If you listen to most US leaders, policymakers and analysts, you will quickly conclude that Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, are the country’s greatest enemy. Just five months ago President Joe Biden branded Putin a dictator, saying on June 6: “I’ve known [Putin] for over 40 years — he’s concerned me for 40 years ... He’s not a decent man — he’s a dictator.”
At a fundraiser in San Francisco in February, Biden insulted Putin and said he might set off a nuclear war: “We have a crazy SOB, that guy Putin and others and we always have to be worried about a nuclear conflict.”
In 2022 Biden called Putin a “pure thug” and “murderous dictator”.
Putin is the same man who, veteran journalist Bob Woodward tells us in his latest book, War, has a close relationship with US president-elect Donald Trump. Woodward wrote that Trump and Putin spoke by phone seven times after Trump left office in January 2021, and that Trump sent Putin Covid testing kits during the pandemic, when such equipment was in short supply in the US and unavailable in many parts of the globe.
This week The Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had discussed the Ukraine invasion by phone on Sunday. The Kremlin quickly dismissed the report as “pure fiction” though other news outlets reported that Trump sources confirmed that the interaction did take place.
What matters here is that after nearly three years of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a new leader (Trump, who has criticised the scale of US military and financial support for Kyiv and said he would end the war quickly) is about to disrupt and upend the landscape of war and peacemaking in the region. He is about to tear up the old rule book. Trump is also self-interested: the war is too expensive, and he wants to keep his dollars for his US voters.
This is the sort of national interest that South Africa has only paid lip service to in the past. South Africa exported $8.32bn worth of goods to the US in 2023 while exporting $282.77m to Russia. More than 600 US companies operate in South Africa. You hardly see any Russian businesses in South Africa. As Ed Stoddard wrote in Daily Maverick, “in terms of economic partnership, it [Russia] is a clapped-out Lada vehicle, a lemon with not much juice to be squeezed from it”.
Yet South African leaders have bent over backwards to speak up for Russia and have been prepared to sell out our human rights principles because it is seen as a “valuable ally and friend”, as President Cyril Ramaphosa put it. Few have asked: what is the price and value of this friendship?
My contention is that a Trump presidency will be positive for the South African government and business if we acknowledge that a key part of his makeup is his belief that he can “make a deal”. He sees the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which has huge geopolitical implications, as merely a deal to be made and everything will be hunky dory.
Angola, which has collaborated with the US under Biden to build the multibillion-dollar Lobito rail corridor, is an example of a country that may very well thrive in collaboration with a Trump administration. Kenya, probably South Africa’s biggest African competitor for US attention, succeeds because it does not sit in the corner admiring itself for being ideologically pure. It acts to attract the investment it needs.
In the Trump era, South Africa will need to dial down on its ideological obsessions and set itself up as a “dealmaker”. This means being focused on the fact that we want to drive down unemployment, raise investment, attract foreign tourists and raise government revenue. We cannot jeopardise our participation in programmes such as the African Growth & Opportunity Act. We need to do the deals that need to be done. It’s the only language Trump understands.
If we don’t want to raise our economic growth and defeat unemployment then, well, let’s go ahead on the trajectory we have been on. In the looming era of Trump and others, we will remain an also-ran, and our unemployed youth will soon do to the ANC what they did to the Democrats in the US and to the Botswana Democratic Party next door.
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