NONTOBEKO HLELA: Why SA’s Ukraine policy should not be in lockstep with the West’s

Most South Africans, like most Americans, believe that they are exceptional. This is the view that leads South Africans to talk about the rest of the African continent as “Africa”, as if SA is not in Africa, and to assume our country is “not like” the other countries in Africa. 

On September 11 2013, President Vladimir Putin of Russia wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he spoke about his relationship with then US president Barack Obama, American foreign policy and the UN’s role, and responded to remarks Obama had made in an address to the American people on Syria.  Putin cautioned Americans about their belief that they are exceptional:

“I would rather disagree with a case he [Obama] made on American exceptionalism, stating that the US’s policy is 'what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional'. It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

Powerful forces in SA hold both to exceptionalism and to the view that they are Western, and that it is an aberration that they find themselves on the African continent. This leads to a desire for our foreign policy to be in lockstep with the US, and the West in general. It is this exceptionalism that makes many journalists, politicians, pundits and other actors in SA howl at Pretoria for choosing to pursue dialogue. This uncritical identification with the West leads to our foreign policy being described as confused and as putting SA on the wrong side of history. It results in any attempt to raise the issue of the evident hypocrisy in Western foreign policy being swiftly silenced with the now standard allegation of “whataboutism”.

We find ourselves in a situation in which any attempt to simultaneously condemn the deaths of innocent civilians in Ukraine and to call for similar concern for all conflicts no matter who is waging them being presented as immoral, as if it is complicity with the suffering in Ukraine rather than a call to take all suffering seriously. The people who refuse to recognise Western hypocrisy did not question SA’s ill-advised 2011 support for the no-fly zone over Libya. This opened the door for the total ruin of Libya, the breakout of civil war, a humanitarian crisis, and the internal and external displacement of hundreds of thousands of Libyans. More than 10 years after the no-fly zone over Libya, the country is in a worse situation than before and the people now left to fend for themselves are less secure.

What the critics of Pretoria’s foreign policy fail to recognise is that in international relations countries’ foreign policy decisions are not just about what is right or moral but also about strategic self-interest. This holds especially so in the school of thought referred to as realism. Any international relations 101 student will tell you that states always act in accordance with their national interests, which can include self-preservation, military security, economic prosperity and influence over other states. 

This is especially so for great powers that guard their security through spheres of interest. The US does this through the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which cautioned European powers to respect the Western hemisphere as its sphere of influence. The US continues to enforce this doctrine and has evoked it a number of times. In the late 1970s the US added another doctrine to its arsenal, the Carter Doctrine, which extends America’s interests to the Persian Gulf. Former president Jimmy Carter stated: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the USA, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” 

A lot of discussion around what is happening in Eastern Europe has failed to take this into consideration and to be cognisant of how states, and in particular big powers, act in international relations. Most have questioned what makes Russia think it can invade Ukraine or that it can stop Ukrainians from joining the EU or Nato if that is what it wants. This type of logic fails to understand that, as in most things, international relations has its own norms that countries normatively agree to live by, and when one falls out of step with this there are consequences, which unfortunately can lead to war and the deaths of innocents.

Ukraine knows this, yet it was led to believe that it could be exceptional and behave in a way that would threaten the big power on its doorstep because it was being courted by another big power thousands of miles away, one whose national and strategic interests were not going to be threatened by its violation of the international relations norms. Ukraine believed it would be admitted into Nato and the EU, but that hasn’t happened. At the start of the conflict it thought it would be fast-tracked into Nato, and that hasn’t happened. To do so now would be to expand the conflict, and the EU and US know this.

In his pre-Ukraine foray speech, Putin said: “As Nato expands to the east, with every passing year, the situation for our country is getting worse and more dangerous. Moreover, in recent days the leadership of Nato has been openly talking about the need to speed up, force the advancement of the alliance’s infrastructure to the borders of Russia. In other words, they are doubling down on their position. We can no longer just watch what is happening. It would be absolutely irresponsible on our part.” 

His argument is in line with a key tenant of realism, which is that security concerns are always paramount and that countries will act if they feel that they are being threatened. John Mearsheimer, a well-known American international relations academic, argued this very point in a 2015 University of Chicago lecture that has now been viewed more than 23-million times.

Moscow’s security concerns have been dismissed as rubbish and Putin said to be untrustworthy. Yet, we are supposed to believe US President Joe Biden’s utterance that Putin “cannot remain in power” to not mean regime change. Decades of US foreign policy suggest that that is exactly what Biden was calling for. The refusal by the West to recognise its culpability for the causes of the ongoing conflict, the pretence that they were unaware of Russia’s red line and their failure to recognise Russian power, interests and feelings of insecurity, will further prolong the destruction of Ukraine.

American diplomats and policymakers have warned against Nato expansion for years. In 1990, George F Kennan, the American diplomat who formulated America’s Cold War policy of containment, called the expansion of Nato into central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Brent Scowcroft a national security adviser under presidents Gerald Ford and George HW Bush, also warned against this, saying: “They complained, but they acquiesced.... I underestimated what it was really doing to Russian attitudes. I think we all did. We were humiliating Russia, not intentionally, but nevertheless that was the net result.” In 1997, US legislators such as Tom Harkin (Iowa Democrat) and Paul Wellstone (Minnesota Democrat)) wrote a letter to US president Bill Clinton urging him against Nato expansion, and another letter signed by 40 former senior officials, ambassadors and government experts who called the expansion of Nato “a policy error of historic proportions”. These warnings were not heeded.

Nelson Mandela’s name has been evoked to claim that he would have been a vociferous critic of Moscow, but it is not clear that this is correct. Mandela often took different foreign policy stances to what the West, and in particular the US, did. This can be seen in his standpoint on Cuba, Libya, Iran and Palestine, where in the face of US criticism for continuing relations with these countries he stated: “I’m not going to take advice as to who my friends should be. The enemies of the West are not my enemies, and I’m not prepared to be dictated to at all by anybody.”

In the past, SA was able to punch above its weight, aided by Mandela’s stature, but those days are long gone. Therefore, whether SA comes out in a visceral attack on Russia, as some would like to see, will not change Russia’s position, and it will not help the Ukrainian people in any way. However, if SA has really been approached within the Brics club of countries to open a dialogue with Russia this should be welcomed and encouraged. The only way that this conflict ends, and Ukrainians stop dying, is by both parties going to the table and by the US and its allies ending some of the economic warfare they have brought to bear on Russia and her people. And, by Western Europe and the US backing away from their encroachment on Russia’s sphere of influence, in the same way that the US would not allow any power to encroach on its sphere of influence.

As South Africans we need to demand as clear a foreign policy from our government in response to suffering and atrocities taking place in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen and Zimbabwe. The suffering in these countries must carry the same weight as the suffering in Ukraine. We need to equally call out the destructive economic warfare the US and its allies continues to wage on countries such as Cuba

We cannot as South Africans and Africans be party to the tendency that continues to value certain lives more and sees their suffering as being worse than those of black and brown people. It is long past time that we fully internalise that we are not part of the West, and that we need to place the interests of Africa, and the global south more widely, at the centre of our analytical and moral understanding of global affairs.

• Hlela is a researcher for the SA office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, a Global South think-tank