When I was in middle and high school, all the “woke” kids at Princeton University were opposed to apartheid in South Africa and agitating for American companies to disinvest there. This seemed like a reasonable position to me, and it was backed also by many of the British musical artists I admired at the time. As time went on, I began to understand that the Reagan administration’s position on white supremacy in Africa was badly hurting the United States and helping Soviet Russia win hearts and minds with non-aligned and Third World countries. It wasn’t enough to have lifted Jim Crow shortly before I was born, we needed to get on the right side of history or we’d continue to pay a heavy price.
The bill is coming due now, as South Africa is doing naval exercises with Russia and probably clandestinely shipping them weapons, too.
…South Africa has its own reasons for remaining loyal to Russia despite the risks, South Africans say. The ruling African National Congress party was backed by the Soviet Union throughout the decades it spent in exile during the apartheid era, and many of its most senior figures received training in the Soviet Union, including the powerful defense minister, Thandi Modise.
On the streets of Soweto, the vast urban settlement on the edge of Johannesburg that was a center of resistance to the apartheid regime, people say they still see Russia as an ally. “Russia was with us when we were in chains,” said Elijah Ndlovu, 51, who is unemployed. “We don’t say Russia is good by destroying Ukraine, but if you ask us where we stand in that fight, we have to be honest. We can never turn our back on Russia.”
Ever since the Israeli-Lebanon War began in 1982 and Tel Aviv shifted away from the Camp David Accords and more to de facto annexing the West Bank, I’ve felt that America has been too dismissive of Arab opinion. I opposed to Persian Gulf War despite seeing the merit in restoring Kuwait’s sovereignty, and I begged our country not to invade Iraq in 2003 without a United Nations mandate or a united Europe. I begged President Obama not to intervene in Syria (he listened) and Libya (he did not). There is cost to these decisions.
…“When America went into Iraq, when America went into Libya, they had their own justifications that we didn’t believe, and now they’re trying to turn the world against Russia. This is unacceptable, too,” [South African radio host Clement] Manyathela said. “I still don’t see any justification for invading a country, but we cannot be dictated to about the Russian moves on Ukraine. I honestly feel the U.S. was trying to bully us.”
Obviously the cost is highest in the Arab world.
The Middle East is one region where Russia has succeeded in winning friends and influence, said Faysal, a retired Egyptian consultant on organized crime who asked that his full name not be used because of the sensitivity of discussing political issues in Egypt.
“Of course I support Putin,” he said in an interview in Cairo. “A long time ago, we lost faith in the West. All the Arabs on this side of the world support Putin, and we are happy to hear he is gaining lands in Ukraine.”
“There’s been a failure of the West in the past 15 years to see the anger building up around the world, and Russia has absolutely exploited this,” Gumede said. “Russia has been able to portray Ukraine as a war with NATO. It’s the West versus the rest.”
It’s not just relatively recent events. The legacy of European/American Colonialism is still exacting a cost that can be seen in the reluctance or refusal of countries from the Americas to Africa to the Subcontinent to enact sanctions on Russia.
The Western countries “are hypocritical,” said Bhaskar Dutta, a clerk in Kolkata, India. “These people colonized the entire world. What Russia has done cannot be condoned, but at the same time, you cannot blame them wholly.”
Put simply, much of the world wants NATO to lose. They’re not lining up to praise Putin, but they have deep grievances with the West that color their view of the war in Ukraine. It doesn’t have to make perfect sense. The USSR and Putin’s Russia share a love for political repression but they’re ideologically separated by a wide gulf. An American communist might have loved the former but has no reason to love the latter, and it’s not clear why the average South African is inclined to maintain their loyalty and gratitude toward Russia now that it’s no longer the leader of the global left but rather a white nationalist gangster state engaged in obvious war crimes.
But America hasn’t lived up to its own finest values. There have been too many mistakes, and we seem to thoughtlessly move on from them realizing that a time might come when we need world opinion on our side.
It’s a difficult lesson. We played footsie with white supremacists in Africa for so long that many Africans are siding with a white nationalist regime in Moscow just to pay us back. We complain that Putin is lying about his reasons for invading Ukraine and are reminded that we lied about our reasons for invading Iraq.
I point all this out because I was never a knee-jerk antiwar anti-interventionist, but I wound up on their side of the argument repeatedly throughout my adult life precisely because I believe our credibility is precious, that world opinion matters, and that one day we might need allies for a fight that is truly unavoidable.
I believe the war in Ukraine meets that test, but it’s hard to convince those we’ve alienated to see it that way. And that is making the task of winning much harder. It could even lead to defeat.
Democracy vs. petrofascism, though, is a fight that I could rally with. That said, our role in the success of the despotic regimes of the Middle East demands re-examination. This moment could have been avoided.
This strikes me as a different flavor of “pwning the libs” as a bedrock philosophy as opposed to a rhetorical hobby. Just as the GOP will embrace bad positions out of a Manichean opposition to all things “liberal” those who side with Russia reflexively over actions from 40 years ago aren’t really exercising judgment on the issue; they’re just engaging their priors.
One thing the US could have done was to try to rectify the war crimes committed in Iraq, by putting the leaders of that invasion on trial. The fact that Obama didn’t do so and didn’t appoint a special prosecutor is one of the reasons for our lack of moral standing.