The Trump administration’s approach to South Africa has increasingly centred on concerns of persecution against Afrikaners.

The concerns are well founded. South Africa faces a severe crime crisis in which farmers are far more likely to be attacked and killed than is the case for the balance of the population. At odds with false news reports in the legacy and global media, South Africa’s Expropriation Act allows the seizure of any fixed or movable asset without market-related compensation. Nor is it true that nothing has been expropriated to date. The entirety of privately held mineral rights were taken without compensation!

Insofar as it taxes capital, South Africa’s broader empowerment policy is a central reason for the country’s low investment, growth, and employment rates. Much of Pretoria’s foreign policy is designed to threaten Washington’s strategic interests. The Trump administration gets all of that right. And it is right again that reversing policy in all these areas is necessary if South Africa is to be successful.

So why does this newspaper see the doubling down on an Afrikaner-focused policy as wrong, counterproductive and a potentially fatal analytical mistake?

Because it understands two things: that Afrikaners are not alone in suffering the consequences of these policies, and that black South Africans do not support the policies. In fact, it could be argued that Afrikaners suffer the consequences less severely than many black South Africans do, and that black opinion is at the forefront of opposition to many of these policies.

The polling is so important here. Do you support the idea of expropriation without compensation? Strong majorities of black and white South Africans, African National Congress and Democratic Alliance voters, say no. Should companies be forced to comply with empowerment policy racial targets if they create jobs and pay tax? Again, the strong majority position is no. On the narrow question of whether American firms should be exempted from black economic empowerment (BEE), the strong majority answer is yes. Is the United States right to defend its national security interests where these are threatened? Yes, is the strong majority answer.

South African society, at odds with the view in Washington, is a pretty based, right-of-centre, Christian conservative place. The idea of a populace overrun by communist hordes set on racial vengeance, wholly committed to Marxism, and intent on “death to America” is wrong.

Just consider that across the high-rainfall east of the country, the majority of agricultural land by productive value is in black possession but not ownership because the government, at odds with the interests of the people who live there, does not allow tens of thousands of black families to own the land they occupy.

Or consider that this newspaper’s research on farm killings is certain that black commercial farmers are butchered to a degree equivalent to their white compatriots. Or ask black professionals how hard it is to draw any advantage from BEE, because it is simply a deck stacked to enable corruption for a narrow, politically connected elite. Given how dependent many black South Africans remain on services provided by the state, the consequences of corruption and affirmative action depress their living standards far more directly than is the case for many white South Africans in the middle classes.

By casting the property rights, empowerment, and American security issues as an “us versus them”, Afrikaners versus black people dynamic, Washington risks both fracturing and alienating that broader conservative opinion. Drive that alienation too far and black South Africans will turn against America, while white people who are trying to build futures in South Africa will countermand it. Insofar as there are Marxists in the government, this is what they want, and the evolving American policy is becoming an asset they are pleased to have as it can split and poison the conservative middle ground against itself.

The broader Western right thinks it is naïve that a multiracial conservative middle ground might come to thrive in Africa. This newspaper thinks it can. South Africa’s friends would be wrong not to at least try.