After several decades of trying to reel in Zimbabwe, the European Union just gave up. Sanctions beginning with mining and diamonds will soon be lifted. Who’s running the show up there in Brussels?

Most Europeans consider Zimbabwe one of their greatest diplomatic failures. The country remains a rogue state ruled by a ruthless dictator who has managed to all but destroy an economy that had one of the greatest potentials in Africa.

Robert Mugabe is 90 years old and has been in power since 1980. He was a freedom fighter much admired in the west when he led a major faction against Ian Smith, the white man who lead “UDI” – Unilateral Declaration of Independence – from Britain in 1962.

Rhodesia, as it was then called, was the brainchild of Cecil Rhodes, who in the last half of the 19th century made the country with brute force. Rhodes was probably the richest man in the world at the time who believed to insanity that Britain should rule Africa from bottom to top.

Britain wasn’t all that adverse to the idea, despite public protestations, so they let the rogue Rhodes into the wilds to massacre tribes, build railways and demarcate his own country.

Rhodesia became one of the most productive, beautiful, peaceful countries in Africa. Its economy blossomed with modern agriculture, mining for a variety of ores including diamonds, and tourism. Although pointedly, all this production was run by whites, British settlers who also believed like Rhodes that Westminster was Olympus.

But when it was time for Independence in the early 1960s, there was only 1 white for every 16 blacks. Ian Smith and his white Rhodesians didn’t need to hire Nate Silver to predict an outcome.

So they took over the country from Britain in 1962. Yes, that’s correct. British settlers took over a British colony. Remind you of anything? Ian Smith more than once called himself the George Washington of Africa.

Times had changed, and the war which followed wasn’t with Britain. It was with blacks like Robert Mugabe, and after 18 years and a lot of European sanctions on white Rhodesia, Britain and the U.S. brokered a peace agreement.

The agreement fixated a constitution for ten years that didn’t give the whites any more power than blacks, but institutionalized the power that they negotiated in the agreement in a way that couldn’t be changed.

For that ten years Robert Mugabe was a very good president … at least we all thought so, and frankly, so did many of the whites. It was a time of tourism explosion in Zimbabwe – since it was now peaceful after so many years.

I was deeply involved with two companies run by two white Senators. They loved Mugabe.

But after that ten years and the constitution could be changed by majority vote, Mugabe did. And his vindictiveness started to show.

He began redistributing land, mostly from white farmers. OK. To be expected, right? But with time it became more and more gruesome and the distribution was hardly fair. The land was given not to people of need but to his supporters. Then his cronies. Then his ministers.

Today the next richest and most powerful man in the country is the head of the army, Minister of Defense, Emmerson Mnangagwa. He is the richest because the land which was given to him by Mugabe includes Zimbabwe’s diamond mines.

Mnangagwa is rich despite European sanctions, and that’s the point of those who argue the sanctions became useless. But the EU itself has estimated that Zimbabwe revenues will increase by Euro 400 million annually as the diamond sanctions are lifted.

Others claim that a major motivation is that Belgium wants the business of cutting the diamonds.

“Too late,” says Zimbabwean spokesman, Rugare Gumbo.

Whatever the reason, Zimbabwe is poised to get much richer. And as time goes on, Zimbabwe is little more than a smaller and smaller and closer and closer group of thugs.