Instinctively, I agree with Suzanne Nossel -- America should be pushing hard on Mugabe to make Zimbabwe's next elections actually fee and fair, rather than the brutal mockeries they currently are. For that matter, we should be leaning on Thabo Mbeki -- and I mean leaning hard -- until he withdraws his support and legitimation from anything less than a true step forward. But how popular are we in Zimbabwe? How about South Africa? Will American pressure be a publicly justifiable reason for Mugabe to consolidate his power? Will it allow Mbeki to fall into mindless pan-Africanism? Seems, if not certain, pretty possible. In Africa, like many other places, American history has essentially shredded the moral authority we think ourselves to have. It's the Iran-effect -- what we did half-a-century ago, though forgotten by us, still scars those we did it too. So mounting our soapbox and calling for reform only occasionally has the intended impact, oftentimes it simply allows the target to turn the attention outward on us and our hegemonic aspirations. One way out is to stop relying on our moral authority and start relying on our affluence. This idea, of converting our foreign policy to an incentive-based approach, has been coming up a lot recently, notably from Steven Cook. And hell, there's a lot to recommend it. In a country as totally demolished as Zimbabwe, the public dangling of enormous amounts of aid in return for free and fair elections should spur a hungry populace to demand that their "leader" takes the deal. So long as he gets to make the decision, however, Mugabe can't turn the issue around on us, nothing we're doing or offering is assertive in the least -- there's simply a bargain if he wants to make it. That should enlarge the popular constituency for a revote, give the opposition a concrete upside to their demands, and protect us from accusations of imperialist designs. In any case, it seems more effective than simply asking nicely.
