South Africa’s newly appointed ambassador to Washington faces the critical challenge of resetting a strained bilateral relationship with the US, demanding shrewd diplomatic skill, honest self-reflection, and bold policy shifts back home to secure a productive partnership with the Trump administration. Greg Mills and Ray Hartley offer some study notes on what could work.
Congratulations on your appointment as South Africa’s ambassador to Washington. It is a well-deserved honour for a loyal public servant.
It is also timely. South Africa needs to improve its relations with the world’s largest economy and most powerful, if not omnipotent, military. Your appointment at this juncture is a recognition both of how much has been achieved in the journey from apartheid to democracy, in which you played an important part, and yet how potholed and uncertain the road ahead has become over the last three decades.
The mismatch between the ANC’s worn rhetoric of a better life for all and the conflicting reality of deteriorating services and diminishing job opportunities has never been starker. The underlying problem is a rate of economic growth that can do little more than appease the elite and feed those who already have jobs. This circumstance reflects a lack of competitive openings for private sector investors, contrasting with an unwillingness to lift the deadening hand of the state from crucial, enabling services.
This thread of statism is not an ANC affliction, of course, but its lack of comparative efficiency is.
READ | FIRST TAKE: Roelf Meyer faces similar task in DC as he did after Boipatong in 1992
Now, it goes without saying that this is an unpredictable moment in international relations, where we can expect change more than continuity. Global peace and the security of its commons from sea lanes of communication to underwriting European peace in the wake of two convulsing wars during the last century has, until now, largely been undertaken by the United States.
That reliance and ownership are now shifting, creating both uncertainties and opportunities, the outcome of which for South Africa will, to a great extent, be determined by whether we can reset our relationship with Washington.
We might like to hope that another pole of power will emerge to offset US predominance, such as through the BRICS, but so far this has not happened. And there is no certainty that the intentions and outputs of this new pole will be any less selfish than that of the status quo – in fact, there is every sign that it may be considerably less democratic and substantially more extractive.
What is needed to reset SA’s relationship with Washington?
To reset our relationship with Washington, your new job, to place our relations with the United States onto a stable footing, we have to be honest about how we reached this particular nadir. We should, as a point of departure, be careful not to confuse Donald Trump’s views on South Africa with his general global outlook.
While Europe and NATO are undoubtedly in the Trump administration’s sights for reasons of burden sharing, South Africa is now occupying a special place, singled out for its continuously antagonistic foreign relations polemic, and yet smugly expectant that its preferential access to the giant American market will continue because we are “special”.
Presuming that is your mission, what will a reset require?
READ | Siphamandla Zondi: Choice of Meyer as ambassador reflects our incomplete transition story
At the outset, this requires stripping away some of the shibboleths about South Africa and its own transition, a history about which, as a key participant, you will be only too familiar.
The preferred narrative is that the end of apartheid was a simple morality play, with the ANC as the hero of the drama and the whites as the villains. As ever, the truth is more complex than the propaganda, not least since it is the same liberation party which has overseen widespread corruption and under whose malodorous leadership we now suffer nearly twice as many murders annually as civilians killed in Ukraine in more than four years of conventional war.
The long game
But South Africa’s great strength is that this was not a revolution but a negotiated settlement rooted in realpolitik, not the delirious dreams of those who thought, on the one hand, the country’s troubles were down to godless communists elsewhere or, on the other, that ideology mattered more than the facts on the ground.
It was neither a military victory for either side, no matter the effort to make the country ungovernable. It was a moment when, for all of the morality play about the anti-apartheid struggle, sane minds prevailed, realising that politics trumped all, and that a negotiated way had to be found to escape our predicament. It was no miracle either.
Our transition was the outcome of a long process, including two years of private discussions even before Mandela’s release in February 1990. Imagine if those discussions had been shouted from the rooftops, where it all might have gone? A search for a celebrity could have been catastrophic.
READ | Mpumelelo Mkhabela: What Roelf Meyer’s appointment as US ambassador signals about SA
You will know that diplomacy is an assiduous business, requiring the careful cultivation of contacts, and preferably over a long period, certainly a longer period than you have at your disposal. But the personal touch matters. The Germans have a word for this: Fingerspitzengefühl, or “fingertip feeling”, referring to an intuitive flair or touch for handling sensitive situations, requiring instinctive empathy, tact and situational awareness. It is used to describe diplomatic, social, or leadership skills acquired by experiencing their theatre of responsibilities with their own eyes and ears. In this way, it is possible to deal with the know-it-all attitude and prejudice of politicians.
This means leaving prejudices at the door. It demands understanding the country and the interlocutors and personalities you are dealing with and, by doing so, to convince them of the merits of our case, or to devise a productive pathway.
In other words, be a Lyndon Johnson, not an Ebrahim Rasool.
To understand how to work in Washington, read Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of the 36th US president, The Master of the Senate. He depicts Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) as an unparalleled “genius” at manufacturing and employing political leverage to achieve his goals, both short-term and selfish, strategic and grand. Caro describes LBJ not merely as a politician, but as a force of nature who understood the legislative process, the psychology and practice of power, and the mechanics of the Senate and its inhabitants better than anyone else.
He cultivated friendships with patrician and sometimes isolated powerbrokers. LBJ was capable of understanding and evaluating the needs, whims, wishes and picadillos of his Senatorial colleagues to a tee. His techniques varied from an intoxicating and beguiling combination of intense political charm and even physical intimidation, flattery and threats, bribery, and opportunism. And it involved hard work, lots of it, even to the detriment of his health, and a large dollop of what Caro describes as “savage determination”. In this way, and through these means, he was able, for example, to drive through his bold civil rights agenda.
‘Watch their eyes and hands’
But this doesn’t come easily. Creating and exercising power means being able to read people accurately. This means knowing what people want. “Watch their eyes, watch their hands,” Johnson used to tell his assistants.
“What a man is telling you with their mouth is never as important as what he is telling you with their eyes. What a man is telling you is never as important as what he is not telling you. Don’t let the conversation end,” he used to tell his aides, “until you find out what he is trying not to tell you.”
LBJ possessed a genius, says Caro, for knowing what men really wanted, not what they said they wanted. Johnson was the greatest reader of men in calculating where power and interests lay, and ruthlessly using whatever he had to use to get the deal done. He was able to make people feel that there was nothing more important in life than their relationship and talking to you at that moment.
Such a capacity for expressing intimacy and friendship and ensuring a clarity of argument will be essential if you are to get people to do things contrary to their prejudices or even their better judgment. There is a need to get inside people’s heads, and to do that, you will need to spend time with them.
If you are successful at cultivating a fertile constituency and shared understanding, one of the things that we can teach the Americans is that power is not only about shiny military hardware, but about the ability to generate long-term political solutions.
But to do that, South Africa has to be seen to be successful. This includes influencing our region and our allies in positive ways, becoming a conduit and conspirator to achieve peace. In this way, we can live up to our own negotiation narrative.
Understanding what America wants, and how we can conceivably partner with them to our advantage, would be to our advantage as we search for this productive pathway. For instance, while some in our respective governments are stuck in a time warp about the control of minerals, this is not the key point of leverage. Rather, it lies increasingly in the control of trade corridors as essential to the security of procurement and sustaining value chains.
SA’s sticking point
Understanding US interests highlights a sticking point in our relationship, an inconvenient truth: Our relationship with Israel. You will know only too well from your time as a conflict resolution specialist that successful peace processes require uniform pressure from outside, a willingness from conflicting parties to compromise in the interests of a better reality, an acceptance of the right of existence in the case of Israel or residence in the case of white South Africa, and leadership, method and timing.
In the case of Israel-Palestine, these conditions have never been met, leading to today’s costly and bloody impasse. Our route to Washington runs most easily through Jerusalem. This does not mean liking what Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is doing, but it does demand having a normal framework of relations in which to discuss these differences; in other words, an ambassador in place in Israel. It also requires understanding that shouting at Israel from the rooftops, while it may appeal to friends in Iran and elsewhere, is contrary to our own experience and unlikely to achieve anything save for appearing both radical and a spoiler against peace.
Without having this policy wiggle-room, you risk trying to defend what, in Washington’s eyes, is indefensible. If that happens, and you fail, Pretoria will be able to say, “you see, not even Roelf could deal with Trump’s America”, in attempting to deflect attention away from the ANC, its performance and its policies towards the individual.
This transition in ties does not have to start big. It could begin with meeting Jewish leaders in South Africa. In the US, once there, you will need to build a relationship with the Republicans, most easily via conservative think-tanks, as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in developing communications with the leadership of the US Jewish community. This could extend to a meeting with the Israeli ambassador in Washington and even a visit to Israel, like all these moves, one which has to be supported and sanctioned by the president. These would be clear steps in persuading Trump that SA is changing.
READ | Roelf Meyer: I last visited Gaza a year ago. I left thinking about Rwanda in 1994
A Talmudic saying that “the face of the generation is like the face of a dog” describes the spiritual and moral decline of society and the paucity of leadership. The “face” of the generation is taken to refer to its leaders and scholars, running ahead on a leash, appearing to be leading, but actually constantly looking back to see which way its master, the people, wants to head. Instead of purposefully setting a direction and having others follow, politicians act according to popular opinion, whims, and contemporaneous demands of the masses.
Ironically, today, Trump is an exception to this general rule. However uncomfortable his direction and language may be, he is not acting as a barometer of public opinion. It will be necessary in your role to tell some home truths to your political masters, especially when the emperor has no clothes. Ambassadors need to be at times uncomfortably honest to be loyal. Striving for popularity with political bosses is, as Dr Niel Barnard, the former head of SA’s National Intelligence Service during the transition, put it, to “do the state a major disservice”.
Personal or political interests should always be secondary to the interests of the state.
Ambassador Meyer, there can be no better person for the job, one steeped in the art of negotiation and of the imperative to maintain close and careful counsel on your own views, translating the giving and receiving of confidences into an art form.
These skills will matter if you have something fresh to sell. To make a deal with this US administration, it does not ultimately matter who South Africa’s person is in Washington. It matters more what the policy is in Pretoria.
- Greg Mills and Ray Hartley are with the Platform for African Democrats.
*Want to respond to the columnist? Send your letter or article to opinions@news24.com with your name and town or province. You are welcome to also send a profile picture. We encourage a diversity of voices and views in our readers’ submissions and reserve the right not to publish any and all submissions received.
Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.
*Want deeper context into what’s going on in the world? Read Friday Briefing every week to stay in the loop with opinion and analysis on current political, social, and economic issues affecting South Africa. Sign up to receive the Friday Briefing newsletter.
5482
