Tag: china

Posted on

The G20 revealed a shift in South Africa’s foreign policy

ANTHONY BUTLER: Shifting from China focus to balanced foreign policy

Balancing global partnerships is SA’s new foreign strategy

5 December 2025

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s firm handling of his US counterpart during a successful G20 process has modified popular views about his capabilities. He is still a lousy president on domestic matters, the conventional wisdom now goes, but he is rather good at foreign affairs.

However, the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is far from clear-cut. Countries seek agreements with their peers, but any deal must be ratified at home by legislatures, interest groups, citizens and political parties. Negotiators respond to the preferences of their domestic constituents while using pressures at home as leverage in international forums. In practice, the two levels of negotiation are simultaneous and continuous.

South Africa’s foreign policy has long been criticised for insufficiently prioritising economic growth and development at home. Turf wars between trade and foreign affairs officials have made an integrated approach hard, while debates about race and transformation have undermined co-operation between big business and government.

The major international crises during Ramaphosa’s first term — the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war — created space for a reorientation of Pretoria’s goals and instruments. Behind the smokescreen of a theatrical confrontation with President Donald Trump, the final G20 summit revealed three related shifts in South Africa’s foreign policy.

After a decade of emphasis on a China-dominated Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) forum, a significant rebalancing has taken place. Former president Thabo Mbeki cautioned about the danger of falling into a new “colonial relationship” with China, noting that exporting raw materials while importing Chinese manufactured goods would leave Africa “condemned to underdevelopment” in a replication of European colonialism.

The new, more balanced, approach recognises that South Africa benefits from Chinese markets and financing but that we also need European investment and global standards access, and alternative vehicles for South-South co-operation.

In a second development, the G20 cycle underscored the maturing and pragmatic relationship between South Africa and Europe. European countries remain by far the biggest investors in this country, and the eurozone hugely surpasses China as South Africa’s biggest trading partner.

The G20 summit unveiled a sharper instrumental and pragmatic focus on critical minerals, sustainable energy transition and trade standards, in place of previous performative issues of political alignment and misalignment.

South Africa signalled deepening co-operation on energy transition supply chains, with the critical minerals needed for batteries, wind magnets and hydrogen infrastructure framed as a durable area of strategic alignment. South Africa wants investment in local beneficiation while Europe wants reliable supply.

In a third development on the margins of the G20 process, leaders of the three Ibsa countries — India, Brazil and South Africa — indicated their determination to revitalise the forum as a channel for South-South co-operation outside the broader Brics agenda.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has established a close working relationship with Ramaphosa, while India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was uncharacteristically effusive. Ibsa is the one major trilateral South-South forum that allows South Africa strategic autonomy, avoids being folded into Sino-centric diplomacy, and facilitates co-operation between large democracies (or just-about-democracies in India’s case) that share concerns about norms, institutions, trade and energy transition financing.

Positive signalling about Ibsa takes place while Europe and the US are seeking non-Chinese industrial partners, Brazil is concerned about mineral supply chains and energy transition, India is positioning itself as a hedge power, and South Africa wants South-South development co-operation and beneficiation without sacrificing Western investment. Ibsa provides a platform for these various goals to align without the geopolitical baggage that sometimes surrounds Brics.

The real test of these three shifts in South Africa’s international orientation lies not in their intrinsic elegance and rationality, but rather in their sustainability, and in whether they will deliver the fruits of stability, co-operation and economic development.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. He recently published a book about the post-apartheid presidents, ‘Presidential Power’.

Posted on

SA foreign policy in the time of Trump

ANTHONY BUTLER: SA has chance to rethink foreign policy amid Trump fall out

There is an opportunity to correct the disjuncture between diplomatic priorities and economic interests

First published in BusinessLive and Business Day

28 February 2025

The international relations turmoil wrought by the new Donald Trump administration has brought an opportunity to rethink SA foreign policy.

Trump’s immediate bugbears include SA’s pursuit of the International Court of Justice case against Israel, membership of Brics, anti-Western rhetoric and perceived alignment with Russia, China and Iran. There are also concerns about BEE and expropriation policies, in keeping with the white supremacist leanings of the administration’s intellectual gurus and oligarchs. 

SA will probably distance itself from anti-American rhetoric and present its relations with Russia and China in a less adversarial way, but removal from the African Growth & Opportunity Act and diplomatic boycotts are likely whatever steps the country takes. We can also expect frustration from the Financial Action Task Force and international financial institutions in which the US has a voice. 

While SA’s curious relationship with Russia is presumably of less long-term concern to the US than its relationship with China — and what the US sees as Beijing’s Brics front — Pretoria has long needed clarity about its longer-term goals. Do we want to overturn the existing international system and establish China at its helm, or merely create a more equitable version of the current global system? 

While the naive democracy and human rights idealism of the Mandela period is long gone, the complete abandonment of these values cannot be in SA’s longer-term interests. Since Zuma rose to the Union Buildings, foreign policy has adopted an increasingly binary character.

“Good” states are those that “understand” Western exploitation and the traumas of colonialism, regardless of their human rights record or the character of their political system. “Bad” states, exemplified by the US and the former colonial powers, are defined by their history and lumped together irrespective of their actions. SA now depends on an unthinking enmity with the Global North as a whole, to sustain its sense of stability and its confidence in its own identity. 

Trump’s assault on former US allies in Europe includes threats of swingeing tariffs, the collapse of the Nato alliance on which postwar European security has rested, and the promotion of far- right parties in European elections. This week the US refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the UN, instead voting with authoritarian apologists such as North Korea and Belarus.

This presages a sustained assault on the capacity of the EU — the world’s largest trading bloc — to establish global norms around digital competition, AI, privacy and climate regulation that are inconvenient to American corporations. 

Conflict between the US and Europe presents an opportunity to rethink SA’s binary model of good and bad states, and to correct the striking disjuncture between SA’s diplomatic priorities and its economic interests. European countries are by far the biggest investors in SA: taken together, the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Belgium account for more than 70% of foreign direct investment stock in SA.

The US accounts for just 5% and China less than 4%. The EU is SA’s biggest trading partner by far, with SA exports to the EU, many of them sophisticated goods and services, more than double exports to the US or to China. 

It may not be an easy time to re-engage with European countries, with them being preoccupied with dealing with Russia and likely to sacrifice engagement with the South to the new priority of defence spending. Far-right parties may also continue to strengthen across the continent, bringing more racial populism and hostility to countries in the south.

But this is just a possible future. Europe remains SA’s most important economic partner, shares democratic and human rights values, and remains — when contrasted with the Trump administration at least — a promoter of stability, development and enlightened values. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.