TOM EATON | Rasool succession: if only diplomats — and sovereign nations — were still a thing

Speculation is mounting over who will replace Ebrahim Rasool as South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, with current frontrunners including deputy justice minister Andries Nel, former Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon and a golden retriever named Babycakes.

At first glance Nel seems to be the ideal candidate, and not only because he is white and will therefore not cause MAGA officials to try to hide the good cutlery when he walks into a room.

Born in New Orleans, he has the US in his blood, or at least some of its petrochemicals, and in theory he could hold his hosts spellbound with stories of his father’s time working as a consul for the apartheid regime, or as it’s remembered in the new Washington, good people on both sides. Even better, as a long-serving member of the ANC he is also very practised at spending time with people who are resistant to facts and who believe that the purpose of government is to enrich your friends.

A closer look, however, would quickly disqualify him. Nel is an Afrikaner, which might raise awkward questions about how he is alive and not being genocided, while a quick FBI security check would reveal that, as a human rights lawyer during apartheid, he is hopelessly infested with the woke mind virus and therefore a persona of the nonnest grata.

Our moral compass isn’t even spinning: as always, it’s simply trying to find the nearest geopolitical sugar daddy.

On Friday, when Helen Zille told an audience that she thought Tony Leon would be an excellent choice, the ANC responded by insisting that the decision would be made by Luthuli house and not the DA. Still, even Leon’s loudest critics would have to agree that he seems qualified for the job: he’s already served as ambassador in three countries, and, given that he oversaw the merging the Democratic Party with the last dregs of the National Party in 2000 to create the Democratic Alliance, he’s clearly got some experience negotiating with white nationalists.

Most important, however, is that Leon seems very unlikely to make the same mistake Rasool did, namely, to forget South Africa’s longstanding policy of performing displays of moral outrage only after it’s first checked with Accounts to see if it’s allowed to.

Of course, when Accounts says no, the results can seem contradictory or at least confusing, as we demand that Benjamin Netanyahu account for his vast crimes in Gaza at the International Criminal Court, the same court that ruled in 2015 that we had broken international law by refusing to arrest the Chinese-backed Sudanese genocidaire Omar Al-Bashir. It’s how we could grant Vladimir Putin diplomatic immunity from arrest in case he turned up at the Brics summit in 2023, but refuse a visa to the Dalai Lama.

As I said, these sort of flip-flops feel erratic, as if our moral compass is spinning out of control. But this is no aberration or malfunction. Rather it’s simply what happens when what is right and good runs smack into the swamp of what is necessary and profitable. Our moral compass isn’t even spinning: as always, it’s simply trying to find the nearest geopolitical sugar daddy.

Rasool’s mistake, I suspect, was to believe that the new bloke in the Oval sugar daddy office was more or less the same as all the ones who’d come before over the last 30 years and would want the same routine: a bit of sexy scolding about what a bad, bad man he’d been; a short bask in some very faded Madiba glow; and then a perfunctory handover of cash.

But the new bloke isn’t like the old ones, and I’m not sure either Andries Nel or Tony Leon are up to it, not because they won’t be excellent ambassadors but because diplomats represent countries, and, as Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are making increasingly clear, sovereign countries and national interests are old-fashioned ideas that tend to get in the way of good business.

This isn’t new, of course. Way back in 1976, in an iconic scene in Network, a captain of industry reveals to our awe-struck hero that “there is no United States” because “we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies”. Instead, “the world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”

That film was a satire; but when you hear the most powerful man in the world claim that “Canada only works as a (US) state” and that the border with Canada is nothing but “an artificial line” on a map; and then on the weekend Steve Witkoff, Trump’s peace envoy to Moscow, tells Putin propagandist Tucker Carlson that “we cannot allow [Ukraine] to drag us into World War Three”, and that the war needs to end so that Trump and Putin can get on with the really important work, like “thinking about how to integrate their energy policies in the Arctic”, it’s hard not to believe that satire has become reality and that we are arriving in a world in which the profit motive openly and explicitly trumps not only the Enlightenment values so many conservatives claim to cherish, but the very notion of nation states.

All of which is why I think our best shot is to send Babycakes the golden retriever to Washington. And why not? She’s charming. She’s obedient. Very importantly, she’s blonde. And best of all, she’ll be listened to just as carefully as any other South African would be.