ANTHONY BUTLER: SA has chance to rethink foreign policy amid Trump fall out

The international relations turmoil wrought by the new Donald Trump administration has brought an opportunity to rethink SA foreign policy.

Trump’s immediate bugbears include SA’s pursuit of the International Court of Justice case against Israel, membership of Brics, anti-Western rhetoric and perceived alignment with Russia, China and Iran. There are also concerns about BEE and expropriation policies, in keeping with the white supremacist leanings of the administration’s intellectual gurus and oligarchs. 

SA will probably distance itself from anti-American rhetoric and present its relations with Russia and China in a less adversarial way, but removal from the African Growth & Opportunity Act and diplomatic boycotts are likely whatever steps the country takes. We can also expect frustration from the Financial Action Task Force and international financial institutions in which the US has a voice. 

While SA’s curious relationship with Russia is presumably of less long-term concern to the US than its relationship with China — and what the US sees as Beijing’s Brics front — Pretoria has long needed clarity about its longer-term goals. Do we want to overturn the existing international system and establish China at its helm, or merely create a more equitable version of the current global system? 

While the naive democracy and human rights idealism of the Mandela period is long gone, the complete abandonment of these values cannot be in SA’s longer-term interests. Since Zuma rose to the Union Buildings, foreign policy has adopted an increasingly binary character.

“Good” states are those that “understand” Western exploitation and the traumas of colonialism, regardless of their human rights record or the character of their political system. “Bad” states, exemplified by the US and the former colonial powers, are defined by their history and lumped together irrespective of their actions. SA now depends on an unthinking enmity with the Global North as a whole, to sustain its sense of stability and its confidence in its own identity. 

Trump’s assault on former US allies in Europe includes threats of swingeing tariffs, the collapse of the Nato alliance on which postwar European security has rested, and the promotion of far- right parties in European elections. This week the US refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the UN, instead voting with authoritarian apologists such as North Korea and Belarus.

This presages a sustained assault on the capacity of the EU — the world’s largest trading bloc — to establish global norms around digital competition, AI, privacy and climate regulation that are inconvenient to American corporations. 

Conflict between the US and Europe presents an opportunity to rethink SA’s binary model of good and bad states, and to correct the striking disjuncture between SA’s diplomatic priorities and its economic interests. European countries are by far the biggest investors in SA: taken together, the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Belgium account for more than 70% of foreign direct investment stock in SA.

The US accounts for just 5% and China less than 4%. The EU is SA’s biggest trading partner by far, with SA exports to the EU, many of them sophisticated goods and services, more than double exports to the US or to China. 

It may not be an easy time to re-engage with European countries, with them being preoccupied with dealing with Russia and likely to sacrifice engagement with the South to the new priority of defence spending. Far-right parties may also continue to strengthen across the continent, bringing more racial populism and hostility to countries in the south.

But this is just a possible future. Europe remains SA’s most important economic partner, shares democratic and human rights values, and remains — when contrasted with the Trump administration at least — a promoter of stability, development and enlightened values. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.