Apology or not from the US ambassador in South Africa, the government’s slack handling of the visit of the Russian freighter the Lady R to the Simon’s Town naval base last year has become a huge deal from which there is no easy out.
The American position continues to be that it strongly believes we have been selling weapons to Russia while it occupies, brutally, vast parts of Ukraine in a war that breaks everything we claim we stand against.
Except we stand with Russia. Its commercial ships have special access to our naval base, its president to our president. Its aircraft use our military bases to deliver mail.
Our defence minister is a huge fan and as Pretoria tries to squirm away from the notion that we have moved into the Russian camp, claiming that we are nonaligned — a meaningless concept given that most members of the UN are also nonaligned and most have voted more than once to condemn the Russian invasion — the head of the South African army pops up in Moscow to discuss combat readiness with the comrades.
We have, to use a maritime phrase, become unmoored from the West and there will be a terrible price to pay.
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