Countdown to War with Iran – Where Will South Africa Stand?

The United States (US) has concentrated more air and sea power in the Middle East than at any point since the 2003 Iraq invasion, with the aim of forcing Iran to step back from a nuclear weapons strategy and to dismantle its ballistic missile capability. Yet talks have thus far come to nought. If Iran refuses to budge, then US strikes are certain in an effort to achieve by force what could not be done by diplomacy. For South Africa’s government, given its close fraternal ties to Iran, the precedent will be to charge to Iran’s defence.

South Africa’s government maintains very close ties with Iran. Since the 2004 MTN investment in Iran, South Africa has routinely used its diplomatic standing to shield Iran from scrutiny over its nuclear weapons programme and human rights abuses. Pretoria’s UN voting record makes this plain. So too does the fact that South Africa played the leading role in drafting Iran into the BRICS grouping.

Nor has South Africa been shy in advertising its affections. Following the October 7 attacks on Israel, South Africa dispatched its foreign minister to Tehran for a glad-handing meeting. Senior South African defence officials are regular visitors to Iran. Iran’s proxy terror forces, such as Hamas, have been welcomed in South Africa and South Africa has long maintained strong relations with Iran’s chief global proxies, Venezuela and Cuba.

Recently, however, in what may be a change of tone, South Africa manufactured a fake news information operation to mislead the public into thinking that Pretoria did not know about Iranian participation in naval exercises hosted at South Africa’s Simonstown naval base and had ordered that the Iranians be expelled – even as it refused to support a United Nations vote condemning the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Iran.

On 19 February the US set Iran a 10-day window to move on its nuclear and ballistic missile demands. If Iran does not move on those demands, initial limited strikes from the sea and the air are expected towards the end of this month, to test Iranian resolve. If those strikes do not shift Iran’s position, the next phase may be several weeks of air and sea strikes and, therefore, a full-on war.

It is not only Tehran that is under pressure. The trouble for the US is that if Iran plays hardball, then US credibility will be on the line. The US cannot move that amount of firepower into a region and not walk away with a positive result. Anything short of an Iranian concession will greatly undermine US credibility and be read as a sign of weakness that will undermine all future US diplomatic pressure initiatives. That is something that, given its rivalry with China over the long term, and the need to end the war in Ukraine in the short term, it cannot afford.

For Pretoria this all poses an interesting series of options.

Precedent would have the country storm to Iran’s defence regardless of the consequences for its already tattered relationship with Washington and regardless of damage wrought to its European ties. Corruption and anti-Western ideology would lead foreign policy.

However, Pretoria has also seen how effective the US (and Israel) have been in dismantling Iran’s regional and global proxy networks. The Middle East regional networks of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Assad’s regime in Syria is largely wholly degraded. Global network partner Venezuela has been largely eliminated as an Iranian proxy and Cuba is teetering. South Africa, the third major global network partner, may see the writing on the wall and realise that the tide is turning and that it needs to turn too.

That Pretoria may decide to tone it down on Iran must be read against the rise of an influential Christian ANC leadership group, on which The Common Sense has previously reported, that is uncomfortable with the country’s foreign policy leaning and its association with Islamist terror groups. Islamist terror has spread rapidly across Southern Africa with Iranian support, leading to the butchering of thousands of African Christians every year. For the ANC, which depends on Christian support in elections, it is only a matter of time before its links to Iran become a major domestic electoral threat.

That discomfort may be important in explaining why the South Africans sought to distance themselves from Iran’s recent naval participation at Simonstown even as the country’s foreign policy remains strongly pro-Iran.

The Iran-South Africa nexus, and how it plays out over the current US force build-up in the Middle East, is very important in helping to understand what South Africa’s longer political and economic trajectory may be. Unlike maintaining sound ties with Russia and China, doing so with Iran, given its role as the key global sponsor of anti-Western terrorism, places South Africa in a very small category of countries. A turn away from Iran towards a more pragmatic foreign policy would be a strong signal that national interest is replacing the primacy of, first, corruption and then anti-Western ideology in Pretoria’s foreign policy calculus.

Such a turn is essential to fostering the trade and investment pacts necessary to get South Africa’s investment rate to a level at which the rate of economic growth can again aspire to emerging market averages, something that was last the case in 2007. The countdown to war with Iran is therefore a very useful barometer from which to draw a fresh read on South Africa’s longer-term prospects.