Yves here. To some, this post might seem quaint. It looks back on a period when some Democrats were willing to act in a principled manner, at least when the costs were not high. It even show members of what Black Agenda Report calls the black misleadership class like Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters acting as if they had some decency.
But a key, albeit secondary part, of this account on how the South African divestment and sanctions movement got rolling is the seminal role of year of campus activism, which included targeting university endowments for divestiture of South African holdings. No wonder Zionist billionaire have been so savage in their efforts to stamp out student and faculty opposition to Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing.
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
By the early 1980s, South Africa’s system of racial apartheid had evolved from an issue of limited concern to becoming a major issue globally. Years of campaigning by anti-apartheid activists, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and student-led divestment movements were beginning to bear fruit. This momentum, however, stalled due to the conservative turn in U.S. politics after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election victory. His constructive engagement policy toward South Africa “prioritized resistance against communist expansion over efforts to end human rights violations internationally,” stated the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Moreover, Cold War concerns over some anti-apartheid groups’ links to radical or communist entities made the cause politically sensitive for many Democrats. The breakthrough came with the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986, when Congress overrode President Reagan’s veto to impose sanctions on South Africa, a result of years of pressure from progressive lawmakers and Democrats. It marked a turning point that would help see apartheid officially dismantled by 1994, assisted by the easing of Cold War tensions and the end of Soviet backing for South Africa’s liberation movements.
Apartheid was never a decisive electoral issue for most Americans. For Democrats with presidential ambitions in the 1980s and early 1990s, support for ending it was strongest in liberal centers like New York and on university campuses, where protests and local resolutions aligned with activist solidarity. Nationwide, however, the cause risked alienating some conservatives and foreign policy hawks. Still, prominent Democrats helped normalize legislation against South Africa, including bans on state entities doing business with companies operating there. Their pressure on the Reagan administration cemented a Democratic brand of foreign policy based on moral conviction. But having claimed a leading role in dismantling apartheid, this legacy has increasingly come back to haunt them.
Carter to Reagan
By the 1970s, events like the 1976 Soweto uprising and the rise of independent trade unions created a link between South African struggles and U.S. civil rights, student activism, and labor movements. For many Democrats, condemning apartheid was becoming a public litmus test for moral internationalism and prioritizing genuine social change abroad over realpolitik. President Jimmy Carter’s administration favored heavier pressure against South Africa, backing the 1977 UN-sponsored arms embargo and restricting exports of certain products.
Carter’s defeat in 1980 led to a policy turnaround. Ronald Reagan’s administration viewed South Africa’s liberation movements—the African National Congress (ANC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF)—as too closely tied to the Soviets, and embraced the constructive engagement policy with the South African government. Seeking gradual reform while maintaining political links, the White House downplayed apartheid as a priority in favor of retaining South Africa as a Cold War ally.
Some Democrats continued to see the issue as both morally and politically urgent. In 1983, Representative Stephen Solarz introduced H.R. 1693 to limit U.S. financial assistance to business operations in South Africa and ban the import of certain goods from the country. The bill failed, but Solarz emerged as a prominent foreign policy force throughout the 1980s.
In an 1985 Opinion piece in the New York Times, he pointed out that “Just as President Reagan’s policy of constructive engagement could not bring Pretoria to its senses, American economic sanctions alone will not bring it to its knees. It will take a combination of increasing internal and international pressure to convince the South African Government that the price of maintaining apartheid exceeds the cost of abandoning it.”
By 1992, political analyst Charlie Cook floated him as a possible presidential contender, but his prospects faded after losing his House seat in post-1990 redistricting. He was offered the Indian ambassadorship by Bill Clinton, which fell through following allegations that he had sought a U.S. visa for a Hong Kong businessman with a criminal record.
Solarz’s actions, however, showed that standing against South Africa’s apartheid didn’t negatively impact one’s political career. National security concerns, especially over South Africa’s suspected nuclear activities (including a possible 1979 nuclear test), also helped build some bipartisan support for sanctions. In 1983, Representative Charles B. Rangel introduced H.R.1020 to ban exports of nuclear materials and technology to South Africa, while Representative William H. Gray III proposed H.R. 1392 to limit U.S. investment in the country.
He also introduced the Anti-Apartheid Action Act of 1985, which called for prohibiting loans and new investments and restricting imports. Though it passed the House and Senate, the bill stalled before becoming law.
The legislative push against apartheid actually began more than a decade earlier, with Representative Ron Dellums, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, issuing the first legislative challenge to apartheid in 1972. By the mid-1980s, community leaders and CBC politicians like Maxine Waters,Ron Dellums, and Charles Rangel had all helped raise awareness, notably after the 1984 arrests of Dellums and Representative John Conyers at the South African Embassy for protesting against “racial segregation.”
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign showed that voters could support a more radical stance on apartheid. In 1984, while speaking at the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, he said, “The present U.S. partnership with apartheid is a violation of our national morality.”
Senior Democrats like Gary Hart and John Glenn, also running for president that year, were less vocal on the issue. However, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, long critical of apartheid since the 1960sand vocal against it as vice president under Jimmy Carter, endorsed strengthening the strategic embargo and limiting diplomatic contact as part of his presidential campaign.
Mondale was defeated in a landslide, winning only in his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C., in an election where his pledge to raise taxes and lingering dissatisfaction with the Carter administration weighed heavily. Despite his defeat, Mondale helped normalize opposition to apartheid within mainstream Democratic discourse, and after retiring from politics following the 1984 presidential election, he later served as U.S. ambassador to Japan under Clinton and narrowly lost a 2002 Senate race.
Democrats continued to introduce new legislation in their fight against apartheid and found success at the local and state levels. By 1985, numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, had passed divestment ordinances, while states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, and Nebraska had enacted divestment laws. The same year, New York Governor Mario Cuomo said that “to demonstrate the abhorrence of… [New York] residents to the pernicious system of apartheid… he would soon propose legislation to require the divestiture, over the next five years, of billions of dollars in state funds.” Despite it being struck down, Cuomo remained a powerful Democratic figure until his 1994 electoral loss.
The movement’s momentum spread from House members to mayors and governors, and senators. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who challenged Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary, stayed a vocal critic of apartheid, traveling to South Africa in 1985 and meeting anti-apartheid activist and bishop Desmond Tutu. Kennedy’s strong liberal base and national profile allowed him to champion sanctions, even as personal scandals invited criticism.
In 1986, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware made headlines by sharply rebuking Secretary of State George Shultz during a Senate hearing over the Reagan administration’s lenient policy toward South Africa. Joined by fellow Democrats and several Republicans, Biden pressed for a timetable to end apartheid. While his national profile was still rising, he remained popular in Delaware.
The turning point came in 1986 when Congress, led by Democrats unanimously, reintroduced the Anti-Apartheid Action Act as the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The victory marked the moment when apartheid became mainstream Democratic policy, reflecting growing public support nationwide.
Moving into the Mainstream
Widespread Democratic support for anti-apartheid measures was clear by the 1988 presidential race. Representative Dick Gephardt, a co-sponsor of the 1983 bill to reduce investment in South Africa, won early 1988 election contests like Iowa but later withdrew amid declining support. Joe Biden also ran briefly in 1988, while Jesse Jackson, in his second presidential campaign, made helping end apartheid an integral part of his foreign policy.
The nomination ultimately went to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis had already divested state pension funds from companies doing business in South Africa in 1983. During his campaign, Dukakis, influenced by Jesse Jackson, labeled South Africa as a terrorist state. Although he lost the general election, he continued his stance by signing an executive order in 1989, which banned Massachusetts state contracts with firms operating there. However, his political capital had diminished, and he chose not to seek reelection as governor in 1991.
A major reason behind growing Democratic activism against apartheid in the 1980s stemmed from greater public awareness. Campus divestment movements further entrenched anti-apartheid activism into the Democratic Party and wider American political culture.
“Beginning in the late 1970s, a grassroots movement of American college students and faculty across the country started demanding that their academic and civic institutions divest their holdings in companies doing business in South Africa and that pension funds and banks divest any South African assets. … By 1988, more than 155 academic institutions had fully or partially divested from South Africa… In addition, by 1989, 26 U.S. states, 22 counties and more than 90 cities had taken economic action against companies doing business in South Africa,” stated the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva.
A series of events organized globally further helped bring apartheid into the national spotlight. These included the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1985, the 1985 global hit “Sun City,” a song that had roots in the protests against a whites-only resort in South Africa, and the 1988 televised London concert for Mandela’s 70th birthday.
Negotiations to dismantle apartheid began in 1989 when Frederik Willem de Klerk became South African president. In the United States, Democrats were critical of President George H.W. Bush’s decision to lift certain sanctions on South Africa in 1991. It was not, however, a major campaign issue in the 1992 election, with foreign policy sidelined due to the Soviet Union’s collapse and a deep recession at home. The election was primarily shaped by domestic concerns, which Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and his vice-presidential pick Al Gore successfully navigated to win.
Both men had taken relatively cautious public positions on apartheid in the 1980s. Gore was a vocal supporter of the 1986 CAAA but did not make it a strong part of his political identity. Clinton was, meanwhile, governor of a southern state and did not advance any divestment initiatives. But the 1992 South African referendum, where white South Africans voted to end minority rule, provided a welcome opening. The Clinton presidential administration strongly backed South Africa’s ongoing reforms and offered strong assistance. In April 1994, apartheid was formally dismantled, and South Africa held its first free elections. Six months later, Clinton welcomed President Nelson Mandela on his first official state visit to the U.S., with Clinton later visiting South Africa in 1998.
Yet Clinton’s trip also exposed early strains. Mandela rejected U.S. trade proposals and defended ties with leaders in Libya, Iran, and Cuba. Still, Democrats retained much of the moral authority associated with their stance on apartheid, a perception reinforced by contrast with President George W. Bush’s wars in the 2000s, until disappointment followed. Barack Obama’s presidency, with Biden as vice president, often appeared to be pushing for overall reform but was morally inconsistent with new military campaigns being initiated during his term. Trump’s 2016 campaign leaned on a promise not to start new wars, a record that Biden was able to match.
But what defined Biden instead was his steadfast support for Israel after October 7, 2023. His administration’s political and military backing split Democrats more sharply than any foreign policy issue in decades, alienating younger, progressive, and Muslim and Arab American voters who once saw the party as a vehicle for moral clarity abroad. Biden’s anti-apartheid legacy has been recast as hypocrisy amid his support for Israel as Palestinians suffer. The wider Democratic Party’s inaction on Israel, aside from its progressive voices, showed that the problem was not just Biden’s but reflected the wider sentiment of the party.
What began as a story of global solidarity and moral clarity has become a painful point of contention, particularly over Israel and other perceived failures of Democratic presidents since then. South Africa’s post-apartheid promise, based on U.S. support, has also faltered, with ongoing racial divisions, corruption, crime, power outages, and a water crisis. These issues drove the African National Congress, dominant for 30 years, to its worst-ever electoral results in 2024. South Africans’ frustration has extended to the U.S., with lingering distrust over American intentions over the past two decades, leaving space for China and Russia to expand their influence.
The Democrat legacy of ending apartheid has not only set higher expectations that the Biden administration failed to meet but also contributed to a geopolitical setback. Democrats’ legacy has been further complicated by President Donald Trump’s renewed focus on white South Africans. Beginning in 2018 and escalating during his second term, Trump has framed their plight as evidence of ongoing racial discrimination in the country. In February 2025, he issued an executive order titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa,” and during an Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in May, he accused him of enabling a white genocide in the country. Trump’s refugee program for white South Africans saw its first arrivals during the same month.
The lesson of the Democratic anti-apartheid legacy extends beyond the single historic victory of helping end South Africa’s discriminatory and oppressive system. While its role in ending apartheid was essential and historic, lasting political change depends on the willingness to act decisively, endure political costs, and uphold principles even when they are inconvenient or unpopular. It also means applying the same standards across countries and time periods, which the Democrats have been unable to achieve.
One wonders how the supply of moral clarity around the issue of apartheid would have been affected if South Africa was an occupying force in the US political terrain back then (the way Israel is today). If there had been an entire apparatus, funded by American billionaires with links to South Africa, ready to bring its crushing weight down on any politician raising their head above the parapet to criticize the country and be at the vanguard of pushing for legislative action against its government, would history have turned out differently? I guess we’ll never know. What we do know is that moral cowardice is now so handsomely rewarded in US politics that the stance of most US politicians on Gaza and Palestine is not at all surprising
I had the same thought. But then I remembered that in the 80s, Reagan did actually push back against Zionist entity overreach – https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/05/24/ronald-reagan-wasnt-afraid-to-use-leverage-to-hold-israel-to-task/ His successor George HW Bush did as well, and it may have cost him re-election.
Maybe these was a little less venality all around back then? Or maybe AIPAC wasn’t paying as well yet. Hard to say, but it’s also amazing that today’s politicians can make that anti-Commie, brain addled, big money spokeshole look good by comparison.
What’s even funnier is that the “Jewish vote” was more “real” back then: Jewish Anericans were more genuinely unified in support of Israel. Now, a majority of them are opposed to Israel’s behavior. Is it really the Jewish donors outweighing Jewish voters?
“Is it really the Jewish donors outweighing Jewish voters?” This is already happening to the general US public, the US donors outweigh US voters…
It’s been a functioning political market where policy is increasingly bid and bought for 4 presidential election cycles since Citizens United.
As early as 2002-3 Thomas Ferguson was showing that statistically policy votes had no meaningful correlation with voter preferences. Since then the duopoly has increasingly struggled to find any rhetoric that can justify policy in any relationship to voter preferences.
This time around, our Best President Ever has simply forsworn any interest in voters or their needs. Everything is for sale while all the money goes to the same fewer and fewer people.
“Maybe AIPAC wasn’t paying as well back then”
Maybe the “startup nation”, as Israel is known in some quarters, has been applying the “test-learn-iterate” cycle favoured by tech startups to its state capture playbook since those days. Upping the pay and making the threats of reputational destruction via blackmail (Epstein) and bogus allegations of anti-semitism more explicit were probably amongst the updates added to the playbook over the years. Maintaining the level of devotion to Israel that we see in the US political landscape must require a monomaniacal focus on keeping politicians acutely aware of the cost of straying from their role as Israel’s first line of defense.
Israel was an ally of apartheid South Africa so in that sense there was an occupying political force but more on the qt back then.
There’s a case to be made that the Cold War, that some of us lived through, was less about Communism or the notion that the Soviets wanted to take over the world and really about the death throes of colonialism. And so the dominant USA signed on to defend French colonialism in Vietnam and various dictators in Africa and Latin America as long as they vowed anticommunism and deference to the USG. This is not what FDR planned with his idea of the UN enforcing international peace. But his successor and Trman’s deep South advisor Byrnes and of course arch colonialist Churchill took the reins.
And now our news is dominated by that final bastion of European colonialism in the Middle East and struggles against Russua versus a multipolarity that would be more what FDR had in mind. Plus the Dems–still coasting on New Deal brand fumes in the 1980s–are much weaker. That said, Trump’s clown show doesn’t seem to have much of a future either. Fog bank ahead.
Your thesis for what the cold war was really about does provide food for thought. With enough time, I think one can go into research mode to try and put empirical meat on that bone.
“There’s a case to be made that the Cold War […] was really about the death throes of colonialism. And so the dominant USA signed on to defend French colonialism in Vietnam […]”
Yes and no.
Yes, it was about the death throes of colonialism, in the sense that the USA were intent on supplanting European powers as the preeminent player in the emerging Third World. The consequence was that the USA were actually quite in favour of booting France, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, Belgium out of their possessions in Asia, Africa, Oceania — provided of course that the resulting nations kept on the side of the “free world”. Senegal, Lebanon, and Singapore yes, Guinea Conakry, Algeria, and North Vietnam no.
Thus, the USA gave up their reluctance on supporting the French in Indochina but only after the Korean war started — which the French skilfully depicted as a new front in the fight against communism in Asia that had already been going on for 5 years in Indochina.
Conversely, when the British and the French attempted to reassert their colonial privileges in Egypt regarding the Suez canal, they were rudely whistled back.
Similarly, the USA were quite reluctant regarding their support of the Portuguese during the colonial wars; they even refused to supply some types of advanced weaponry the Portuguese were needing, and supported (somewhat desultorily) independentist movements that were not obviously aligned with the Eastern bloc (such as, at times, the UNITA and the FNLA in Angola).
We are observing the very last backwash of that evolution with the French winding up their military presence in Africa while the USA keep busy trying to replace them everywhere they left after having done nothing to help their “allies” to maintain their historic private preserve.
I’m more receptive to this argument than I might have been, say, 10 years ago.
Today’s Ukraine looks like it’s being run a lot like S. Vietnam was 60 years ago. Afghanistan was for the 20 years we were there, too.
American colonialism looks different than European colonialism, per vao’s comment below.
I very much recall the abhorrence many felt about apartheid and the moral high ground occupied by some US politicians and international politicians and governments. There was a very real grass roots activism on and off college campuses. There are a couple of major differences versus the on-going Gaza genocide and the struggle to end apartheid. First, the US civil rights movement remained cohesive after the various victories of the preceding two decades. It was a multi-racial movement that picked up the torch of anti-apartheid. Secondly there was a semi-functional “left” in the United States with roots in the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements. These remained in society and on college campuses and were active not only opposing apartheid, but also the US-sponsored wars in Central America and advocating nuclear disarmament. Arguably, these movements were co-opted and factionalized into dissolution in the 1990s-2010s. What is now happening with the anti Genocide movement is a very different suppression.
What I wonder about from the death throes of apartheid in SA is how coincided with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and nominally socialist Eastern Europe and privatizations in Mexico. What was the role of the US (and lesser extent Western Europe) and NGOs to facilitate the massive looting of state assets and establishment of neoliberalism and rent-seeking financialization? Were there US government of NGO advisers embedded in the SA government? In all these places oligarchs rose to power and the 90% became the precariate; the GINI coefficient in SA is worse now than it was 30 years ago. So much for the Freedom Charter; it was just a piece of paper anyway. In the case of SA the grassroots UDF was intentionally disbanded and trade unions and SACP co-opted into their modern irrelevance.
It seems like a common 1990s playbook to me…
Upstater, the first post-apartheid government in South Africa, the so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), which included erstwhile Apartheid era ministers as part of the cabinet, came into being as a result of the mood of reconciliation gripping the country after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA). The groundwork for the issues plaguing contemporary SA, which you so eloquently lament, was done during those “negotiations”. With the National Party boers neutering them from within the cabinet, the ANC was seen as a safe pair of hands for the country (ie they weren’t going to disrupt the economic status quo). As part of the bargain, a few black oligarchs, including our current president, were plucked from their ranks and the unions aligned with them and the rest, as they say, is history. The ANC managed to fly solo after extricating itself from the snares of the NP but messed up so badly as a ruling party that we’re now once again treading on familiar political ground with the return of yet another GNU. I suspect this time, the rebranded NP (DA) is in it for the long haul.
Again, what matters is the trajectory.
If you don’t want to protest genocide and ethnic cleansing, you are morally bankrupt.
The big difference is that in the case of Gaza the US has an enormous role. In the South African transition, it had effectively none. It did not supply weapons, as did France and Israel, and had little other leverage. The two unhelpful interventions it made were to encourage the South Africans to go into Angola in 1975 (for which they never forgave the US) and to give a platform to Chief Buthelezi, the “moderate” face of anti-apartheid. The BDS campaign was (correctly) perceived at the time as a performative movement to imitate the glory days of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam protests, but if anything it was counter-productive. The community most affected was the urban English-speaking middle class, who were the least enthusiastic supporters of the government anyway, and the result was that they moved to the right and began to vote for the Afrikaner-led National Party, the traditional enemy, in significant numbers by the late 1980s. (Ironically, the Democratic Alliance, with which the ANC was in coalition is the latest iteration of the old United Party, previously supported by most English-speakers.) Outside western pressure played little part, which is important because the story of the struggle itself has since been domesticated and banalised into a version of the US in the 1960s (see the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, for example.) It’s also true that the struggle was ideological rather than ethnic: significant numbers of the ANC’s political and military cadres were white, coloured or Indian (I knew some of them.) The fact that the ANC and the SA Communist Party were joined at the hip also had a strong influence
In the end, what really did for apartheid was the un-winnable war in Angola, the violence in the country and, most of all, the end of the Cold War, which in one go removed the main plank from under the whole justification for the regime, and put an end to the (widely-shared) fears of a master plan for regime change directed from Moscow, and a Cuban-Soviet invasion via Angola and Namibia. This gave De Klerk the space for what he thought would be a clever political manoeuvre: unban the ANC and the CP, release Mandela and offer a few token concessions towards a reformed political system. But during the CODESA process and the Transitional Executive Council (TEC) that followed, the NP was completely outplayed by the ANC, which took effective power even before the elections. (I was there for personal reasons during the transition, and you could feel the power ebbing progressively away from the NP in the charged atmosphere of the time.)
I thought then, and I still think, that the transition was handled about as well as could have reasonably been expected, given the constraints of the time, and the fact that there was a near-civil war in progress. Pulling back from the abyss wasn’t a bad result, even if, as always, it’s possible to imagine better ones.
Of course the chicken and egg question is whether the Russians and Chinese really posed a threat that required unsavory third world allies for the West or whether that was merely the excuse for the old world to cling to their posessions or, alternately, influence the US to take their place. In the end the dominos did not fall, or fell in the reverse direction since Russia and China have become more like us than vice versa.
This is an economics blog and a lot of it involves questions about whether neoliberal TINA is a good thing as opposed to the competition between economic ideas that existed for much of the 20th. Some of us used to think the USG was doing in Latin America what they would do in this country if they could get away with it. Seems ever more true.
And also the obvious inability of the Euros and the US deep state to let go of the first Cold War challenges the credibility of that earlier threat. One might almost conclude it was really just a vulgar power struggle and not a great crusade for freedom and democracy or, more recently, against “terrorism.”
The BDS campaign wasn’t merely perfomative as you contend. Through a combination of sanctions, freezing the country out of international credit markets, the anemic economic growth in its wake, massive capital flight, currency devaluation, and a host of other things, the BDS campaign chipped away at the financial stability of the apartheid government until a ballooning budget deficit resulting from all these factors made it completely untenable. The SA government could, and did, shrug off its international pariah status as long as it had the money to keep the apartheid system in place. But dwindling resources meant that by the time De Klerk made the decision to release Mandela, the government was financially on its knees and the proverbial writing was on the wall vis a vis its future survival prospects. With the collapse of the Soviet Union flipping the geopolitical chessboard, the NP knew it was living on borrowed time and decided some conciliatory overtures towards the resistance would position it to rebrand and play a role in the transition government (which is exactly what happened).
I’m also not sure how the ANC outplayed the NP when it was the ANC that emerged from CODESA with a watered down vision for the future of the country? It’s not for nothing that a vocal section of the population contend that the ANC negotiators made concessions during negotiations that are today seen as tantamount to having betrayed the revolution. The Freedom Charter was never implemented, but is instead dusted off whenever politicians want to hurl platitudes at the electorate. The economic status quo entrenched during apartheid was never disrupted and it continues to confer privilege on the descendants of the architects of that brutal system. It’s hard to reconcile these facts with your position that the Nats were outplayed by the ANC.
It’s accepted that the SA was in a bad way economically by the end of the 1980s, but the problems you mention were in fact part of the factors that drove the white electorate to the right, and made a political solution more difficult. The transition would not have been possible, on the other hand, without the end of the Cold War. As regards CODESA/TEC, I knew some people who had been involved, and it’s true that complaints about the ANC “giving away too much” began almost at once, and in particular that the economy would remain largely in white hands. But it depends on what you thought the objective was. The ANC could probably have walked away with more, but at what cost to the country? Alastair Sparks’s “Tomorrow is Another Country” does give a very good account of the negotiations (he had excellent sources) and makes it clear how far the regime underestimated the ANC.
I’ve heard the argument being made in the past that the ANC had to “give away too much” (or, in resistance politics parlance , “betray the revolution”) to avert what might otherwise have been too high a cost for a country in transition to bear. What i’ve never heard described is what this cost would have been, in real terms. A civil war? Economic collapse? Whites hightailing it to exit the country? A full blown civil war aside, which the most fanatical sections of the Afrikaaner population led by the likes of Eugene Terblanche of the AWB tried to instigate by storming the CODESA negotiations in 1993, these things did happen to varying degrees in the early years of the transition, but the country muddled through regardless. Again, it’s less clear to me what this supposed “high cost” would have been, both in the short term, and perhaps more pertinently, in the long term. Contrast this with the cost of “giving away too much”, which is all too visible today, easily identifiable as the long forward shadow cast on the economic prospects of the majority of our citizens. Thanks for the book recommendation.
Nice to be reminded of Jesse Jackson’s two attempts to get the Dem nomination. I volunteered on both his campaigns, and still believe that if the DNC weren’t such racists Jesse would have been President.
Very interesting piece, but I have to push back on this: “Trump’s 2016 campaign leaned on a promise not to start new wars, a record that Biden was able to match.”
Starting as Vice President, Biden pushed relentlessly for war in Ukraine. He backed the 2014 coup that brought a Russophobic, nazi backed government to power.
As President, his blanket refusal to negotiate with Russia (and the high likelihood that he was backing a Ukrainian assault on the Donbas, which Putin invaded to pre-empt) triggered the invasion.
Once the SMO began, Biden did everything possible to pour gasoline on the fire: arming Ukraine, sending NATO “advisors” into the war zone, providing Ukraine with targeting data for missile and drone attacks inside Russia, etc.