Confucius, please help
Sitting on the fence over Russia’s war in Ukraine might turn out to be the best strategy for SA
Noncommittal was probably the look SA was aiming for when it abstained from voting on the UN’s recent Ukraine resolution. There was nothing legally binding about the resolution, it was just an opportunity for UN members to display their feelings. Unsurprisingly, it was overwhelmingly adopted with 141 countries voting in favour, 35 abstaining and five voting against it. Among SA’s fellow abstainers — apart from 23 other African nations — were Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan and, most importantly, China.
Had SA thrown caution to the wind and voted against the resolution, it would have been in the company of Russia, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea and Belarus. This is probably not the sort of company you want to find yourself in if you’re trying to entice international investors to help grow your economy.
The vote shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given SA’s complicated history with Russia and Western Europe, one that doesn’t lend itself to the easy assumption that the West is inevitably good and Russia inevitably bad.
As it happens, it was a safe enough stance. Abstaining avoided any threat to its relations with Russia and, again more importantly, China. But perhaps even more important was that it didn’t appear to distress the “yes” voters too much. According to Business Day, a top US diplomat said the abstention was unlikely to harm trade relations with the world’s largest economy. “Our trade decisions are made based on our trade interests. This is a separate issue; there is no conditionality involved,” the diplomat said.
It’s very likely that all concerned reckoned that no-one, apart from possibly Ukraine, had the moral high ground on the matter. Many of the powerful EU states, as well as Britain, enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oligarch friends to squirrel their wealth away in safe havens.
Of course the ANC’s more recent calls for the EU to justify its “draconian sanctions” might be taking things beyond noncommittal.
Indeed, if, as now seems distressingly likely, there is no speedy resolution and tensions escalate, SA might have no choice but to take sides, if not within the next few weeks, then certainly in the near future.
Which side it takes will likely be heavily influenced by China, which has made much of its friendship with Russia and
Putin, using the recent Beijing Olympics to reinforce its support for Russia’s stance on Ukraine.
Russia reciprocated by endorsing China’s “one China” policy.
In early February the two governments issued a tediously long joint statement in which they essentially whinged about the US-led unipolar global power structure. Reasonably enough they were seeking a “multipolarity” global order in which their important roles would be recognised. That order would involve the creation of a Eurasian Economic Union and the development of China’s “belt and road” initiative.
Many China experts accept that President Xi Jinping did know ahead of time that Russia would invade Ukraine, and assumed it would be a quick and clean exercise. As one expert says, Xi may have expected it to be “done and dusted before there was a military response from Ukraine” and certainly before a remarkably united West would be able to cobble together a potentially paralysing set of sanctions.
But with just two weeks into the invasion it’s evident things are not going according to plan. While it seems inevitable that Russia will prevail militarily, nothing else seems clear. Will the West remain united in its approach? Will the formidable array of sanctions hold? Will China stick with its new best friend, no matter what?
China is Russia’s largest trading partner, but Russia doesn’t feature on China’s top 10; it might of course move up that list if China decides to buy up Russia’s gas and other resources. But then, as China-focused news service SupChina notes, China would risk being hit by secondary sanctions.
In the medium to longer term, as China focuses on its self-sufficiency strategy, those sanctions might be manageable. But it’s not ready yet. Neither are the many Western companies operating in China, such as Apple.
An extremely volatile situation is not what Xi wants just eight months before his expected coronation at the Communist Party’s 20th congress.
So he might try to wiggle out of his Russian commitment or, better still, help find a solution. In which case SA’s noncommittal strategy will have worked, for now.
An extremely volatile situation is not what Xi wants just eight months before the Communist Party’s 20th congress