I.am.not.making.this.up 💥 Don't Poke the Bear: Ebrahim Rasool and the art of diplomatic self-sabotage

One likes to be open-minded and free-thinking, but for reasons of diplomacy and decorum (especially if it’s your job), there are things you just don’t say, especially on a recorded zoominar.

If you are at an airport security checkpoint, and are asked whether you have anything to declare, you don’t say: “Just my love for chaos and my desire to challenge authority.”

When you are pulled over by a traffic cop and asked whether you knew how fast you were driving, you probably don’t say “I’m not sure, but I was trying to beat my personal record.”

As the head of a company that has just presided over a huge oil spill that caused 11 deaths and massive environmental damage, you don’t say, “I just want my life back,” as BP CEO Tony Hayward said after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

If you are an ambassador, the restrictions are particularly tight.

As a diplomat, you probably tend to avoid describing any country as "that shitty little country", even if, in your view, the country is a) little, and b) the cause of global tensions. (That’s what French Ambassador to the United Kingdom Daniel Bernard said of Israel).

And now it turns out, it's undiplomatic to call the leader of the world’s largest economy the head of a white supremacist movement. (There is a question about whether he did actually say that specifically, but it was pretty close, using the term ‘supremacist’ repeatedly). And so, SA’s ambassador to the US Ebrahim Rasool has had his credentials pulled and is now officially “Persona non grata”, plunging SA’s relations with the US lower than the low point that they were already.

In the context of the Trump administration’s castigation of much of rest of the world, its decision to pull out of international organisations, its unfathomably heartless scrapping of life-saving development aid, its attacks on its own allies and neighbours, well … you might justifiably want to grant Rasool a little latitude.

The problem is that in the context of all these global diplomatic ructions, Rasool literally had only one job, and that is this: don’t poke the bear. You represent a small country which is entirely dispensable in the great game of nations. So be humble, keep your controversial opinions to yourself, and don’t poke the damn bear!

There are plenty of politicians whose job it is to grab the limelight, throw theories around, make outrageous claims, justifiable or not. They can, and maybe should, poke the bear. But if your job is to focus on solutions, finding ways to work around unpalatable situations, then you beaver away in the background and refrain from theorising out loud about your host country’s actions.

Contrary to this consideration, Ebrahim Rasool decided to join a foreign policy seminar held by the ANC’s think-tank, the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), in Johannesburg last Friday and go on a pretty wild extrapolation.

Rasool was actually a bit all over the place, but the overall thread amounts roughly to this: the argument - popular in ANC circles, as it happens - is that there is some kind of global plot to keep developing nations down which is evidenced by colonialism. And that conspiracy is fundamentally motivated by racism. And it's probably tied to other evils like global capitalism.

This is the critical part of Rasool’s diatribe:

“What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency, at home, and — I think I’ve illustrated — abroad as well.

“So in terms of that, the supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white.

“And that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon. And so that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things, I think that there’s data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this wall being built, the deportation movement, et cetera et cetera”.

In other words, whites will be a minority soon and MAGA is, one presumes from his comments, an attempt to rally the (white) forces against this trend. Weirdly, I do recognise where Rasool is coming from. Trump is an artist at playing many sides of a question, signalling to disparate communities what they fundamentally and most crucially want to hear. For example, his crusade against illegal immigration appeals to legal immigrants (even though he keeps trying to deport some of these, too); people who hold legality in high regard; ‘patriots’; and, as it happens, racist white Americans. Finding those issues and playing them hard is what makes Trump such a successful politician.

But overall, I also think Rasool’s view, while passionate and possibly even well-intentioned, is a kind of trivialisation and misconstrual of a very complex history and state of local and international affairs. His harping on ‘supremacism’ is par for the course in South Africa: if you have been the victim of racism, it’s uncomplicated to interpret the world fundamentally in that way. But it's also narrow, simplistic, and myopic. At some point, it also brushes very close to things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theories, and I always wonder if Hamas supporters like Rasool don’t stray into this worldview a bit too easily.

It is hard not to notice the hallmarks of the ANC’s beloved contrived victimhood in operation: the overriding primacy of race, the international conspiracy of forces, the fundamental unjustness of the world, the assumption of martyrdom, etc.

Even at the most basic level, Rasool’s ‘facts’ are wrong: it's true that black Americans voted strongly against Trump. But Latino Americans were only marginally against him and fairly evenly divided, as were Asian voters, as were women voters. Trump is not only appealing to racist white Americans, as Rasool claims; if he did only that, he would never have come close to winning and you might hope that South Africa’s point man in a very fraught diplomatic situation would recognise this very obvious factt.

But where Rasool really went off the deep end was not his criticism of Trump but his support for Trump! Yes, seriously, he expressed support for Trump in one respect because a broken clock does show the right time twice a day. I am not making this up: South Africa could encourage Trump’s “healthy disrespect” for global institutions, he said. “(We) may just, if we play our cards right, be the way in which, when we hand over to Donald Trump after four years of global self-leadership of the G-20, there may be possibly one president that could reform some of the global architecture”.

This is arguably as wacko as some of what he rails against. The idea that Trump is going to accidentally (or even deliberately!) change the voting power of the US in the IMF and World Bank in favour of SA and other developing nations because he distrusts international institutions is a measure of Rasool’s disjuncture with reality. The US has the largest share of the vote in these institutions because the US contributes the most in funding; of course, this is antiquated, but no US politician, least of all Trump, is going to give up votes without also decreasing its contribution.

This idea is so bad, it invites the question, why was Rasool selected again? The answer is notionally, he was the most experienced candidate since he was ambassador to the US between 2010 and 2015. But why appoint a Hamas supporter to the job of US ambassador when Trump has gone out of his way to disparage this stance (even now causing someone to be arrested for supporting Palestine on a university campus)? (In fairness, Rasool did say it was time for SA to “put away South Africa's “megaphone” on Gaza” - perhaps referring partly to himself…)

One theory is that he was appointed back in May last year in the belief that president Joe Biden would be reelected. Once it became clear that Trump had won, he was pushed through quickly before the new administration came into being in case they wouldn’t accept him. Rasool had, after all, participated in efforts to unite Hamas and Fatah in 2015, aiming to improve "coherence in resistance,". The effort garnered praise from then-Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who presented Rasool with a signed Palestinian scarf. This is all a long time ago, but still.

So why, once Trump had won, was his appointment not reconsidered? And what does that say about SA’s understanding of diplomacy? Lots of things, I think.

First, there is a huge overestimation of SA’s real clout in international affairs. The way ANC politicians talk about things, you would think the whole world is just waiting with bated breath for the moment SA can take the lead. Just because nice Europeans say SA punches above its weight doesn’t actually mean SA punches above its weight. What it means is they want you to think that you are punching above your weight. It’s called flattery, which can also be called ‘diplomacy’.

That era is definitively gone. What the world sees now is a country punching below its weight, with a moribund economy, enmeshed in state-sanctioned corruption, implementing racially-specific economic policies while endlessly claiming other countries are racist, and lacking a nuanced global political discourse. And, in case anyone forgets, the ultimate truth is that SA constitutes a rounding error in the global economy.

And second, it reflects on the poor quality of candidates that the diplomatic service now has at its disposal and its very poor administration. After years of being used as a dumping ground for controversial politicians, career diplomats are now very rarely appointed to important posts.

And on the subject of dumping grounds for controversial politicians, it's worth noting that Rasool himself is exactly one of those people. In 2010, he was accused of paying journalists for positive coverage during his tenure as the Premier of the Western Cape in the 2000s. One of those journalists was Ashley Smith, who was political reporter at the Cape Argus; Smith later admitted to receiving payments, confirming the allegations.

Rasool denied direct involvement, claiming that any wrongdoing was done without his knowledge. Smith’s affidavit said the opposite, affirming many discussions were held in Rasool’s presence, at the provincial premier’s residence, Leeuwenhof. The scandal must have contributed to his removal as premier in 2008, but it all made no difference because a year later, the Democratic Alliance won the majority vote in the province. Even if you believe Rasool, that someone with such poor administrative history and political instincts could be appointed US ambassador not once but twice says much about the level of SA’s diplomacy.

So what now? USAID is gone. AGOA is going. Even support for SA’s economy at the IMF is now doubtful. I think SA really only has one choice: to offer the job to a sophisticated, experienced, sufficiently pro-Isreal candidate who will not immediately be shut out in Republican circles. This will narrow down the field, but I, for one, can think of a few appropriate people.

Will it happen? I doubt it. 💥

From the department of schadenfreude ..

From the department of correct pronoun usage ..

From the department of why aren't people talking about this more ..

From the department of AI-powered researchthat might suggest its time to short Novo Nordisk ..

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I’m a South African journalist - former FM, Business Day & Business Maverick editor. I currently contribute to Daily Maverick and Currencynews.co.za. Commentary and reflections on business, economics.

💥 Loose Canon 💥Tim Cohen