Stop funding South Africa's rogue foreign policy

Sometimes the answer to the question Why do people do bad things? it’s simply because they can. In South Africa's case, they can because their bad behavior has been richly rewarded with billions of dollars in foreign aid and U.S. trade preferences.

His list of misdeeds is long.

Think about South Africa illegal weapons supply to Russia. That prompted a rare U.S. public rebuke last year after the U.S. embassy warned that a Russian ship was docked in one of its military ports. The ship that would carry the weapons was under U.S. sanctions. Response from Pretoria? South Africa held a ten-day meeting joint naval exercise with Russia and China on the first anniversary of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

In addition to helping to project Chinese military power in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, South Africa has been the leading supporter of the expansion of Chinese military power. BRICSChina's geopolitical project aimed at restructuring the global political, economic and financial architecture. South Africa was a co-founder, lending the S to the group's name alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China.

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South Africa hosted the annual BRICS meeting last year, co-chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping. The African country was duly rewarded for its political loyalty with 14 billion dollars in Chinese investments and construction projects. Next year, South Africa will be the host the G20 summit. It is a sure value whose interests Pretoria will promote.

At the BRICS meeting, membership was extended to Iran. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa justified this offer as a shared vision for a better world. Iran more precisely describe it is a strategic victory for Iranian foreign policy. The invitation came two months before Hamas' attack on Israel and Iran's proxy attacks on U.S. military and diplomatic facilities. However, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor visited Tehran, just two weeks after the massacre.

South Africa gained considerable notoriety by taking Israel international tribunalaccusing him of violating the genocide convention in his war against Hamas in Gaza and labeling Israel's existence in the form of apartheid which has lasted for 75 years. In other words, there is no right to a Jewish state. In a show of global boldness, South Africa has worked closely together with the Palestinian terrorist fronts to document his allegations of genocide against Israel.

South Africa complaints he has a moral responsibility to always stand with the oppressed, because we come from a history of struggle, from a history of conviction that everyone deserves human dignity, justice and freedom. Tell that to the hundreds of millions of Syrians, North Koreans, Iranians, Chinese, Burmese, Russians, Sudanese, Cubans and other persecuted peoples who watched South Africa vote repeatedly against the United Nations. resolutions condemning their repressive regimes for human rights violations. No human dignity for them.

One would think that such a long and damaging record would lead to diplomatic isolation, at least in the face of the influx of American taxpayer money. But the opposite is true.

South Africa is the ninth largest recipient of American foreign aid, receiving 6 billion dollars between 2013 and 2022. Billions more are going to South Africa thanks to US contributions to multilateral institutions. The World Bank, financed by the United States, for example engaged a total of $2.6 billion over the past two years.

In 2022, South Africa received $503 million in support of HIV/AIDS from the United States and is expected to receive another $900 million next yearwhich brings the total to 8 billion dollars since 2003. America too funds food security, agricultural development, education, entrepreneurship and other programs.

Over the years, the United States has overcome rolling blackouts in South Africa thanks to 3,180 megawatts of electricity production. Ignoring this government corruption and mismanagement are the main reasons for the outages, the United States joined other donors in gift Pretoria with an international aid program of 8.5 billion dollars to help it accelerate its green transition.

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South Africa is the Americas' largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa, with bilateral trade representing 25 billion dollars. South African duty-free exports to US markets offset 16 billion dollars of this total. In short, American generosity helped South Africa become one of the most developed economies on the continent.

One might think that South Africa's extremist foreign policy choices would jeopardize the United States' generous bilateral support. No way. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken put aside South Africa's anti-Israel actions claiming any one issue does not take away from the important work we do together in so many other areas.

Yes, why allow a small thing like siding with Hamas, Iran, China, Russia and other special issues to stop the flow of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to a rogue regime?

Congress, fortunately, thinks otherwise. He called the deepening of military relations between South Africa and Russia and joint military exercises with Russia and China a violation of the legal requirement that [trade] recipient countries do not engage in activities that undermine the national security of the United States. Recently, 210 legislators wrote to President Joe Biden to denounce South Africa for its defamatory accusations against Israel on the world stage.

Conventional wisdom will argue that cutting aid to South Africa would push it further into the arms of China. But all that conventional wisdom has achieved is already a deep embrace between the two countries. The best way to hold South Africa to account for its dangerous foreign policy is to stop paying for it.