With the rules-based order in retreat, Tony Leon argues SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often.

Just as well, given the extraordinary, arguably extra-legal, events over the weekend in Caracas, that South Africa’s ambassador to Venezuela, Lindiwe Maeko, maintained a judicious silence (thus far).

Had her predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi (now in Chad), still been in the post, who knows what would have happened. And what the ending might be.

Back in July 2018, Nkosi – our man in Caracas – expressed solidarity with the regime of Nicolas Maduro, adding: “If it is necessary that we bring our soldiers to fight against the Americans we will do it, we cannot allow ourselves to be dominated by the American administration…The days of the US dominating the world are numbered.”

I commented at the time that this diplomat put the “moron” into “oxymoron”, given the depleted defence force he was calling to arms in defence of a dictator. And the idiocy of threatening a nuclear superpower with a pea shooter: not to mention that Nkosi’s remarks were offered on Mandela Day, usually associated with reconciliation and democracy.

Although Nkosi received a mild wrist slap from the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) he was kept in post and then sent off to Central Africa. And, as an ANC deployee, he no doubt thought himself in sync with his master’s voice.

Venezuela unmasked

Indeed, two years after this diplomatic snafu, President Cyril Ramaphosa – at the time when starving Caracas residents were eating their pets to stay alive (and over 5 million had fled the country) – posted a warm tweet on his phone call to “my brother President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela yesterday”. He added, “our two countries share a close and deep historical bond based on friendship and solidarity”.

One such bonding thread that Business Day unstitched in an editorial was what it described as South Africa’s chosen role as an “instinctive supporter of tyrannical leaders hated by their own populations.”

Just how disliked Maduro, whose Chavista regime has reduced South America’s once wealthiest economy to beggary and replaced its once robust democracy with a thuggish autocracy, was revealed in 2025.

He stole the rigged presidential election in brazen fashion (tally sheets indicated the opposition won 80% of the vote). The UN recently released a report detailing more than a decade of “killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention against his political opponents”.

Clearly for “Brother President CR” the promise of the Freedom Charter that “the people will govern” was not written for export.

US President Donald Trump’s kidnapping of both Maduro and his wife, as well as his boast that henceforth the US will “run” Venezuela, means the Western Hemisphere is now the place where “might is right”.

Trump plunges the world back to the nineteenth century, the era of the Monroe Doctrine, where the US asserted its claim to operate unimpeded in its own sphere of influence. Bad times ahead in the new-old era, where, in the wise and ancient words of Thucydides, after the Peloponnesian War: “The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must”.

Of course, outside the presidency and the comrades in the EFF and SA Communist Party, few will mourn the end of the Maduro tyranny. But Trump has signalled he has little interest in restoring democracy in Venezuela. Indeed, he has allowed power to pass to Maduro’s vice-president and kept in place the autocratic enablers of the kidnapped president’s regime. Though if they don’t do his bidding on everything from oil to drugs and migrants, who knows their fate.

Trump modestly claimed the Caracas operation as indicative of his own “Donroe Doctrine” and offered that both Colombia and Cuba had better watch it, though in cruder language. But where it ends, and what it implies for the rest of the world, is anyone’s guess, but it’s not the best or brightest start to the new year.

Predictably, Pretoria offered condemnation of the US operation in Venezuela, and its statement has more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese.

The statement noted, in part, its “grave concern…South Africa views these actions as a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations, which mandates that all member states refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Furthermore, the Charter does not authorise external military intervention in matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of a sovereign nation.”

Moral authority squandered

Thanks, Dirco for this elementary summary of public international law. Just a pity it was forgotten when Ramaphosa himself ordered the withdrawal of SA’s initial condemnation of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As for intervening in the “political independence of any state” – we await in vain any SA reference, never mind condemnation, of Iran’s decades-long intervention (militarily and via proxies) in the sovereign state of Lebanon. Never mind its other proxies invading Israel and operating in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Oh, hang on a second: This week, our modest navy (now reduced to “one working ship” with all its submarines “out of service”, according to a report by Erika Gibson in City Press, in November 2024) will perform joint exercises in our waters with both Russia and Iran.

Though with long-suffering Iranians now marching and protesting their own murderous and economically destructive regime, perhaps the Iranians should stay closer to the Persian Gulf.

However, just to prove the accuracy of historian Niall Ferguson’s quip that the “wheel of history is often turned by the God of Irony”, the statement of the Russian foreign ministry on Venezuela wins first prize in the chutzpah stakes.

With nary a wink or blink nor ethical wobble, the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation) described the “aggressive actions by the United States” as “an unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state, the respect for which is a fundamental principle of international law.”

Yes indeed, the same country that invaded the sovereign state of Ukraine, made multiple botched attempts to kidnap and kill its elected president and unleashed the largest and most destructive land war in Europe since 1945. Now, it is upholder and exemplar of principled international law.

The year 1945 is a baleful reminder of how the world, or at least the victors of World War II, decided to construct a rules-based new order to cement the idea that international law and not the law of the jungle, or the rule of the strongest, would construct an era of enduring peace and global cooperation. Previous regime changes, such as Panama, were invoked under a bilateral treaty, and the highly contested invasion of Iraq, for example, followed a UN resolution, flawed though the facts of the case were.

But now, who knows? The mightiest military power has just licensed the idea again that might determines right, doubtless of huge encouragement to both Moscow and Beijing (and of deep fear in places such as Ukraine and Taiwan, never mind Greenland).

SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often by propitiating autocrats and selectively offering condemnations to its ideological enemies that it never delivers to its authoritarian friends. It has alchemised hypocrisy and partiality into an alloy of irrelevance. And we lack any hard power in the bargain.

During the holidays, I enjoyed a Netflix movie on nuclear risk titled A House of Dynamite. Spoiler alert: It concerns a nuclear missile hurtling toward Chicago and leaves open how, and whether, the president of the US can retaliate, or whether he does so, and leaves unanswered whether a city of 10 million people is vaporised.

I thought it was an escapist romp with some difficult dilemmas attached. But in our new 2026 ruleless world, let’s hope that life does not soon imitate art.