Foreign Policy Responses to the West

Abstract

In his annual New Year’s Day address to the nation, Prime Minister Vorster told the South African people in January 1977 that they no longer could count on the support of the West in their struggle against communism. Citing the collapse of Western cooperation in the Angolan affair, which he attributed to a ‘loss of will’, Vorster concluded with a bleak warning: ‘If therefore a Communist onslaught should be made against South Africa, directly or under camouflage, South Africa will have to face it alone, and certain countries which profess to be anti-Communist will even refuse to sell [us] arms … This is the reality of our situation.’¹ This theme of the alleged unreliability of the West, and of how the West — particularly the US — had ‘left South Africa in the lurch’ in Angola, was reiterated by P.W. Botha.