President Donald Trump’s secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Cuban-American Marco Rubio, wields enormous influence over the foreign policy establishment of the Trump administration.
Rubio, perhaps even much more than Trump himself, looms large as a diplomatic and political foe of democratic South Africa who is likely to continue to give life and fuel to the decidedly ruinous lie about a so-called “white genocide” in the country.
US vice-president JD Vance may also in the future emerge to vie for the title of the most formidable opponent of South Africa in the Trump administration, given allegations of his closeness to Peter Thiel. Thiel is his wealthy and influential billionaire patron and benefactor who spent part of his childhood in apartheid South Africa and colonial-era South West Africa (Namibia), who is apparently among white South African émigrés in America tirelessly promoting the bogus “white genocide” claim.
The closeness between Vance and Thiel makes the former prone to continue Elon Musk and Rubio’s baseless propaganda offensive against democratic South Africa.
Rubio is nothing if not a lifelong and highly dedicated anti-Communist lusting for the overthrow of Cuba’s Communist regime and quick to inflict severe, painful punishment on countries, weak ones especially, he perceives as being too closely aligned with Cuba, such as Venezuela and seemingly South Africa as well.
It is true that Rubio once blasted Trump as a “con artist”, as reported by The Texas Tribune of February 26 2016 in an article titled Rubio Eviscerates ‘Con Artist’ Donald Trump.
Whatever transpires in the future politically for Rubio, he is today the most powerful US secretary of state since Henry Kissinger by virtue of being simultaneously the secretary of state and the acting national security adviser, two positions Kissinger also occupied in the 1970s.
Rubio seems particularly determined to stamp his fingerprints all over Trump’s bilateral relationship towards South Africa the way Kissinger before him did with his ‘Africa shuttle diplomacy’ in the 1970s, which remains to this day the official American diplomacy’s most activist engagement with the African continent.
What complicates matters greatly for South Africa, in my view, is highlighted by Lawrence Davidson’s Consortium News article of May 26 titled Rubio, Cuba & the Zionist Model.
In this article Davidson reveals the close connection between Rubio, the Miami, Florida-based Cuban-American lobby, in particular the Cuban-American National Foundation founded by Mas Canosa and the powerful Israel lobby in the US that acts as a model for the anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Florida,, Rubio’s birthplace.
Davidson writes: “Rubio was born in 1971 to a Cuban exile parents residing in Florida. That means he was born into a community and culture that was overtly opposed to the rule of Fidel Castro and his successors. One cannot emphasise enough that this was a relatively closed, yet highly organised, community, where to challenge the prevailing anti-Castro stance was tantamount to ‘treason’.
It was also a politically influential community when it came to lobbying the federal government on foreign policy on Cuba. For instance, politicians like Rubio pushed for the economic embargo of Cuba without regard to either the increasing poverty of the Cuban people, or the friction this approach caused with US allies involved in trade with Cuba.”
The almost mythical power of the Israel lobby in America was perhaps best exposed by John J Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book, The Israeli Lobby and Foreign Policy.
In the book, as in their London Review of Books article of March 2006 on the same theme, these top-shelf American academics meticulously detailed instances of what they termed the Israel lobby’s “... almost unchallenged hold on Congress” in the US.
The Cuban lobby in America sought and still seeks to emulate the Israel lobby with regard to a hold on the American Congress in so far as America’s policies towards Communist-ruled Cuba are concerned, as Davidson makes clear.
There is the added complexity layer of racial tensions between black and white Latino communities in the Florida milieu in which Rubio grew up, an Irish coffee of sorts, which is politically dominated by white Cuban émigrés, with white Hispanics often siding with the dominant white Republican political establishment against the interests of their fellow black Latinos.
When Rubio openly relished his recent startling and vindictive public announcement that he would be boycotting the G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting which South Africa hosted in preparation to the G20 Summit later this year on account of a blatant lie about a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa, he revealed himself to be what a recent New York Times article by Michael D Shear termed “Trump’s loyal foreign policy foot soldier” and “a reliable echo of the president’s agenda”.
Rubio is nothing if not a lifelong and highly dedicated anti-Communist lusting for the overthrow of Cuba’s Communist regime and quick to inflict severe, painful punishment on countries, weak ones especially, he perceives as being too closely aligned with Cuba, such as Venezuela and seemingly South Africa.
Trump and Rubio vindicate Kissinger’s witty remark that “diplomacy can be deadly business, all the more so for being clothed in conciliatory forms.
Trump and Rubio do not even pretend to cloth their diplomacy towards South Africa in conciliatory forms and gestures.
• Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is the founder and executive chairperson of the Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za
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