Neither ‘side’ of anglosphere left-right politics has any wish to spend lives or cash fixing Mugabe’s government. True, the feeling in the liberal West was ‘OKI, fixed that!’ when Mugabe took power, and none of our governments wanted to know when he committed the massacres in Matabeleland.
It is very hard to see why any particular government should take the lead. Rhodesia was created by individual entrepreneurship from South Africa, and the link to Britain was a post-hoc symbolic alliance for that project. Britain would be a great choice to lead if they wanted but they have thrown aid that way for decades and seen it go down the toilet. They have no real reason to want it.
I think the more time one spends in Africa the less one believes in easy redemptive political solutions. The paternalism of well-intentioned Western ideas is nice when directly applied, but doesn’t work by shaming aggressive killers into being nice. It needs bayonets and bullets to make a rule of law where the strong pillage the weak.
