The Common Sense’s Diary

A spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry agreed on social media that South Africa should re-arm with nuclear weapons in order to counter the foreign policy of the United States.

That comment was subsequently deleted with the excuse that it was misunderstood.

That’s obviously a lie.

South Africa’s foreign ministry and the presidency loathe the United States (US) and if South Africa still had nukes they would certainly have applied them to pressure the US.

South Africa did once possess nuclear weapons. But a condition of the 1994 transition was that it surrendered these. The reason is that none of the world’s great powers trusted the ANC with the weapons (some feared they might one day turn them on…Washington).

And don’t think that was just Western pressure. The former Soviets had great reservations about the ANC too.

A narrative was subsequently sketched that South Africa disarmed voluntarily in a great statement of moral virtue and example to the rest of the world. This week, the DA repeated that fiction, arguing that the moral virtue of South Africa’s foreign policy rested in part on its disarmament decision.

The truth is rather more brutal: that the last apartheid administration worked closely with global powers to dismantle the nuclear arsenal before the first democratic administration came to power.

The foreign ministry spokesperson is not wrong on the principle of the thing, though. From a strategic perspective the ANC should never have accepted the surrender of the nuclear arsenal. If South Africa had nukes today its global stature and influence would be far greater than it is. The only pity is that it would apply that stature to the wrong ends, i.e. Washington. From a strategic perspective the argument could certainly be made that under a better national administration it would be in South Africa’s national interest to invest in developing nuclear arms again.

That administration, at least from a foreign policy perspective, may still be some time in coming. South Africa has been sharply critical of the US action to arrest Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Violating Venezuela’s sovereignty is cited as the offence.

Nonsense. Maduro ceded that when he crashed Venezuelan GDP by more than 50%, hounded the middle classes out of the country, and turned to fascist autocracy. Not to mention that he then leased Venezuela’s geography to Iran, among others, to threaten US national security. The Trump administration acted correctly and with moral virtue in decapitating the administration and forcing Maduro to stand trial in America.

Every time with the South Africans it is the same thing. If Pretoria backs some tyrant, even minimal scratching beneath the surface reveals that Iran is somewhere in the chain of events. What hold does Tehran have on Pretoria? It must involve money because that has also always been at the heart of the corruption of South Africa’s foreign policy after 1994, whether vis-à-vis Taiwan, Indonesia, Nigeria, or Libya.

The Iranians have now been invited to conduct military exercises in South Africa starting next month. That is a deliberate provocation of the US. In August last year a senior South African general was in Tehran, where he said that South Africa and the Iranians have much in common and need to build closer ties. In the aftermath the fiction was planted in the South African media that those comments were not sanctioned and were at odds with South Africa’s policy. In other words, the general was on a personal gambit that neither the defence minister nor the presidency knew anything about.

Nonsense again.

The Iran tie was again on display when Israel recognised Somaliland. Somaliland is the relatively well-run northern half of Somalia and is pro-West. Its geography at the gateway to the Red Sea makes it a very effective counter to Iranian influence in the Middle East. Israel has now taken full advantage of that, which is why the South Africans have an issue with it, this time citing the sanctity of colonial borders as the principle violated by the Israelis.

Iran itself is having a tough time. The currency has lost so much value that merchants and the middle classes can no longer easily afford the goods they once traded and enjoyed. That has sparked street protests.

But beneath these lies something else. Polls for the Iranian government show that only half of Iranians are religiously observant, a majority support dropping any requirement that women wear headscarves, more than half feel that religious belief should not be a factor in civil service employment, and by a margin of almost 2:1 Iranians support dropping their country’s nuclear weapons programme. The religious zealotry of the administration, which manifests as a determination to exterminate the West, is quite at odds with public opinion.

Things are well primed, therefore, for the military to topple the current religious leadership and replace it with a group more aligned to public sentiment and economic sense. That way at least, the military, which is frighteningly corrupt, will be able to continue enjoying the spoils of power.

That may be a very good thing for South Africa, as via such toppling what hold Iran has on Pretoria might be reduced and thereby open the way for South Africa’s government also to pursue a foreign policy aligned to public sentiment and economic sense. These two events may follow each other like night follows day.