What next in South Africa?

WHAT NEXT IN SOUTH AFRICA? THERE WERE a couple of nice touches in the final few days leading to the override of Mr. Reagan's veto. On wednesday, the foreign minister of South Africa, no less, telephoned key senators and told them that South Africa might react against sanctions in any number of ways, including an interdiction of all commercial traffic into neighboring black states, notably Zimbabwe. Senator Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the principal Republican enthusiast for sanctions, reacted explosively, denouncing South Africa for its attempt to meddle in American business. Howzzatagain? Yes: It was meddlesome of South Africa to attempt to persuade the United States not to intervene in South African business.

There are paradoxes everywhere you look. Paul Johnson, the British historian, reminded Bishop Travor Huddleston of Great Britain, the leading spokesman in favor of sanctions, of what happened in respect of the arms industry. Fifteen years or so back, Mr. Johnson recalled, the United States passed a law prohibiting the sale of military equipment to South Africa, with the result that South Africa cranked up its own military factories. The American response, 15 years later, has been to prohibit any country to which we give assistance from purchasing military equipment from South Africa. Perhaps the only way we could ever generate enthusiasm for sanctions against the Soviet Union would be to pass a law prohibiting trade with any country that trades with South Africa.

And then, of course, there is everyone's favorite, of which the Rhodesian sanctions were the dress rehearsal. The brave free world, after imposing sanctions against Rhodesia, found itself buying chrome from the Soviet Union, at two or three times the price--chrome mined, in substantial effect, by Gulag miners: Thus had we got our moral house in order.

What is South Africa going to do? One dares to hope that the government will not really think it appropriate retaliation against the United States to choke off traffic to the neighboring black states. There are reasons to be angry with Robert Mugabe, but unless Zimbabwe becomes an armed camp for anti-South African terrorists, to close off the railroad to commerce would be to afflict a relatively innocent country. Nothing would please the South African government more than to deny the United States access to critical metals. But there is no critical shortage in sight that can't be satisfied by a little discreet trading with the Soviet Union, to which Senator Lugar is not likely to object. So then, how is South Africa likely to react?

We have almost guaranteed that the antiapartheid movement within South Africa will now slow down. We have got to keep reminding ourselves that we live in an age in which kamikaze devotion to the state is quite common. The Afrikaners who have been inclined, under pressure of domestic commercial considerations, to encourage the liberalization of the racial laws will now be scorned as collusive agents of the West. If, in our time, we saw brave men by the tens of thousands fight and die for the cause of Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and for Stalin and Hitler, then we shouldn't be surprised if brave men by the tens of thousands find themselves fighting to the death for the awful cause of apartheid. It was always the point of Ronald Reagan, and a few others, that the anti-apartheid cause is set back, rather than advanced, by aggressive sanctions against the government of South Africa.

SO THEN, what will Pretoria do? It would seem likely that the government will move on several fronts. The likeliest would seem to be the forced repatriation of blacks who have emigrated to South Africa from the neighboring states--Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe. Second, we should anticipate South Africa's acquisition of the ultimate weapon. It is not easy to imagine exactly where South Africa would drop an atomic bomb, but the mere existence of a nuclear artillery has a way of dulling the tone of foreign moralists. (If Hitler had got the Bomb in 1944, we'd have been introduced much earlier to the doctrine that there is simply no alternative to co-existence with Hitler.) And, finally, we can anticipate a great increase in violence by blacks, as unemployment increases and the sense of helplessness becomes more acute. If the objective of U.S. policy toward South Africa is to increase the likelihood of civil war, then we have just now acted with great statesmanship.