By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Costs of South Africa’s Ideological Foreign Policy

Over thirty years after apartheid ended, the relationship between the United States and South Africa is at a nadir. Many analysts blame U.S. President Donald Trump and his sudden fixation on vilifying the country’s government. The second Trump administration has issued an executive order banning U.S. assistance to South Africa, expelled the South African ambassador from Washington, and declared that the Afrikaners—Dutch-descended white South Africans—are so persecuted that they deserve priority status for refugee resettlement in the United States. During a bilateral meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in May, Trump orchestrated a humiliating multimedia presentation in the Oval Office that falsely accused South African officials of abetting a so-called white genocide.3

The Trump administration’s determination to make an example of South Africa is partly driven by its overall antipathy toward attempts to redress historical racial injustices and has as much to do with the fixations of parts of the MAGA base as it does foreign policy. In truth, however, U.S.–South African relations have been difficult for years, characterized by mutual disappointment and suspicion. South Africa’s objections to the U.S. government’s actions abroad, especially its military interventions in Iraq and Libya, are part of the story. But so are South African actions that the United States has found objectionable.

U.S. officials anticipated that South Africa would champion pluralistic democracy and respect for human rights around the world after a decades-long liberation struggle toppled white minority rule in 1994. This expectation was informed in part by Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president, who declared that “human rights will be the light that guides our foreign affairs” and that “only true democracy can guarantee rights.” In the post-apartheid 1990s, the United States sought to strengthen ties with and champion South Africa, establishing a high-level binational commission to deepen cooperation and fast-track support for the new democracy.

But within a decade, ideology, history, and pressures exerted by South Africa’s own domestic politics have conspired to produce a foreign policy that was bound to alienate Washington. Its unexpected stances on human-rights-related votes at the United Nations were early signs of trouble. With its sustained support for Zimbabwe’s violently repressive regime, its refusal to condemn human rights abuses in Myanmar, and its silence regarding Beijing’s treatment of China’s Uyghur population, South Africa has been extremely selective about the injustices it chooses to condemn. South African officials, eager to transpose the moral authority of Mandela to the South African government as a whole, exacerbated the problem by continuously insisting that the government’s policies are consistent and principled.

The rift deepened as South African foreign policy tilted, again and again, to favor U.S. rivals. A full year before Trump took office for the second time, members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation calling on the U.S. government to review its approach to South Africa. Among the grievances that bill cited were South Africa’s condemnation of Israel and its willingness to engage with Hamas’s leaders, its continued military cooperation with Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and its close relationship with China. The United States and South Africa could—and should—work closely together, since they share an interest in maintaining successful multiracial democracies. But if the two countries continue to see each other as problems instead of partners, that capacity for collaboration may vanish for good.

 

The Past is Prologue

The African National Congress, South Africa’s leading liberation movement under apartheid, became the country’s ruling party after its first democratic elections in 1994; for 30 years, it won comfortable majorities in nationwide elections. During its long liberation struggle, the ANC had to pursue its own foreign relations and sustained its anti-apartheid efforts by building international support, primarily from the Soviet bloc. The United States aligned with the apartheid state to combat communist expansion in Africa during the Cold War, at times shielding the country from international sanctions and designating the ANC as a terrorist organization. The ANC members who dominate South Africa’s foreign policy establishment see the U.S. government’s support for the apartheid government as the most salient data point for how to view Washington today, rather than America’s vigorous anti-apartheid movement, which led Congress to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto and impose sanctions on the minority government in an attempt to incentivize change.

The capitals that more consistently supported southern African liberation movements, by contrast—such as Beijing, Havana, and Moscow—still enjoy a reputation in South Africa for being on the right side of history. The Chinese Communist Party still provides political training to ANC members. Cold War nostalgia informed the ANC’s 2023 statement that the United States “provoked the war with Russia over Ukraine, hoping to put Russia in its place” and former South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor’s suggestion that there was nothing notable about South Africa’s decision to host joint military exercises with Russia on the first anniversary of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, since “all countries conduct military exercises with friends worldwide.”

Since May 2024, the ANC has had to share power—uncomfortably—with the Democratic Alliance and other parties. Foreign policy, however, remains under the ANC’s control. The conflation of the party and the state in diplomatic and international security matters is, in part, a function of the ANC’s need to conduct its own foreign policy before South Africa became democratic. When speaking about the U.S.–South African relationship, ANC officials frequently lament the party’s paucity of direct ties with major U.S. political parties, suggesting that this explains at least some of its difficulties with Washington.

The party’s ideological underpinnings have an outsized influence on policy, and they are also full of contradictions. The ANC defines its foreign policy ideology as “progressive internationalism,” which it regularly describes as “a radical perspective on international relations” that stands in opposition to the “perpetuation of the legacy of global imperialism,” the “dominance of the global North over the global South,” and “structural global inequality and poverty.” It often cites these principles to explain South Africa’s enthusiasm for the BRICS platform—the group led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that, along with new members, positions itself as a champion of multipolarity and an alternative to existing international institutions.

This change agenda, however, coexists alongside a stated commitment to respect the core precepts of the rules-based international order: state sovereignty, multilateralism as expressed through the United Nations, and adherence to international law. In 2017, the ANC’s International Relations subcommittee explained that it seeks to “mobilize progressive forces in the [global] South and worldwide to strengthen the system of global governance and the UN in particular” so that the international order can “remain a bulwark against the unilateralist and warmongering tendencies” of powerful nations. The party’s professed goal is revolutionary change, but its preferred means are legalistic.

Another paradox emerges from the ANC’s reading of its most important document, the 1955 Freedom Charter. That text declares that South Africa should be a “fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations” but also maintains that that it should pursue “upholding the equal rights, opportunities, and status of all.” Whether South Africa, under ANC rule, calls out gross human rights abuses or respects the right of another government to repress its people as it sees fit has, in practice, depended on the degree to which ANC officials understand the government in question to be its partner in combating global power asymmetries.

South Africa characterizes its foreign policy as one of active nonalignment. Rather than refrain from taking sides when great powers disagree, the country has sought to capitalize on opportunities presented by geopolitical rifts to advance its principles. Because the United States enjoyed unchallenged power for much of the post–Cold War era, this often means a warm South African embrace of U.S. adversaries and a willingness to ignore their acts of repression. Thus concerns about Ukraine’s sovereignty and Russia’s use of force without a United Nations mandate fell by the wayside in the ANC’s rush to maintain solidarity with Moscow. South Africa has often overlooked Iran’s support for terrorism and its record of repression at home: in 2024, Pandor, South Africa’s former foreign minister, startled attendees of a think tank event in Washington when she pushed back against the characterization of Iran’s government as “authoritarian.”

South Africa’s sympathy for the Palestinian people is not at all unusual in Africa. But South Africa’s decision to bring a case to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in December 2023 came against the backdrop of earlier decisions that reveal a selective concern for oppressed peoples and international legal obligations. For example, South Africa—a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court—declined to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he visited the country in 2015, despite knowing that he was the subject of an ICC arrest warrant on charges including genocide. (South Africa claimed that its law granting immunity to sitting heads of state overruled the ICC warrant.)

 

Home Fires

South Africa’s own domestic political pressures have not helped its relationship with the United States. Decades after its segregationist regime fell, South Africa remains a profoundly unequal society. The ANC is losing the faith of centrists disillusioned with its neglectful bureaucracies and its tolerance for corruption. Some political rivals, such as Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters and former President Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe party, insist that the ANC’s failures stem instead from an inadequately radical domestic agenda, particularly when it comes to economic policy. They want to see resources nationalized and wealth redistributed. These left-wing rivals represent a looming threat to the ANC’s power: they won nearly a quarter of the vote in national elections last May.

But the ANC, which has borne the responsibility of governing and not just campaigning, has been unwilling to risk collapsing the South African economy by radically reinventing it. ANC leaders may perceive foreign policy to be a safer realm in which to assert radical bona fides. Ramaphosa’s approval rating enjoyed a bounce after in the weeks after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and South Africa’s subsequent full-throated condemnation of Israel, and he received resounding applause at his 2025 State of the Nation address after he suggested the country “will not be bullied” by the United States.

Opposing the United States, however, may confer less of a domestic benefit in the future. In 2025, after reintroducing the bill demanding a review of Washington’s policy toward South Africa, U.S. legislators added a call for sanctions on South African leaders implicated in corruption or human rights abuses. Trump has subjected South Africa to some of the highest tariff rates of any African country and is set to end its duty-free access to U.S. markets, which will cost the country tens of thousands of jobs.

South Africa has thus raced to make a deal with the Trump administration to salvage commercial ties, and talks continue behind closed doors. Tripartite military exercises with China and Russia had been slated to occur in South African waters just weeks before November’s G-20 summit in Johannesburg, and South African officials have sought to postpone them to avoid further alienating the United States. But the country's foreign policy inconsistencies persist, complicating its charm offensive. In August, the country’s top military officer, General Rudzani Maphwanya, visited Tehran. There, he said that his country shares “common goals” with Iran. “We always stand alongside the oppressed and defenseless people of the world.” South Africa frantically attempted to walk the comment back, stating that “any statements made by an individual . . . should not be misinterpreted as the official position of the South African government.” Centrist political leaders in South Africa complained that the government did not go far enough to discipline the general, while a left-wing rival party taunted Ramaphosa for “appeasing Donald Trump” with the statement.

 

Lost Opportunity

Ironically, South Africa’s complaints about the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy are similar to the grievances the United States has about its approach. South African officials seethe when U.S. leaders express concern for Ukrainian civilians but are less quick to sympathize with civilians in Gaza. They note the United States’ habit of picking and choosing moments to invoke or ignore international legal institutions and restrictions. At the same time, South Africa’s foreign policy inconsistencies and its tendency to conflate anti-Western entities with progressive ones have left many of its former U.S. champions unwilling to leap to its defense. In an alternate universe, the inconsistencies in both countries’ foreign policies would help each one better understand and sympathize with the other.

Foreign policy is difficult, and pursuing a principled foreign policy is even harder. Some hypocrisy is virtually inescapable. But when two states with different biases and worldviews collide—one enamored with a vision of its exceptionalism and another clinging to its identity as moral authority—pragmatism is in order. The United States does not gain from endorsing racist conspiracy theories that amplify South Africa’s caricature of it. And South Africa does not gain by gratuitously alienating the United States.

The two countries’ troubles run deep enough that official relations are unlikely to improve in the near future. But academics, scientists, artists, and philanthropists can make a deliberate effort to deepen collaborations and exchanges that will help lay the groundwork for a new kind of bilateral relationship that sets aside old scripts and focuses on genuine and enduring shared interests. The United States and South Africa have experience with this kind of ground-up repair: during the apartheid era, citizens built connective tissue without waiting on changes in their official governments’ policies—acts that, in turn, drove transformative top-level policy changes. They must do so once again.

 

 

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