I might be forgiven for saying I told you so. Long before Donald Trump became president, I was warning on these pages that we had no business picking a fight with the US.
After Trump’s imposition of a 30% tariff, our leaders have been arguing that the tariff does not make sense because South African companies are not a threat to US business. Of course they are not, our economy makes up 0.5% of global GDP and the US about 25%.
I have also heard Trump say we are not the only country on which the US has imposed tariffs. The real point is that we have made foreign policy choices that Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, see as inimical to their country’s national interests. We chose to ally ourselves with China, Russia, Iran and many other countries that are enemies of the US.
Now, I know we say we are not going to allow any other country to impose its imperialist designs on us. That sounds great if you are a liberation movement, but running a government is quite a different matter. As government you are responsible not just for members of your party, but for the lives of millions whose jobs will be lost on the altar of militant ideology. People do not eat ideological shibboleths from a bygone era. Suffice to say that the radicals are living luxurious lives in the richest suburbs of Johannesburg. To the poor and “wretched of the earth”, they might as well say “let them eat cake”.
Does our government have the intellectual resources to engage with the US government? I have lived in the US for 20 years, as a graduate student and an academic. In my student days, particularly in the intellectual capital of America, Boston, the US was teeming with South Africans. Not only that, but there was a vast network of American organisations supporting our struggle and our transition to democracy. Since I returned almost 10 years ago, I would be hard-pressed to say I have met a handful of South Africans, certainly not in the institutions that matter — think-tanks, universities and media. And yet, in the US, foreign policy is a function of domestic lobbying, which we simply do not have, and that is because we disengaged with our domestic allies.
I know that as a country we do not have much time for intellectuals. But the inescapable truism is that, as Mahmood Mamdani once observed, “there can be no political revolution without an intellectual revolution”. Conversely, there can be no intellectual revolution without a political revolution, which South Africans showed by voting with their feet, walking away from the ANC. We should know better than to rely on political parties to run our lives.
South Africa may not prioritise intellectual development, but other countries do. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology most of my classmates were from China, Japan, Brazil, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. These were not party hacks, and yet their governments saw the necessity of sending them out to the best academic institutions in the world. At about the same time I argued for exactly such a programme. Can you imagine the quality of our government, especially our foreign policy, if we had developed such a programme?
But the US government, including their foreign policy, is informed by ideas that emanate from think-tanks. On the liberal left would be the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and on the right are the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which laid the foundations for the Trump administration’s Project 2025. Publications such as Foreign Affairs include contributions from people all over the US and the world without distinction by party political affiliation.
Even if Democrats were to take over Congress, nothing is going to change the American view of our foreign policy, unless we change it.
All these institutions are a stone’s throw from the White House and Congress, but we hardly engage with the US Congress. Our attention is always on the president, forgetting the central role Congress plays in shaping legislation. Those are the people who may put the final nail in the coffin of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa). And this is because our foreign policy has alienated even the liberal members of Congress. Even if Democrats were to take over Congress, nothing is going to change the American view of our foreign policy, unless we change it.
My other question: how can we have meaningful engagement with the US if we do not understand the country’s idiom?
Some time back, I had a conversation with a senior government official who is part of our country’s foreign team. As we spoke, he kept mentioning “DEI”. I was barely following the conversation until it became clear that he was talking about D.E.I — diversity, equity and inclusion. There was nothing wrong about what he was saying, but if I, a fellow South African, could not understand him, how much more exasperating that must be for his American counterparts.
The high point of our diplomacy in the US was during the ambassadorship of Franklin Sonn. The man was charismatic, polished, articulate and, more importantly, engaged with American civil society. And he was followed by someone just as sophisticated, Barbara Masekela, and then Ebrahim Rasool, even though I do not understand why Rasool would say derogatory things about the head of state of the very country that would be hosting him. As former president Thabo Mbeki put it, “as a diplomat you do not represent yourself, you cannot speak in your private capacity, there is no private capacity”.
Suffice to say, there should be a background check of whoever the government appoints as ambassador or special envoy. Stay away from party cadres and ideologues. I am sure there are many South Africans who have not rankled Trump or his government. Try a business person, for crying out loud. Someone with the requisite political savvy, intellectual depth and breadth and a cosmopolitan outlook. The American relationship is too important to the welfare of the South African people to be left to “comrades”, even if that means swallowing ideological pride and principle. That person does not have to be a member of the ANC, even though that’s asking for too much from a ruling party to which merit means nothing. But please try it, even if just for once.
• Mangcu is professor of sociology and history at The George Washington University
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