Constructive Engagement in South Africa: A Viable U.S. Policy

CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA: A VIABLE U.S. POLICY John Seiler .he new Reagan administration must promptly consider its policy toward southern Africa. The Namibian negotiations remain unsettled, and because of that potential crisis the prospects for an uncontrollable regional war involving major international powers have grown. Underlying any review ofregional policy must be a clearheaded assessment of U.S. interests in and policy toward South Africa itself. Are we as a nation genuinely concerned about furthering constructive changes in that troubled, complex society, or have our protestations over South African domestic policies during the past two decades been essentially reflexive and rhetorical, aimed at UN and domestic constituencies and at easing guilt about our own social shortcomings? If the concern is genuine, then a conjunction of events—rapid changes in southern Africa since the 1974 Portuguese coup, the tentative but substantial commitment to change made by the P.W. Botha government in South Africa since it took office in September 1978, the tacit acknowledgment by career Carter administration officials that the approach initiated in the first months of 1977 had failed, the massive Reagan victory, the Senate's Republican majority, and a conservative shift in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives—gives us a momentary opportunity to launch a redirected policy intended to boost peaceful change in South Africa: a policy of constructive engagement. John Seiler taught political science at Rhodes University in South Africa from 1972-76. He edited Southern Africa Since the Portuguese Coup, and publishes The Seiler Report, a monthly analysis of southern African issues in American politics. He is now completing a book on South Africa.© 1980 John Seiler 161 162 SAIS REVIEW Any new policy starts with a great disadvantage engendered by Carter policy. That policy assumed originally that U.S. public criticism of apartheid would have no effect on simultaneous U.S. efforts to win South African support for peaceful change in Zimbabwe and in Namibia . U.S. officials were quickly disabused ofthat naive notion, as first John Vorster and then his successor, P.W. Botha, shrewdly channeled white resentment of U.S. criticism into support for South African domestic and regional policies. The South African government had already lost its residual faith in U.S. intentions in the aftermath of the 1975 Angolan intervention. By the end of 1978, it concluded that it need not succumb to any combination of foreseeable U.S. threats and blandishments. Its sense of confidence was bolstered by the conspicuous shift in U.S. rhetoric and attitude from the April 1977 apogee represented by Vice President Mondale's critical "one-man, one-vote" comment in Vienna to the modest and even sympathetic statement made by Richard Moose, assistant secretary ofstate for African affairs, to the House subcommittee on African affairs on April 30, 1980. Pretoria now calculates accurately that it can withstand any economic pressures short offull-scale mandatory economic sanctions and any military pressures short of a conventional invasion led by either the Soviet Union or the Western powers. Neither action is anticipated. Given the present South African emphasis on self-reliance and their distrust of U.S. intentions, two polar policy options which are occasionally suggested have a momentary appeal. One would require unequivocal support for black nationalists in Namibia and South Africa as represented by the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) and the African National Congress ofSouth Africa (ANC) in international bodies. The other involves a tacit laissez-faire attitude toward South Africa, effectively ignoring its domestic policies, in order to maximize U.S. economic and strategic interests. Neither alternative makes good policy—a perception shared by successive administrations starting with Eisenhower, although none were successful in straddling interests in the Republic and in black Africa. Support for black nationalists will not emerge from a Reagan administration, but it is possible that a laissez-faire policy might—with considerable cost to longerterm U.S. regional interests. The key argument for constructive engagement rather than either of these two alternatives is that sufficient constructive change is now underway in South Africa to give some hope for the success of this policy. Granted that the change is not impelled by altruism, but by...