For Sanctions, Even if in Futile Outrage

Why should we bother about South Africa? In Washington’s acrimonious debate that question goes unasked. Yet it is the key to understanding events and to devising a sensible course for the United States. It is particularly pertinent because South Africa does not fit the profile of other U.S. foreign-policy interests and concerns.

The Republic of South Africa lies on a major trading route, yet no threat is likely to be projected against the sea lanes. The naval base at Simonstown, once touted by Great Britain, has little value. Nor, it turns out, are we so dependent on minerals from the republic that we must place that interest before all else. Even if South Africa has nuclear weapons, it does not threaten global security arrangements. On strategic grounds South Africa does not merit the attention now lavished on it.

Nor does fear about what might happen next justify our current intense interest. South Africa will not soon, if ever, become a black communist state dominated by the Soviet Union. Despite long-term advantages for Moscow from obtuse U.S. policy, South Africa’s neighbors are not destined to join the Soviet camp if apartheid persists. And there is no parallel with the Philippines, where, with change impending, the United States found a self-interested need to move rapidly onto the side of the victors.

By the same token, domestic politics in the United States does not explain the spate of concern about South Africa. To be sure, many American blacks are deeply engaged. And some conservative leaders in the Republican Party have calculated that taking a strong moral stand on this issue can help the Republicans become the nation’s majority party. So far, South Africa has not become a pervasive grass-roots issue dividing American blacks from whites. Certainly it is not a constituency issue on the scale of Israel, Ireland, Greece or even the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe.

Then why does South Africa matter? For the simplest of reasons: The average American believes that apartheid is wrong. It may not be the worst evil in the world. The black townships are dehumanizing, but still not the gulag; blacks are being killed, but there is no wholesale slaughter as in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia. But, at this moment in the post-colonial world, ending white oppression of non-whites has achieved moral primacy. It is history’s child.

Yet for Americans who accept responsibility for helping to end apartheid there is little but frustration. Domestic debate about the best means to achieve a valid, perhaps vital, moral purpose has become disconnected from the reality of South African life and politics. We have rediscovered this evil, witnessed the pain, admired the courage of apartheid’s victims and its foes. According to our practical nature, it should be a simple step from awareness to action, and from action to rapid results.

Against this need and expectation it is hard for Americans to understand South Africa for what it is. Its whites are deeply entrenched in a modern Western economy. The bulk of white society coalesces around commitment to its survival and dominance --political, economic and cultural. On its own, white South Africa will not dismantle the basic structure of the state, nor will it accede to the limited outside pressures being debated in the West. “Petty apartheid” may go, but, with politics driven by fear, no compromise on the basics seems possible.

The U.S. debate about imposing sanctions turns in part on who would suffer more: white rulers or black workers. It turns partly on the strength of the message that the civilized world should send in “marching to Pretoria.” But few are prepared to concede the limited utility of economic sanctions, even sanctions of unprecedented purity, to effect a revolution in domestic power. White rule continued in Rhodesia for more than a decade under sanctions, in circumstances where rulers were less obdurate and change was clearly inevitable.

In South Africa, by contrast, there is little reason to believe that the revolution in power--which, in Lincoln’s phrase, “must needs come”--will come other than after prolonged and prodigious slaughter. The U.S. debate on sanctions is puny in comparison. It is an effort variously to symbolize solidarity with apartheid’s opponents, to hope against hope, to make the problem go away for now, or, cynically, to appear to be doing good without risk of success.

Judged in terms of likely results, sanctions have little to commend them, while neither the United States nor other nations will entertain military assault against South Africa. But, in making moral judgments, “results” are a secondary matter. Indeed, President Reagan and his key advisers are missing a simple point: Sometimes it is necessary to act for moral reasons alone, even if logic argues that the chosen action is likely to be futile.

Thus even if there is little hope that sanctions will lead to “one man, one vote,” they deserve U.S. support as a symbol of outraged humanity.