Letter: Why SA will not play policeman in Brics - BusinessLIVE

Rowan Polovin’s thoughts on SA’s foreign policy are at once correct and misplaced. (“Government has moral responsibility to apply foreign policies consistently”, January 17).   

He is entirely correct to point to the government and the ANC’s obsessive condemnation of Israel, and to the double standards (perhaps a lack of any standards would be more appropriate) it exhibits when dealing with certain other countries. This has been glaringly on display in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However, it is misplaced to believe this arises from the “nostalgic political relevance of yesteryear”. Historical ties and sympathies may play a role in SA’s positioning, but they are not decisive. Instead, SA’s diplomatic stance is an outgrowth of a worldview conditioned by the ideology of a liberation movement. It is an expression of how the ANC sees things today: geopolitics as a struggle against imperialism, a phenomenon perpetuated exclusively by “Western” capitalist nations or their surrogates against the rest of the world.

From this perspective, whatever misdeeds might be committed by nonimperialist powers will always pale into insignificance when measured against the omnipresent imperialist threat. And so, Israel — within this ideological framework, essentially an illegitimate and inauthentic presence in the region — will always be the ultimate problem in the Middle East. And even as Russian forces occupy Ukraine, the real problem is Nato and the quisling Ukrainian regime’s desire for closer links to the West.

The same reasoning is applied to protesters in Venezuela, dissidents in Cuba or opposition groups in Zimbabwe. To answer Polovin’s rhetorical question directly: no, SA will not use its Brics presidency to hold “Russia and others” to account. To suggest as much is to misunderstand the very nature of the country’s foreign policy, and what Brics means to the government and the governing party.

Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2023-01-19-letter-why-sa-will-not-play-policeman-in-brics/