From high road scenarios to dead-end alliances: SA has lost its strategic way

Clem Sunter, who died last month, was rightly memorialised as a pioneering thinker who elevated the hopes of a besieged and parochial SA in the 1980s to the summit of better possible futures.

His book The World and South Africa in the 1990s detailed the content of his popular “high road, low road” scenarios, each of which was contingent on the country and its people choosing the right path.

Back in 1986, when he and the Anglo scenario team took their findings public, both possibilities were in sight: either an enervating confrontation in a fortress country or a negotiated winning nation prospect.

Four years later, the country embarked, in fits and starts and with imperfect outcomes, on the negotiation route. And the rest is, as the cliché says, history.

Recalling Sunter and his scenarios led me to reread his book last weekend, at the very moment when President Donald Trump announced the US and Israeli military operations against Iran.

Forty years back, Sunter made the point, perhaps obvious today, but not in SA back then, that “it is those nations that look outwards that win”. He cited the “three big gorillas” that dominated the world economy then: Japan, West Germany and the US.

Of course, today West Germany no longer exists as a standalone country, and its once admired economic engine is in key respects “kaput”. Japan at that time posed the gravest, most immediate economic threat to American manufacturing, a role now filled by China.

But of the third country in the triad, the United States, an American member of Sunter’s scenario team described the US role in the world as “the Big Gorilla theory”. He asked the team in 1986: “Where does the Big Gorilla sleep?”

After various options were suggested – from the grass to a tree to a cave, the American replied:

No. The Big Gorilla sleeps where he wants to sleep.

Last weekend, Iran and the world were reminded anew that whatever else has changed and whichever nations have risen or crested over four decades, this theory remains intact.

Trump, though has done a pirouette, a dizzying reversal of his vow to avoid and end wars (and demand for the Nobel Peace Prize for stopping them). And this contradicts his apparent fixation on “America First” and always being in sync with his political base (around 41% of his 2024 supporters said the US government today is “too focused on international issues”. And this was before the Iran war.

The US-Israeli intelligence actions and aerial strikes appear operationally impressive (wiping out the Iranian top leadership in one strike and forcing the besieged country to widen the conflict to draw in Gulf nations and the Saudis as new adversaries). But both the course of the conflict, the human and economic costs and its outcomes are bewilderingly unclear.

And since the US war aims keep evolving – from regime change to regime replacement, Iranian nuclear disablement and missile destruction, a short or long war, an aerial attack only, or troops on the ground? All or some of these? The fog of war has never been thicker.

And with Trump doing his customary “weave” and calling random journalists with his latest thoughts, the world’s number one superpower is led by a mercurial president who has not necessarily thought through future strategic consequences, dubbed “the day after” by scenario planners.

Cynics might assume that the war will end whichever happens first: Iran runs out of missiles and projectiles to hit back, or Trump runs out of patience to continue.

But if Trump is careening all over the map, politically and strategically, where in the world is South Africa, a distant, bit player in the theatre of conflict now consuming global concern and attention?

The ANC and the government are closely allied to the clerical regime in Tehran. Animated by a broad anti-Western impulse, its roots are difficult to single out: Ideological? Psychological? Financial? Historical? Perhaps a Venn diagram of all these strands and strains leading to a fetid stew of resentments that actively harm national interest.

Thomas Friedman, avowed opponent of Trump and sceptic of simplistic analysis, is deeply seasoned in Middle East matters (he was based as a correspondent in Beirut when Sunter was popularising scenarios here in the 1980s), wrote in the New York Times on 2 March:

“To think clearly about the Middle East wars, you need to hold multiple thoughts in your head at the same time…If you are looking for a black-and-white narrative, you might want to take up checkers.”

And while Friedman posits possible outcomes in appropriate contingent terms, there is one matter on which he suggests no uncertainty:

“I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilises its neighbours, and has destroyed a great civilisation. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realise their full potential.”

On the same day as this article appeared, there was a lively debate in the UK House of Commons on the war in Iran and its legality, which the burden of government opinion suggested was contrary to international law.

Most striking, though, was the intervention in the debate by veteran far-left Labour MP (shorn of the party whip), Dianne Abbott. She made history as the first black woman elected to parliament in 1987. She described the US-Israeli war on Iran as illegal, like the invasion of Iraq.

But she prefaced her remarks:

“Of course, the current Iranian regime is horrible, violent, murderous and a threat to international order.”

The ANC and government statements on Iran contain no such caveat. Not a single condemnation of a murderous theocracy that kills its own citizens, hangs dissidents and practices imperial overreach in its own region via its violent proxies that destabilise sovereign states. And as Ms Abbot noted is “a threat to international order”.

The ANC, which views itself as the vanguard of international progressive thought and a promoter of a rules-based international order, has never met a regressive regime it did not love. Its vaunted struggle slogan, “power to the people”, was not meant for export.

Instead, the party (and government, where it entirely monopolises international relations) decried the use of “anticipatory self-defence based on assumption and conjecture”. However, while offering no sympathy to the oppressed majority in Iran, it did “convey sincere sympathies to the people of Iran following reports of the passing of their Supreme Leader, extending sympathy to his family and to the Iranian nation during this period of mourning”.

It clearly missed the spontaneous, if not very risky, eruption of celebration in many parts of Tehran upon news of the demise of Ayatollah Khamenei.

The SA government is playing an old game of checkers as its historic allies – from Iran to Venezuela to Cuba to Russia – are either decapitated, teeter on the brink or are under extreme pressure.

In a world where the “Big Gorilla” sleeps where it wants, it helps to have strategic flexibility, a backbone of clear principle married to national interest and enough nuance in alliance-building to see the woods for the trees.

Instead, we are governed by a 1980s black and white worldview as out of date as its promoters.