Pretoria – US ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard and Small Business minister Lindiwe Zulu both bent the diplomatic rules a bit on Thursday to express their hopes that Democrat Hillary Clinton and not the Republican Donald Trump would be the next US President.
They were speaking at the 240th anniversary of US independence in Pretoria on Thursday.
Gaspard, a close confidante of US President Barack Obama, reassured the 500 guests at the reception at his Waterkloof residence that despite the ugly rhetoric in the presidential election campaign, “the politics of performance will never Trump the politics of principle” in the US.
His oblique expression of preference in November’s presidential elections raised a cheer and a laugh from the crowd. US ambassadors are not supposed to express political preferences but he did so in a deniable way.
No doubt if challenged, he would insist he meant trump with a small “t”. Gaspard is somewhat immune from normal diplomatic rules as he is a political appointment who is serving his last year as ambassador.
Gaspard was clearly also referring to Trump’s xenophobic remarks, threatening to build a wall along America’s southern border and to bar entry of all Muslims, when he said “despite the inflammatory rhetoric we hear in some quarters, the challenges of the 21st century cannot be resolved in isolation. None of us have the ability to draw moats around our nations and to pull up the drawbridge”.
Gaspard added that it was not until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in the mid-19th century that the US had realised the democratic rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson.
And the US was still struggling to meet its aspirations of non-racial democracy and equal access to justice but it was nonetheless a beacon of democracy worldwide.
Referring directly to the US presidential elections, Gaspard said he wanted to assure America’s South African friends that “the United States will continue to be that beacon of aspirational democracy, irrespective of the rabid fever of the election campaign. The politics of performance will never Trump the politics of principle”.
Foreign governments are also not supposed to meddle in the internal politics of another country but Zulu also tried to navigate around that prohibition by saying that as a woman, she hoped that the next US president would also be a woman.
Zulu said if the US got its first woman president in 240 years of independence, that would have a ripple effect throughout the world, inspiring women everywhere to assert themselves.
She hastened to add that of course she did not have a vote in the November presidential elections and it was entirely up to the American people to choose their next president.
Gaspard marked another milestone on Thursday by becoming the first US ambassador to invite the Cuban ambassador to the annual “Fourth of July” independence celebrations (which were held early this year for logistical reasons).
This was because the US and Cuba only resumed diplomatic relations last year for the first time since they were broken after the Cuban revolution in 1959.
Gaspard recalled that the rapprochement between the two countries began in South Africa at former President Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013 “with a small gesture, a simple handshake between President Obama and (Cuban) President Raoul Castro. And from that, great things have come so we are indebted to our South African friends for that incredible moment”.
Cuban ambassador Carlos Dominquez confirmed that he was the first Cuban ambassador to South Africa to have been invited to a US Fourth of July celebration since the revolution.
“I will be inviting Ambassador Gaspard to our national day celebrations this year,” he added. That would be another first.
African News Agency