On the lawn of the South African presidency in 2003, US President George W Bush held out his arm to Thabo Mbeki and said: “This is our point man.”
When Mbeki meets Bush in Washington on Friday will he still warrant this sporting honorific from Bush? Does he still want it? Analysts say that neither leader has much choice.
“When Bush looks for lily pads to hop on to as he negotiates across Africa, he’s not exactly spoiled for choice,” says Richard Cornwell of the Institute for Security Studies. “South Africa is the only sure thing right now. Angola might prove another, although its joining Opec will not have reassured Washington. Nigeria, moving into election mode, is hardly a stable platform.”
Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad describes the US as a major trading partner with R60-billion worth of two-way trade growing annually at 11%.
“As [South Africa is] one of the biggest beneficiaries of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, this issue will feature prominently on the agenda,” says Pahad.
Officially, the presidents will also discuss bilateral issues. Relations with the Bush administration have not been of the hand-in-glove variety that the ANC pursued with the Clinton team. The new US ambassador to South Africa, Eric Bost, has publicly complained about the poor access he has to the South African Cabinet. Far from seeing this as any kind of snub, ambassadors from other Western powers say in essence: “Take a ticket. We’re not seeing much of them either.”
Mbeki is hoping access will not be a problem when he tries to hook up with some old Democrat friends who now hold the reins in both houses of Congress.
When Bush referred to Mbeki as his point man, he was referring specifically to Zimbabwe. There has been very little progress on this, however, and Washington has regularly expressed its exasperation with South Africa’s refusal to condemn Zimbabwe’s slide towards collapse. Exactly how much pressure is applied on Mbeki this time depends on whether Bush has decided to try to add a warm and fuzzy African success to his tarnished performance.
“I don’t think this is very likely,” says Cornwell. “In fact Africa and human rights seems to have slipped off the map with the Bush administration.”
Bush is more likely to attempt to achieve a soupçon of success in mediating Arab-Israeli relations. This is, after all, one of the more trenchant suggestions made in the in the report he commissioned from a team of his father’s colleagues.
The report from the Iraq Study Group, which was headed by former secretary of state James Baker, says any success in the Middle East rests heavily on achieving an Israeli-ÂPalestinian accord. Thus, South Africa’s increasingly critical line on Israel will not be regarded by the US leader as helpful — particularly as it comes from a country that will be sitting alongside his ambassador at the UN Security Council next year.
Iran is possibly the thorniest issue in US-South Africa relations. South Africa’s official approach is that problems with Iran’s nuclear programme should be sorted out in the International Atomic Energy Agency and not the UN Security Council.
The subtext is that if the US can bully Iran now about its nuclear energy programme, it could easily bully South Africa when it starts exporting its own pebble bed modular reactor technology.