Talking to Bloomberg, Geordin Hill-Lewis, who was elected as the new head of the Democratic Alliance (DA) over the weekend, said that the current Iran war is "not achieving anything helpful or meaningful for the world". That comment reveals a naivety around global affairs that he needs to snap his party out of if it is to be taken seriously on the national, let alone global, foreign policy stage.

The strategic objectives behind the war are well understood by top thinkers.

A first objective is to deny Iran the offensive capacity to threaten its neighbours and the ability to develop a nuclear weapon. That objective is being substantively met.

A second objective is to force Europe into restoring its energy security by reinvesting in North Sea and related oil and gas. Had Europe, under green pressure, not throttled capital flows into fossil-fuel investment, this newspaper estimates that it might now have produced around 15 million barrels of oil a day – roughly two thirds of what passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the start of the current war between Israel, the United States, and Iran.

A third is to strengthen the Western liberal order broadly by forcing Europe into sourcing what oil and gas it cannot itself produce from America instead. Together with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, that eliminates much of the leverage the non-West has held over the West over the past 30 years.

A fourth is to reorder the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific by developing leverage over Chinese oil flows. China is far more exposed to the consequences of a Hormuz lockdown than is the case for the US or Europe. Earlier this week this newspaper argued that the US may look to use Chinese pressure on Iran around the Hormuz lockdown to force the Iranians out of their nuclear weapons ambitions, which might mark an exit point for the conflict.

The potential for South Africa to exploit opportunities around these four priorities is significant. Its Simonstown chokepoint has seen its already vast strategic value in anchoring control of the Indo-Pacific multiply several times over as a consequence of Hormuz. That is good for South Africa if its leaders could only learn how to exploit such geography.

South Africa's untapped oil and gas potential is a second opportunity. “Drill, baby, drill” and the country could draw vast benefit from uncertainty around Iran and Hormuz and attempts to circumvent Hormuz dependency.

Trade that geography and the oil flows, between East and West (China and America), and South Africa could extract sufficient investment concessions to lift its growth rate to 4% of GDP on foreign capital inflows alone.

But you cannot exploit those opportunities if you cannot understand the strategic plays at work – let alone if you think there aren't any such plays.

Hill-Lewis also repeated the idea that oil prices are extremely high and thus doing great global harm. That is wrong. At around $100 oil prices are in line with their inflation-adjusted averages. Global growth forecasts are largely unchanged from 2025 as this newspaper again reported yesterday. Markets are very high relative to a year ago, as we report again this morning. And even the rand is stronger than 12 months ago. Again, therefore, an ignorant statement from someone who has not been properly briefed. At well over $100 the global growth and market outlook changes, as it does if the $100+ level is held too deep into 2026. But for now, serious people know that the global and markets outlook is still sound.

Hill-Lewis therefore comes across as unserious, something that was brutally exposed in the government’s decision earlier this week to appoint Roelf Meyer as the country’s ambassador to Washington. That decision, read against Hill-Lewis's comments, has in a sense inverted the balance of power between the DA and the African National Congress (ANC) in Washington. The ANC, because that is in practice what it is, has sent a well-regarded serious actor to the American capital, while the DA has sent a very different calibre of message.

That is the real issue here. To be a serious player, on not just the national but also international stage, the DA needs to think and understand the world as well as the best analysts do. Too often it is pedestrian and its leaders therefore come across as chancers who, while doing a very good and important thing in helping the ANC in the Government of National Unity, in effect stumbled up to a station where they don’t really belong.