Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Cold War by Shahin P. Malik & Alan P. Dobson

Author:Shahin P. Malik & Alan P. Dobson [Malik, Shahin P. & Dobson, Alan P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138614215
Google: 8FbHuQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 40981402
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Western Misperceptions

In this way the relentless logic of containment and the clouded thought and loose generalities about Soviet intentions it spawned in the West which played into the hands of military and political elites in Pretoria. And this was, as Bowman demonstrated, despite the fact that all of these three arguments could be challenged, that South Africa’s indispensability to the West was by no means absolute or indeed proven (Bowman, 1985, p.133). There were a number of counter-arguments to negate the propaganda emanating from South Africa, including the following:

i) The Cape Route was not as strategically decisive for Western oil interests for example as the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf. In any case, once the Americans acquired a 50 year lease on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean from the UK in 1966 and developed a naval and communications base there access to Simonstown was irrelevant.

ii) There was no reason why a black South African government should not sell minerals to the West. Others did. Angola, for example, had been a Marxist/Leninist state since 1975 yet continued (and continues) to supply the West with petroleum.

iii) The long term strategic interests of the West clearly dictated staying on the good side of black African nationalists. To co-operate with white South Africa was therefore extremely myopic and inimical to US global interests.

iv) Apart from the holocaust, opposition to apartheid in South Africa was the only moral absolute in world politics on which the dominant ideologies - North, South, East and West - could agree. To co-operate with the South African regime therefore meant bucking the new normative climate of international relations and sacrificing a possible leadership role in world politics.

v) Finally, and most pertinently, the Soviet Union had no vital interests in South Africa.

In the hierarchy of world affairs, Moscow had always ranked southern Africa fairly low down on the list, certainly below Europe, East Asia and the Middle East (Albright, 1978, p.38-9). Unlike these geo-strategic locations in the ‘great game’, southern Africa was always peripheral rather than core.

Throughout the Cold War period, and contrary to Western perceptions, Soviet policy in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole was decidedly low key, low-risk and low-cost. Although the Soviet-bloc presence in Angola and Mozambique after 1974-5 alarmed Washington, overall direct Soviet commitment to the region was limited. There was certainly no evidence, beyond that alleged by Pretoria, of a communist ‘grand design’ for control of southern Africa.

In fact the biggest Eastern bloc presence in Southern Africa throughout the Cold War period - 50,000 Cuban troops in Angola - was paid for not by the USSR, but by Angola from hard dollar currency earned from petroleum exports to the USA (Marcum, 1976, pp.407-25).

In other words the Soviet threat to southern Africa, in so far as it materialised, was in fact indirectly bankrolled by the USA itself. This is a classic example of the self-fulfilling prophecy in international relations and stemmed from the fact that while the Americans persisted in perceiving the world in terms of

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