NONTOBEKO HLELA: US tries to launder image with hardball response to Russia’s Ukraine war

Though Russia paid the highest price for the defeat of fascism in Europe, the US certainly played a key role too. This has for many years enabled the US to present itself as the de facto defender of democracy worldwide.

Republican and Democratic US administrations promise to “protect free nations” and “promote democracy”, be it through ideological means, economic inducements or military intervention.

Of course, this is not how many countries and people in the formerly colonised world see things. Across the global South there is a strong memory of the many coups and invasions the US has launched or promoted against other countries, including in many instances against elected governments, to install leaders more pliable to its policies. For years the US supported and armed the apartheid state in SA.

But many Americans still see their country as the best country to live in and the world’s greatest democracy. Yet African Americans and indigenous Americans have never been fully accorded the rights conferred on white Americans.

Some of those personal, democratic rights and liberties have been whittled away. This became more pronounced under the one US president who never called himself a democrat or a defender of free nations — Donald J Trump.

The US prides itself on freedom of choice, but with the repealing of Roe v Wade on June 24 last year, the supreme court ensured women could not have a choice about their bodies and what happens to them. For decades Texas has narrowed access to abortion, while it has cut social spending and publicly funded healthcare.

On September 1 2021 the Texas Senate passed Bill 8, which prohibits an abortion at all stages of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape or incest. Only women at risk of death due to the pregnancy can have an abortion. Texas has the US’s worst rate of maternal deaths, and black women comprise an inordinate share in these deaths.

Not only does Texas prevent people from making intensely personal choices about their bodies and for their families, but like other red states it has been making it difficult for people, especially of colour, to be able to ensure their hard-fought rights are recognised by casting their vote.

For a country that claims to be the defender of democracy wanting fewer people to vote goes against everything democracy is supposed to stand for. This makes a mockery of its claim to be a bastion of democracy and the arbiter of free and fair elections worldwide.

One of the most glaring examples of the undermining of democracy and the rule of law arising from the US is Trump’s active advocacy for the 2020 election results to be overturned. This caused him to encourage and applaud the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021, calling them “patriots” and “peaceful” people. The attempted insurrection against democracy in the attacks on the Congress reverberated worldwide and shook the foundations of US democracy.

It is said that when the US coughs, the rest of the world catches a cold. Many were not entirely surprised when on January 8 supporters of Jair Bolsanaro, Brazil’s Trump-styled former president, attempted a coup d’état to get rid of democratically elected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by storming the National Congress, the supreme court, and the presidential palace in Brasilia.

Undermined

In SA we are familiar with political elites who came to power through democratic means opposing democratic institutions. SA politicians have repeatedly undermined parliament, got rid of or weakened institutions such as the Scorpions that were making their lives uncomfortable, questioned the authority of the courts and attacked individual judges.

As with Trump’s US, anti-immigrant sentiment has been rising in SA. Here it festers from the right, the centre and the pseudo-left, with the government endorsing this with moves to expel hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans and new xenophobic labour laws in the offing.

With the high levels of unemployment in SA, populist demagogues find fertile ground for their xenophobic seeds to flourish.

After all, why should those who have never benefited from democracy not be sceptical of its virtues? Indeed, why should the middle classes, now living without electricity and water and subjected to constant threats of crime and violence, not be attracted to a strong man promising to “drain the swamp”?

The admiration for Rwanda as a state that is seen to work despite its sketchy democratic record, often expressed by the middle classes, is another indication of this.

Unlike those in Brazil, the antidemocratic forces here are not trailing in the wake of Trump. Antidemocratic forces in SA have cynically misused nationalism and anticolonialism to justify their grim politics. Ironically, these forces may have appreciated that Trump railed against the international system the US has built.

At the 2018 UN General Assembly he launched an attack on international institutions and international law, announcing that the US would be scaling back its support of UN peacekeeping missions and declaring that “we [the US] reject globalism and embrace the doctrine of patriotism”.

Under Joe Biden that has changed, swiftly. The US has taken and stuck to a hard line in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going as far as not to encourage and support the prospect of talks between the warring nations.

Claw back

This can be viewed as a way for the US to claw back its place in international affairs by making it appear relevant again, and as it presents the war in Ukraine as a war between authoritarianism and democracy. It is moving to relegitimise itself as a global power broker after it lost so much global standing during the Trump years and after the catastrophe of the war in Iraq that took over 1-million lives and left the country in ruins.

This hard-line approach is also a way for the US to counter China’s appeal and influence in Europe. Since 2020, China has been the EU’s biggest trading partner for manufactured goods. The US has been clear that it wants to counter China’s rise, with Biden stating: “China has an overall goal to become ... the most powerful country in the world ... That’s not going to happen on my watch.”

The US appearing to become the guarantor of liberal democracy in Ukraine by providing weapons and encouraging the EU to do the same is another way for it to keep the EU on side for when the US finally makes a move in the South China Seas.

The question for Africa is how to build its own sovereignty and strong democratic institutions. Those who bay, in a well-orchestrated chorus, for it to become a client state of the US have no vision of a genuinely democratic future for Africa, one in which Africa takes its place among equals on the global stage.

It is as if Africa should only exist in permanent subservience to the US in particular, and the West in general. Advocacy for African sovereignty and solidarity is viewed as a threat to be quashed.

Those who hide behind the crude misuse of nationalism to legitimate crudely kleptocratic politics are simply exploiting the legitimate aspiration of real sovereignty for their own socially and politically corrosive interests.

What is needed is a modern form of the old commitment to African sovereignty, and a return to Pan-Africanism so that Africa can take its place in the world as an equal among equals.

• Hlela, a former intelligence officer and diplomat, is employed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, but has been seconded to the office of the national security adviser as a researcher. She writes in her personal capacity.