At a moment of profound geopolitical turmoil, one might have expected the country of Nelson Mandela to draw on its negotiated past to seek common ground, promote peace, uphold international law, and favour moderation over radicalism.

Instead, less than three months after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, South Africa launched proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing the country of genocide. The speed of the move suggested that it had been a long time coming.

Two weeks later, the ICJ held public hearings. At the end of January 2024, it issued its initial binding provisional measures, finding that at least some of the rights claimed by Palestinians under the Genocide Convention were plausible and at risk of irreparable harm. For a country that struggles to keep water and electricity flowing and potholes filled, the efficiency of South Africa’s response was breathtaking.

In March, citing deteriorating conditions and the threat of famine, the court issued further provisional measures following an additional request from South Africa, requiring Israel to ensure the provision of urgently needed humanitarian assistance, including food, and to facilitate the expansion of land crossings. A third set of provisional measures followed in May 2024. On 28 October 2024, little more than a year after the Hamas attacks, South Africa filed its formal Memorial, comprising more than 750 pages of legal argument and 4 000 pages of supporting exhibits detailing its allegations against Israel.

This was plainly a foreign policy priority from the outset. It was no coincidence that then International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor travelled to Tehran 15 days after the 7 October attacks to deliver a personal message to then Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, or that she took a phone call from the Hamas leadership.

The intensity of the campaign against Israel, which no doubt deserves criticism for the manner in which it has carried out its war against Hamas, was noteworthy. When something is a priority, the African National Congress (ANC) can get things done quickly. When it is not, whether because of naked self-interest, ideology, money or some combination of the three, progress can be glacial. Sometimes the country moves in precisely the wrong direction.

Little Influence

That South Africa in 2026 has so little international influence in peace-making is a measure of how far the country has fallen since its emergence as arguably the diplomatic star of the 1990s. It is also a measure of how transactional its foreign policy has become.

The campaign against Israel has, in the process, become the defining issue of South African foreign policy, alongside being part of the BRICS bloc of developing nations. Pretoria has invested much of its remaining diplomatic energy in the grouping, but with little discernible effect beyond an endless succession of summits. South Africa has not persuaded Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw from Ukraine, Beijing to treat its minorities more humanely, or Iran – a full BRICS member since 2024 – to stop killing protesters and executing young people.

Time magazine has been among the independent media outlets reporting estimates that the death toll from Iran’s January 2025 protests could exceed 30 000. The scale of the killings is difficult to establish because the authorities shut down the internet as security forces moved in and morgues filled up.

The contrast in Pretoria’s priorities is striking. Since 7 October, around 1 200 Israelis and 74 000 Palestinians have lost their lives. Over a broadly comparable period, perhaps as many as 400 000 people have been killed in Sudan’s civil war. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies reports that fatalities linked to militant Islamist groups in Africa have exceeded 20 000 annually for four consecutive years, reaching a record 23 872 in the 12 months to mid-2026. More than 150 000 deaths have been linked to these groups over the past decade. Aside from a grinning photo op after a meeting between President Cyril Ramaphosa and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka General Hemedti, the leader of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Pretoria has shown no interest in seeking a resolution to this conflict. This moment of brotherly love occurred on 4 January 2024, just as South Africa’s case against Israel got under way.

Meanwhile, cumulative estimates of deaths associated with the long-running conflicts and humanitarian crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), since the late 1990s, exceed six million, largely from indirect causes such as disease and starvation. More than five million people have been internally displaced, according to figures cited by Human Rights Watch and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker.

South Africa committed peacekeepers to the DRC, but its mission was terminated after its forces were routed and it became clear Pretoria did not (or could not) provide the proper military resources. Since then, South Africa has been a distant spectator.

All these conflicts deserve attention. The question is not whether Palestinians deserve sympathy or protection under international law. They do. It is why South Africa has chosen to expend so much diplomatic capital on one conflict while showing so little comparable urgency elsewhere.

A Selective Morality

Okay, one might say, that was then and this is now.

But at the very moment Pretoria launched its ICJ case, its BRICS ally Russia was pursuing its war against Ukraine, seeking to subjugate a neighbouring country and annex its territory. The invasion had already driven millions of Ukrainians from their homes and turned a substantial share of the population into refugees or internally displaced people.

Ukraine has become a kind of Gaza-plus, albeit with an important distinction: the conflicts have different histories, circumstances, and legal dimensions. The common thread is the difficulty of negotiating a durable peace when one party seeks to deny the other’s sovereignty or right to exist. South Africa might have something useful to contribute to such a debate. It has not seriously tried.

Rather than align itself unequivocally with Ukraine, which is fighting invasion and territorial absorption, Pretoria has opted for what it calls neutrality. In practice, that posture has tended to favour Russia, the aggressor. Rather than use its diplomatic standing to encourage a negotiated settlement in the Middle East, it has taken a highly partisan position that has often appeared sympathetic to Hamas and Hezbollah, both backed by Iran.

Iran is a theocratic state in which religion and government are fused in ways fundamentally at odds with the liberal-democratic tradition South Africa claims to uphold. Its political system is deeply exclusionary, with religious and ideological conformity enforced through state power. In its institutionalised intolerance, it invites comparison with apartheid South Africa, although the grounds of exclusion and the systems themselves are different: race in one case, religious and political conformity in the other.

The contrast is reflected in Freedom House’s assessments. South Africa scores 81 out of 100 and is classified as “Free”. Iran scores ten, placing it in the “Not Free” category, just below Russia at 12, and alongside China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia at nine.

Nor is Pretoria’s selective morality confined to the Middle East or Europe. When elections in countries such as Tanzania and Uganda have been marred by repression and human-rights abuses, South Africa has been conspicuously reluctant to challenge incumbent governments, particularly where they are associated with liberation movements and longstanding political alliances.

At this very moment, two democratic African leaders, Tundu Lissu in Tanzania and Dr Kizza Besigye in Uganda, are enduring cooked-up treason trials before kangaroo courts while the citizens of those countries endure life under brutal security regimes. Those who dare speak out are arrested or worse, tortured and killed. In Uganda, the head of the military, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, posts images of detainees held in his basement and openly threatens on social media to kill opposition leaders. These murderous regimes appear to elicit no emotion in Pretoria, which continues to cultivate ties with “liberation movements” even when they openly commit atrocities.

Mum’s the word. And the posture is one of studied indifference.

A Country Changing its Mind

Where does this come from? The uncomfortable answer is that Pretoria’s worldview is not entirely out of step with a substantial section of South African public opinion, even if the ANC takes it further than many voters would.

Polling published by The Common Sense in partnership with the Social Research Foundation (SRF) found that 67% of South African voters (a majority across racial and political party groups) agreed that China contributes more investment and jobs to South Africa than the United States (US) does. Only 37% of likely voters agreed that the Government of National Unityshould align South African foreign policy with the West, while 47% favoured strong relations with Russia, China, and Iran.

A series of The Common Sense/SRF surveys suggests a shift in attitudes towards Israel and the West more generally.

In October 2023, 43% of respondents agreed that South Africa should align with Russia and China against the US and the European Union. Yet 68% said it was in South Africa’s best interests to build a strong and close relationship with the West. Nearly 56% believed Russia and China provided more investment and created more jobs than Western countries. Asked whether the Israeli government practised apartheid policies against Palestinians, 37% agreed. That figure rose to 41% in September 2024.

An April 2024 poll found that 42% favoured closer relations with the West, against 39% who favoured relations with Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. A majority (57%) said South Africa should put economic interests ahead of ideology and loyalty, which 34% prioritised.

By September 2024, 37% agreed that South Africa should align with Russia, China, and Iran rather than the West, while 46% favoured the West. Asked whether life was better in America than in China, 42% agreed, against 31% who favoured China.

The results do not point to a simple, uniform realignment. They suggest something more complicated: a public increasingly receptive to non-Western partnerships, but still divided over the strategic direction the country should take.

What explains the shift?

The Price of Anti-Westernism

Donald Trump’s personality and his decision to single out South Africa for what appeared to be particularly punitive treatment may also have contributed. His portrayal in much of the media as a malign, corrupt, incompetent, and narcissistic force in international affairs has undoubtedly coloured perceptions, not least because his conduct has often reinforced that image.

But this is not merely a reaction to Trump. Europe, too, has come under sustained attack from his administration, as have other Western allies, including Canada. South Africa’s anti-Western sentiment appears to run deeper than any one president or administration.

It reflects a historical inheritance of racial domination and colonialism, one that remains politically potent and is routinely exploited by Russia and others seeking to weaken Western influence. Historical grievances are real. The problem arises when they become a substitute for strategic judgment, or when the conduct of non-Western powers is excused simply because those powers position themselves as opponents of the West.

Then there are the global economic imbalances. The world’s economic weight remains disproportionately concentrated in the West. That may change over coming generations, but for now Western economies account for about half of global GDP while representing less than 12% of the world’s population.

Western countries also remain major providers of development assistance. Africa received about $60 billion in aid in 2024. European nations, led by the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, hold the largest combined stock of foreign direct investment in Africa; about four times China's reported $42 billion. That Chinese figure is slightly greater than the cumulative US investment stock.

The distinction matters. Trade, investment, aid, and employment are not interchangeable measures of economic influence, and the figures should not be conflated. But taken together, they illustrate the continued importance of Western capital and markets to African development.

China is South Africa’s largest overall trading partner, accounting for about29% of its trade in 2025, and has some 200 companies invested in the country. Yet approximately 600 US companies operate in South Africa, supporting about 426 000 jobs.

These figures do not diminish China’s importance. They do, however, challenge the simplistic narrative that the country’s economic future lies principally with Beijing and its political allies.

Some of the shift in public sentiment may reflect the relentless and devastating Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

For South Africa, this comes at a cost. It raises the perceived risk of investing in the country and can make capital more expensive.

Investers generally look for three things:

Predictability: Sufficient policy and fiscal stability to give investers confidence that they can recover their initial capital over a project’s lifetime;

Competitiveness:Aan investment environment that compares favourably with credible alternative destinations for capital; and

Institutional Efficiency: Administrative processes that are timely, transparent, and sufficiently predictable to allow projects to proceed.

Where these conditions are absent, capital does not necessarily disappear. It goes elsewhere. Or it demands a substantially higher return to compensate for the risk of investing in South Africa.

Diplomatic posturing cannot compensate for that. Nor can declarations of solidarity with countries that offer little in the way of investment, technology or market access.

The mMissing National Project

The missing element in guiding South Africa towards its own, defining foreign policy is leadership, on both sides of the political aisle.

There is little evidence of a compelling alternative vision emerging from either government or the opposition. Too much of the debate remains confined to incremental adjustments: dismantling cadre deployment, reforming black economic empowerment, or tweaking individual policies without addressing the larger question of what kind of country South Africa wants to become.

During the anti-apartheid struggle, South Africa had a big idea: a democratic, non-racial society in which political freedom and equal citizenship would replace institutionalised racial domination. It was an imperfectly articulated project, and its supporters disagreed about much, but it provided a common destination around which an extraordinarily broad movement could organise.

Today, there is no comparable national project. There are generalised promises of better lives, greater fairness, safer communities, and more jobs, but little agreement on how these objectives fit together, what trade-offs they require, or how they are to be achieved.

Without that shared sense of direction, strategy gives way to improvisation. Government becomes a contest among competing interests, each seeking its own advantage. The result is drift.

A national project, of course, requires strong, articulate leadership: leaders able to explain the destination, build a coalition behind it and use their mandate to move the country forward. South Africa is hardly alone in struggling to produce such leadership.

Across Europe and elsewhere, riots and public disorder often reflect young people’s frustration with poor job prospects, high prices, and the sense that the economic system offers them little hope. They want better opportunities, and understandably so. But when unrest destroys businesses, deters investment, and raises insurance and security costs, it can deepen the very conditions that produced it. The result is a downward spiral of fewer jobs, weaker local economies and growing alienation.

The underlying problem is often weak economic growth and the absence of fiscal room to respond. As Robert Guest argued in The Economist recently, governments cannot endlessly reach for the “magic money tree” to finance subsidies and handouts when their public finances are already stretched.

The danger is that a period of deteriorating living standards drives voters towards populist alternatives on both the left and the right, promising solutions that cannot plausibly be funded.

The political centre then loses credibility, in Africa as in Europe, while radical alternatives gain appeal. Yet the parties at the extremes (on both the left and the right in Europe) often have neither serious plans to revive growth nor access to a magic money tree. Their eventual failure risks leaving voters poorer, angrier and more disillusioned than before.

Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics

This is one way of understanding the ANC’s approach to the Middle East. The timing of South Africa’s ICJ case invites the suspicion that the government saw an opportunity to advertise its radical credentials and revive its historic identity as an opponent of Western power.

The strategy resembles Pretoria’s longstanding political solidarity with Havana, which has too often privileged ideological affinity over an honest assessment of economic performance and governance.

There is an obvious domestic political logic to such gestures. They allow the ANC to present itself as a principled voice of the Global South, even as its record at home becomes harder to defend. International activism can create the appearance of moral purpose at relatively little immediate domestic cost.

But there are two fundamental problems.

First, foreign policy grandstanding does not solve the problems confronting South Africans at home. The ANC’s electoral performance in May 2024, when it lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994, was a reminder that liberation credentials and international solidarity cannot indefinitely substitute for effective government.

Second, the strategy risks alienating powerful Western partners. The Trump administration has shown little tolerance for governments it perceives as hostile to American interests or sympathetic to movements it regards as Islamist. South Africa may reasonably disagree with Washington on particular issues, but it cannot assume that the consequences of doing so will be cost-free.

The larger point is not that South Africa should abandon international law, ignore Palestinian suffering, or defer automatically to Washington. Nor should it accept the proposition that every Western position is right simply because it is Western.

It is that a credible foreign policy must be principled without being selective, independent without being reflexively anti-Western, and pragmatic without becoming morally indifferent.

If international law matters, it must matter in Ukraine as well as in Gaza. If human rights matter, they must matter in Iran, Sudan, the DRC, Uganda, and Tanzania, as well as in Israel and the Palestinian territories. If sovereignty matters, it must matter for small and vulnerable countries regardless of whether their aggressors are Western, Eastern, or members of a favoured diplomatic bloc.

Consistency is not a luxury in foreign policy. It is the foundation of credibility.

The absence of a compelling national project also extends to the opposition. The Democratic Alliance has yet to articulate a fully developed foreign policy of its own that could offer a coherent alternative to the ANC’s combination of ideological solidarity and transactional politics. It is not enough to criticise the government’s choices; the opposition must explain what South Africa’s international interests are, which partnerships best serve them, and how the country should use its diplomatic influence.

That means articulating a foreign policy built around economic growth, institutional strength, democratic values, respect for international law, and a clear-eyed assessment of national interests. It also means recognising that South Africa’s history gives it a distinctive voice, but that history is an asset only when used with judgment.

For example, on China, South Africa should seek to emulate a version of Czechia’s China policy, which takes into account their interests and not only Beijing’s. Thus, Prague maintains healthy bilateral relations with Taiwan, including at the political level, which have reaped significant investment rewards in high-tech manufacturers in Czechia. Of course, Beijing huffs and puffs about this choice, but Prague steadfastly retains its own version of a one-China policy, securing its interests first, and deepening relations with Taiwan democracy while maintaining ties with Beijing.

South Africa once enjoyed extraordinary international standing because it appeared to offer something the world needed: a negotiated transition from oppression to democracy, a model of political reconciliation, and a willingness to bridge deep divisions. That reputation was never going to last indefinitely on its own. It had to be renewed through competent government, moral consistency and practical diplomacy.

Instead, South Africa increasingly appears to have traded influence for gestures, strategy for ideology and the pursuit of peace for the performance of solidarity.

Its foreign relations may play well to the galleries. They are much less likely to impress those with money to invest, jobs to create or peace to negotiate.

That is how a foreign policy star falls.

Hartley and Mills are with the Platform for African Democrats.