Ebrahim Rasool, the former South African Ambassador to the US whom the Trump administration kicked out of the country over the weekend, has been thrown under a bus by his own party.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC have issued no protest at the expulsion of Rasool, and would not be drawn on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s charge that Rasool is a “race-baiting politician.”
The ANC has been stunned into silence. Any protest would have made the tension between the US and South Africa far worse. And the US was within its legal rights to expel him. Rasool said President Donald Trump was leading the global white supremacist movement, the sort of remark to which most governments would respond with strong objections.
The ANC is now very nervous about where things might now be headed for SA in Washington. The scrapping of the preferential trade deal we have with the US, the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, is almost a foregone conclusion, and targeted sanctions against ANC leaders might not be too far off.
Rasool’s speech, which caused him to be expelled, was not a rant but was a good example of the style and substance of the ANC’s world-view.
Rasool lowered his guard, as he felt at home speaking to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection. The think tank claims it is independent, but it is broadly aligned with the ANC. Long-term government and ANC spin master Joel Netshitenzhe is a previous executive director and chair of the think tank.
But Rasool has done us a great service. He lifted the veil last week on what he and his party really think about the Trump revolution.
What the speech underscored is that the ANC remains under a giant misapprehension. It clearly thinks it can still retain its ideology and world outlook, play with Russia, China and Iran, speak out loud and draw the race card when it wishes without consequences, and maybe do a deal with the Trump administration. It just ain’t so.
Bizarrely
Bizarrely, Rasool’s strident attack on Trump and his supporters as “supremacists” came just after an appeal in his speech for South Africa to lean more towards defending its interests through pragmatism.
Rasool began his speech on a sound footing by pointing out the need for SA to pursue its own national interest, one example of which would be good relations with the US.
“Foreign policy, like other policies, is like a telescope. It has two lenses, a lens for your values and a lens for your interests.”
SA, he said, has mostly held the lens of values to its eye and then calibrated its interest through that lens. That cannot be disputed, and is a reason why we are now in deep trouble with the US.
But then Rasool quickly turned to slam the US. Even the Biden administration had been resistant to “the emerging multipolarity in the world”.
“And it is even from the Biden administration that we saw the very frenetic attempts to maintain US ideological hegemony, particularly in the way in which it armed, for example, Ukraine and Israel,” Rasool said.
But hang on, this was not about ideological hegemony. Ukraine was invaded by Russia, and Israel faced multi-front attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. The US motivation was to defend friends who faced onslaughts that may have challenged their very existence.
Rasool is clearly pleased about President Donald Trump’s “healthy disrespect for NATO”, but troubled by his “assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilising a supremacism against the incumbency at home,” and abroad.
Got him expelled
And then he came to the part that got him expelled − the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, “as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the US, in which the voting electorate is projected to become 48 percent white and that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon.”
For some, but not all, Trump voters, that may be the case. This is a serious misreading of the US by Rasool and shows his ideologically driven wishful thinking.
That pending demographic change is not the main reason for the surge in support for the Trump revolution. The revolution is mostly due to the US losing confidence with job losses in manufacturing, high immigration, the rise of China, and the military bashing it took in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Trump revolution represents an immense distrust of elites in the universities, big corporations, and government. It brings together new and old conservative strands in the US from some old Republicans, some liberals from a past era, with those who believe that they have been unfairly treated by the elites.
And yes, there is another strand built on resentment at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, but that is hardly racism. Some hard segregationists are within the Trump camp, but that does not mean the Trump movement is fuelled at its core by “supremacism.”
Trump increased his share of the black vote from ten percent in 2020 to 20 percent last year, and raised his share of the Latino vote from 28 to 42 percent. So things are changing. The Republicans are also out to attract black and Latino voters.
These voters also worry about pocket-book issues like tax cuts and jobs. Is this support for Trump all due to “false consciousness”?
Racism as a dominant explanation behind the Trump revolution just does not work. Rasool sees the world through the struggle years and is not prepared to search for deeper and broader causes. This is the reason he misread the US and got kicked out of the country.
Very worrying tendencies
Rasool is worried about an “export of the revolution” with Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance supporting Alternative for Germany (AFD) and right wingers in the UK. It is hard to categorically say Vance is a racist. After all, he is married to a woman of Indian origin. But there are some very worrying tendencies in the Trump revolution that cannot be easily dismissed.
Rasool and the ANC are worried about AfriForum’s warm reception in Washington. He sees it as a way “to project white victims as a dog whistle” for a global white base. To defuse that, why is the ANC not prepared to then get rid of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, which AfriForum and others worry might be used to scrap Afrikaans schools, as well as the other big worry, the Expropriation Act?
Another insight into, at least, Rasool’s mind is that SA is being targeted “because we are the historical antidote to supremacism, the success story of it.”
The Trump administration is in its early days and there might be a walk back on some issues by the US, he suggested. And we should be prepared to make a deal with the Trump administration.
Any deal might have to wait for sea changes by the ANC.
[Image: Jesse Collins – Imported from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team. (detail page), CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71470143]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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