Does Pretoria Even Know What It Holds In Simonstown?

South Africa is hosting the G20 summit this weekend without championing one of its most decisive, but wholly squandered, foreign policy assets. Its position at the Cape of Good Hope and its control of Simonstown should provide hard power relevance in the Indo-Pacific, yet Pretoria’s foreign policy machinery has failed to convert that geography into strategic currency.

In a world where influence is increasingly traded through control of supply routes, South Africa has not positioned the Cape as a bargaining chip with either Washington or Beijing.

The Cape route functions as a chokepoint even though the ocean gives the illusion of width. Shipping is compressed into a narrow and hazardous transit lane by the Agulhas Bank and deep water to the south. A study by BRE-DE-RE, a think tank based in Germany, describes this corridor as narrow, perilous, and indispensable during periods of conflict in the Middle East, Suez, and the Red Sea. Recent attacks on Red Sea traffic brought that reality into focus when diverted vessels surged around the Cape, underscoring how global trade depends on South Africa’s maritime domain.

This dependency should translate directly into diplomatic leverage. A state that commands the only reliable alternative to Suez should be able to extract trade concessions, security co-operation, and investment commitments from the world’s major powers. Instead, Pretoria has not articulated a national security doctrine that aligns Simonstown with the strategic competition between China and the United States (US).

South Africa has not used its position at the hinge between the Indian and Atlantic oceans to insist on favourable access to US markets, nor has it used the same geography to negotiate long-term infrastructure and investment guarantees from Beijing.

The absence of strategy is evident in the country’s minimal participation in Indo-Pacific security frameworks at a time when China is accelerating naval deployments and regional actors are strengthening co-operation on submarine activity, grey-zone threats, and sea lane protection. Pretoria has allowed Simonstown to drift outside these arrangements despite its historical role as a base from which maritime order could be anchored.

The lead-up to the G20 offered a clear opportunity to correct this failure. With major economies facing renewed insecurity through Suez, South Africa could have framed the stability of the Cape route as a global public good dependent on investment partnerships and diplomatic alignment. Instead, underutilisation of this chokepoint has reduced South Africa’s influence, robbed it of strategic relevance, and denied it the economic advantages that geography should deliver.

A state that sits on one of the world’s most valuable maritime assets should be setting terms, not taking them. Until Pretoria builds a foreign policy that treats the Cape route and Simonstown as national security instruments rather than geographic trivia, South Africa will remain a bystander in a strategic contest in which it should be a pivotal actor.

Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States Navy officer and historian in the 19th and 20th centuries and considered by some to be one of the most important American strategists.