Former DA leader Tony Leon talks about how South Africa should handle Trump and the G20. Former DA leader Tony Leon tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that South Africa is taking a chance in how it is dealing with US President Donald Trump’s decision to boycott the recent G20 [...]
While President Ramaphosa touts G20 success and foreign policy achievements, he should keep in mind that voters overwhelmingly prioritise domestic economic concerns like jobs and corruption over international relations, writes Tony Leon. “There are few votes in foreign affairs,” was the response I received from a local politician. This, after I enquired why his party had [...]
Tony Leon argues that South Africa’s G20 summit was inflated as a historic diplomatic triumph when it was merely standard international theatre with vague aspirations. In July 1971, US National Security Advisor Dr Henry Kissinger undertook a top-secret visit to Beijing, breaking more than two decades of Cold War confrontation between America and China. It was [...]
South Africa’s moral blindness, or one-eyed approach to a the 7 October attack, might be one reason for the country’s exclusion from a seat at Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, writes Tony Leon. Why, you might reasonably ask, was the world’s “moral superpower” not present at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday? Just to recap: In January [...]
Our constitutional promises and its premises have been flattened into a single unadorned and unqualified concept: the pursuit of “transformation”, writes Tony Leon. With debate raging and court challenges looming on the government’s version of “transformation”, you could be forgiven for thinking that the SA Constitution consists of just one section. On 9 June, President Cyril Ramaphosa [...]
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent encounter at the White House revealed that South Africans have all succumbed to “Trump derangement syndrome” in varying different degrees, writes Tony Leon. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa went to the White House on a “working visit” to meet the US president and nothing much happened. No one in the world, least [...]
Tony Leon explores the unpredictable dynamics and potential outcomes of Wednesday’s high-stakes Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, examining political tensions, personal chemistry, and the challenges both leaders bring to the table. The great question for Wednesday is which Donald J Trump will show up for his meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa? The second [...]
Tony Leon reflects on lessons for the US-SA relations in the relationship between Jorge Bergoglio (who later became Pope Francis) and the former president to Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. A lot of airtime right now is taken with the identity of who President Cyril Ramaphosa appoints as South Africa's new ambassador to the United States. Though, as [...]
In an act of conspicuous national self-destruction, the ANC has set the scene for the ejection of the DA from the GNU, writes Tony Leon. Circa 1899, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, developed the idea of "screen memory". This suggested that one memory can function to hide another, typically, unconscious mental content. Perhaps only psychologists [...]
Logan Roy was the magnificent and monstrous patriarch at the centre of the satirical television masterpiece Succession. In the second episode of its final season in 2023, Roy delivered a killer line to his dysfunctional children, "I love you, but you are not serious people". Absent any amity, indeed amid high levels of acrimony, "you [...]
