Absent a black swan event, Biden will be governing by executive order and veto pen for the next two years while the lunatics take over the asylum on Capitol Hill. If his Democrats hang onto the Senate, he will at least be able to appoint federal judges and fill a Supreme Court vacancy should one fall open.

Assuming Kevin McCarthy replaces Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, it will be interesting to see whether he grows a spine. Hitherto, he has been Basil Fawlty to Trump’s Sybil. Will he let himself be shoved around by Georgia representative and Trumpette Marjorie Taylor Greene who attributed California’s wildfires to a space laser part owned by the Rothschilds? Will he rein in those like her who want to make impeachment of Biden job one for the new Congress?

Impeachment or no, there will be a slew of oversight hearings – show trials, really – designed to destroy the reputations of Anthony Fauci, now Biden’s chief medical adviser, for failing to toe the Trump party line, whatever it was, on Covid;  Attorney General Merrick Garland, for pursuing Trump’s document thefts and other crimes; Secretary of Homeland  Security Alejandro Mayorkas, for failing to seal the borders; and, of course, Hunter Biden, the tortured soul they will hound, quite literally one fears, to death, in order to get at his father. This is the party, remember, that pushed Hillary and Bill Clinton’s lawyer and friend Vince Foster to suicide in the early years of Bill’s presidency. They are a savage lot.

Other than inquisition, the Republican majority in the House has the power to undermine the full faith and credit of the United States by refusing to raise the federal debt limit unless its demands are satisfied. Perhaps, McCarthy and co. will use that power judiciously. Perhaps they will use it to kill any measure that offends the interests – fossil fuel and pharmaceutical, for example – that fills their campaign coffers. They will certainly use it with a view to winning back the White House for Trump or whoever in 2024.

Vladimir Putin will obviously be watching closely. He must be enjoying the noise. We are in scoundrel time, to borrow Lillian Hellman’s phrase. But the center ultimately will hold. That, hard as it is to discern, is the signal.

Published in Business Day November 7, 2022