The quiet denial of shore leave to a Russian naval training vessel, which arrived in Cape Town on Tuesday, August 5, 2025, something long treated as routine, slipped almost unnoticed into the news cycle. No explanation came until Friday, 8 August, shortly before the ship’s departure, when the Border Management Authority issued an official comment confirming denial of disembarkation.

According to a Russian source, cadets with military IDs have never before been refused disembarkation in South Africa, with visas normally issued on arrival at port customs. That this sudden change came in the middle of escalating US tariffs, and was followed by three days of official silence, raises the question: was this a bureaucratic mishap, or a calculated political signal sent under pressure from Washington?

In settler states such as South Africa, where the Democratic Alliance (DA) serves as custodian of white minority liberal policies and privilege, undermining the political and economic aspirations of indigenous communities comes naturally. From its inception, the DA’s political ideology has aligned seamlessly with the racist views and strategic interests of USA and European Union bureaucrats. It serves the unilateral white supremacist order because its existence is tied to the Anglo-American and EU empire states.

“The DA is the local arm of an imperial project designed to keep the Global South compliant, and its resources accessible.”

The DA’s actions are not incidental, they are part of a calculated USA and EU strategy to spread Western-authored economic liberalism across the globe, manipulating and looting the economies of the Global South for the benefit of the West. This agenda is rooted in the reconfigured Cold War that emerged after World War II, when the USA and its Western European allies, now the EU and NATO bloc, confronted the Soviet Union and its socialist allies.

In 1947, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall introduced the European Recovery Programme, implemented in 1948 and funded through resources and wealth extracted from colonial territories. Russia and China, then under communist leadership, rejected it as an imperialist plan to entrench capitalism and suppress socialist values. The West responded with a coordinated campaign to erase socialist and communist sentiment worldwide.

World War II had ended with the Soviet Union’s Red Army defeating Nazi Germany and liberating much of Central and Eastern Europe, fuelling Western paranoia about the spread of socialism. Determined to curb Soviet influence, the USA and Britain created NATO in 1949 to expand US hegemony, entrench liberal economics, and project American cultural dominance, while undermining Russia as a rival power. President Harry Truman stated the policy plainly, the United States would provide military and diplomatic assistance to any “democratic” nation threatened by communism.

This Cold War doctrine, which included intervention, proxy wars and resource control, remains central to Washington’s foreign policy, and is now embedded in its dealings with South Africa. The DA’s alignment with this order is consistent with NATO’s long-term strategy to maintain Western economic dominance, suppress socialist or anti-imperialist movements, and secure resource access. What NATO once achieved with military deployments, coups and propaganda across Europe and the Global South, the DA now executes through parliamentary obstruction, policy sabotage and ideological policing inside South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU). These are not always public confrontations. Often, they are quiet acts of subservience, procedural decisions, withheld permissions and diplomatic silences, whose impact is no less damaging for being discreet.

“The Smolny incident aligns neatly with USA and EU objectives to weaken BRICS cohesion, and isolate Russia diplomatically.”

South Africa’s membership in BRICS places it squarely in the crosshairs of this geopolitical conflict. On one hand, the ANC invokes its historical ties to Russia and China, relationships that have extended into economic cooperation through BRICS. On the other, the DA clings to the USA and EU’s unipolar world order, hostile to any multipolar alternative. Inside the GNU, the DA has escalated attacks on South Africa’s historical allies, Russia, China, Cuba, Libya and Palestine, while the ANC’s policy ambiguity on trade, land reform and restorative justice creates the perfect vacuum for Western-aligned interference.

The Trump administration has been explicit in its hostility toward South Africa’s ties with Russia, China and Iran, and to its support for Palestine. Washington wants South Africa to withdraw its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. To enforce compliance, the USA has imposed punitive trade tariffs, which the DA and AfriForum welcomed as justified. DA ministers have even denied that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, aligning themselves with Washington’s position and further entrenching USA and EU influence inside South African governance.

On May 21, 2025, Donald Trump summoned Cyril Ramaphosa to the Oval Office. There, he repeated the false claim of a “white farmer genocide” and insisted Ramaphosa bring along white South Africans personally selected by Trump. These individuals were used as political props to pressure the South African president into abandoning land reform, severing ties with Russia and China, and exiting BRICS.

Corporate actors have reinforced this pressure. Sibanye Stillwater, a US-linked mining company, lobbied Trump to impose anti-dumping duties on Russian palladium and urged Ramaphosa to grant US firms preferential access to South Africa’s mineral wealth. Neal Froneman, Sibanye’s CEO, and Rick Menell, a board member, proposed using South Africa as a springboard for US access to Africa’s rare mineral reserves.

“Unless openly confronted, this alignment will keep South Africa trapped in a proxy war, its resources flowing to Western capitals.”

The USA’s proxy wars typically produce socially engineered political and economic instability, high levels of corruption, civil unrest, assassinations, propaganda offensives, armed conflict and stunted development in target states. South Africa’s current trajectory fits this pattern. By exploiting ANC indecision, DA complicity and corporate collaboration, the USA and EU bloc advances its own strategic interests in the region, neutralising multipolar alliances, keeping mineral wealth accessible to Western markets, and suppressing any socialist or sovereign economic policy.

The DA is the local arm of this imperial project. Its historical role has been to preserve white economic dominance under whatever political arrangement exists. Its loyalty is not to the South African people, least of all the black majority, but to the unipolar order that sustains Western power. From its origins in the white liberal Progressive Party of the apartheid era, through the Progressive Federal Party and Democratic Party, to its current incarnation, the DA has consistently acted as a political instrument for elite business interests. In the GNU, it now functions as NATO’s proxy, blocking, diluting and undermining any policy that challenges Western economic and geopolitical dominance.

South Africa’s position in BRICS, its historical alliances and its vast mineral wealth make it a prime target for the very Cold War tactics that NATO and its partners perfected over decades. The DA, acting in alignment with USA and EU objectives, is an obstacle to any assertion of independent foreign policy or economic sovereignty. Unless this alignment is openly confronted, South Africa will remain a theatre for proxy war, its policy space constrained by foreign agendas, its resources channelled to Western capitals, and its alliances fractured to serve the needs of a fading but still aggressive unipolar order. And as with the Russian vessel quietly turned away in Cape Town on  August 5, 2025, only for an explanation to be issued on 8 August, the most telling acts of subservience may unfold not with loud declarations, but with the silence that follows them.

* Sipho Singiswa is a political commentator, writer and filmmaker. A 1976 student leader he spent much of his youth in apartheid prisons and Robben Island.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.

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