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Notes -
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
The Angolans weren’t capable of mounting an invasion of South Africa proper and had no intention of doing so, plus by the mid-80s when the Mig-29 was entering service as an export product the Cold War was winding down. More generally, I don’t think it’s possible to believe in HBD and think any of the Southern African countries could present a serious military threat to South Africa, especially when most of SA’s neighbors relied utterly on South Africa for economic reasons and had no interest in participating. Angola’s annoyance with South Africa extended to South Africa’s involvement in Namibia and the Angolan Civil War (where it was in practice on the American side). The US only passed anti-apartheid legislation in 1986 and frankly I suspect that had the Soviet Union not collapsed the CIA would have found other ways to ensure the Angolan communists continued to be contained. In addition, both the Soviet Union and China traded extensively with South Africa behind the scenes, including in arms, as has only more recently become fully clear. The decline of American power since 2001 and the growth of China, not to mention new opportunities for trading relationships with the Arabs and others who wouldn’t care about apartheid would have further made the system more tenable for longer. The economy had stabilized even under American sanctions by 1989 as, like Russia today, the South Africans figured out how to obtain what they wanted anyway.
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