That's a really interesting post. I agree with a few things you say, but being a pragmatist with an eye on realpolitik...mostly no. You can't forget that SA is the home of the holiest of holies for 1.2B Muslims around the planet (over a third of which are in Southeast Asia, btw). If we were to do that which alienates hundreds of billions of Muslims (a couple of million who are in the U.S.), that's gonna come back and bit us in the rear. What's more, while we ourselves have a much-decreased need of their oil, the same cannot be said of much of the rest of the world. If we allowed SA's oil fields to become threatened - or worse, damaged or destroyed - then this would cause oil prices worldwide to skyrocket, which leads to widespread economic problems in every nation including our own, since the prices would skyrocket here, too.
Here's a hard, hard lesson about realpolitik:
sometimes, when the villain is too big or too important, you have to let him get away with what he did because the price of holding him accountable is simply too high. The best example I can think of is the sinking of the
nuclear submarine USS Scorpion. The official story is that she sunk due to an engineering casualty - which you can easily read about. However, there's a truly significant body of hard evidence showing that she was torpedoed, apparently by the Soviets in what may have been retaliation for the sinking of one of their nuclear submarines in the Pacific a month or so before...which would mean that our government almost certainly knew that the Soviets sunk our submarine and sent our sailors and others on board to their deaths, but did nothing to ensure justice for them.
But that's the problem, isn't it? If the president had come out and told the public that the Soviets had just torpedoed one of our submarines, what would have happened then? I don't know how old you are, but being retired Navy, I remember the Cold War very well and I can attest that yes, the missiles would likely have flown that day...and hundreds of millions of innocent lives (at a minimum!) would have been ended. In other words, yes, in this case - as with SA today - when the villain is too big or too important, you have to let him get away with what he did because the price of holding him accountable is simply too high. It doesn't mean that one forgets or forgives, but that richly-justified retribution doesn't have to consist of that which may well lead to validation of the old Chinese proverb, "when planning revenge, dig two graves."
Come to think of it, WWI (and the 10M people who died) is a wonderful example of what can happen when this principle is ignored.
This is pragmatism and realpolitik. It sucks...but it's a heck of a lot better than the alternative.
