The greatest costs of South Africa’s loss of preferential access to the world’s largest economy through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) will be borne by South African job-seekers and by the United States (US), which will lose geopolitical influence in southern Africa. They will not, it seems, be borne by those responsible for this failure.

America, now ruled more by temper tantrums than strategy, loses because it has opened the way for closer South African ties with Beijing and other authoritarian regimes, not least Moscow and Tehran. Indeed, America’s adversaries (if Russia is still considered an adversary by the Trump administration) could hardly have planned this better.

South Africans lose because the rupture raises the risk premium for Western investors, who are generally more inclined to operate within established standards of corporate and labour governance. Those investors will now demand higher returns to compensate for increased political risk. Some will simply decide that South Africa is no longer worth the investment. The ultimate price will be paid in jobs that are never created.

Politically, the fallout also makes the Government of National Unity (GNU) less, rather than more, sustainable. The limitations of a handful of Democratic Alliance (DA) ministers seeking to exercise influence within an African National Congress (ANC)-dominated government, against a backdrop of fragile institutions incapable of delivering meaningful reform, are already painfully apparent.

The irritants of governing together would have been amplified by the politicking surrounding the local government elections, making it increasingly difficult to maintain the schizophrenia of being simultaneously in government and in opposition. Having the bright blue Gogo going pothole to pothole to remind the ANC of its failings was hardly going to make the relationship easier.

Profound Problem

But the tactics of the local government election campaign point to a more profound problem, in both the US and South Africa, and, indeed, elsewhere in politics: the virtual absence of strategy.

Across government, business and the military, problems demanding long-term thinking are increasingly subordinated to short-term political, financial, and institutional pressures. This tendency has been intensified by populism, the velocity, fragmentation and consumption trends of the modern media environment, and institutions often poorly configured for the challenges they are expected to address.

The political attention span, already shortened by social media and the relentless demand for instant gratification, is now being further challenged by artificial intelligence. There is a danger that original strategic thinking will increasingly be displaced by algorithmic answers, shaped by the interests and capabilities of those who dominate the technology.

The result is a widening gap between ambition and strategy, strategy and capability, and capability and execution.

Governments that cannot establish clear priorities and sustain them across electoral cycles are particularly vulnerable. Institutions remain burdened by structures, incentives, and personnel designed for an earlier age. Political leaders are rewarded for immediate reactions rather than patient statecraft. The consequence is not simply bad policy, but a progressive erosion of the capacity to think strategically at all.

Business faces a similar challenge. Companies operate under intense pressure to deliver immediate results, sometimes at the expense of the generational horizons, capabilities, and institutional assets on which enduring success depends. The feverish search for yield trumps strategic interventions as the quarterly reporting cycle becomes a substitute for strategy.

Militaries confront an even more acute version of the problem. Training personnel, developing doctrine, building industrial capacity, and procuring sophisticated equipment can take years, sometimes decades. Yet the threats against which these investments are made are often uncertain, difficult to predict and even harder to explain to electorates.

Reconcile

Democratic governments must therefore reconcile long-term national security requirements with voters whose immediate concerns understandably centre on living standards, public services, and economic security. This creates an inherent tension between the time horizons of strategy and those of democratic politics.

That tension has fuelled a recurring and dangerous temptation: the belief that complex societies might be better governed by a decisive strongman with friends in autocratic places rather than through the compromises, constraints, and competing interests of democratic government. Yet history offers ample evidence of the limitations, costs and vulnerabilities of authoritarian systems. Concentrating power may accelerate decisions; it does not necessarily make them intelligent, sustainable, or effective.

The question, then, is not whether democracy or strong leadership is preferable in the abstract. It is how democratic societies can persuade voters to support the capacity for long-term strategic thought and, crucially, sustained execution.

This requires politics to coalesce around big ideas, supported by leadership capable of articulating them, and mobilising society behind their implementation. Such leadership has been conspicuously absent. Instead, political space has increasingly been occupied by extremes offering transactional, short-term, and redistributive formulas for change. Their preoccupation is less with what should be done with power than with the acquisition and retention of power itself. The result is political dopamine to tough economic choices, one fuelled by instant media, instant outrage and instant answers.

Yet the problems confronting modern societies, from economic stagnation and technological disruption to national security and institutional decay, demand solutions that are complex, patient and often generational.

Extreme

Donald Trump is perhaps the most extreme expression of this political failure. Yet the question posed by Rory Stewart is a pertinent one: why do “ordinary, decent, courteous, generous Americans” vote for someone he describes as “the most disgusting, humiliating, bullying, foul-mouthed, destructive, corrupt villain in the world”?

The same question might be asked of those who continue to support the ANC and its Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe Party offshoots, despite their economic and governance record and the consequences of their politics.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the loss of AGOA. But that is precisely the problem: the costs will be borne by South African workers, prospective investors, and, ultimately, American strategic interests, not by the politicians on either side of the Atlantic whose short-term calculations and mendacity helped bring us to this point.

In Beijing, meanwhile, there will be few complaints.

Mills and Hartley are with the Platform for African Democrats.