The fallout with the US raises questions about SA’s approach and practice of diplomacy, specifically it’s ability to read the political mood and temperature of a country which, as things stand, is important to us.
These questions apply to American politics — the return to office of US President Donald Trump and what it meant for SA’s relationship with the US. This is so especially when overlain with SA’s decision to take Israel (an important US ally) to the International Court of Justice.
They also apply to the lobbying of conservative forces in the US that has been carried out over the years by AfriForum and the Solidarity movement.
They revolve around SA’s reading of these developments from the time AfriForum and its allies began lobbying in the US, and understanding their likely effect on SA’s relationship with the US.
As events since Trump assumed office in January illustrate, these lobbying efforts have paid off, because they resonated with US conservatives’ way of seeing the world, or what it ought to look like — the return to family values, war against “woke progressivism”, and the role of central government (federal in US terms and national in SA).
You only need to read “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, a policy path published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023 and popularly known as Project 2025.
One of the planks of Project 2025 is “deleting the terms” of what conservatives refer to as “woke progressivism” — diversity, equity and inclusion, issues that fall under the transformation umbrella in SA.
There’s also the cry that the US federal government “is a behemoth, weaponised against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before”. A similar cry has been sounded in SA for some time.
“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” says Project 2025.
The questions are how SA’s diplomats understood these developments in the US and, most importantly, how SA should deal with them (the game plan). These questions matter because, as the late American economist Kenneth Boulding put it, at the centre of international systems and relations are images. By which he meant images “a nation has of itself and of those other bodies in the system which constitute its international environment”.
Another observation by Boulding was that the people who determine the policies and actions of nations “do not respond to the ‘objective’ facts of the situation, whatever that may mean,” but to their “image” of the situation.
“It is what we think the world is like, not what it is really like, that determines our behaviour. We act according to the way the world appears to us, not necessarily the way it is,” Boulding wrote in a 1959 paper on national images and international systems. He added that it was always the image, “not the truth”, that immediately determines behaviour.
The Trump administration has a certain image of SA and its domestic and foreign policies, an image that in part has been shaped by the AfriForum-Solidarity lobbying of US conservative forces — an image that was certainly enhanced by the fact that they see the world through the same lens.
The SA government has a different image of itself and its policies. This gap between how SA sees itself and the Trump administration’s characterisation of SA has been described as one informed by a clash of values.
The values in SA’s case can be summed up as healing the divisions of the past and establishing a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights. To realise these values successive governments since 1994 have created a huge administrative state, to which the current administration wants to add more. This even when the administrative state has become less efficient and effective in recent years.
True to Project 2025 goals, Trump has lost no time in seeking to “deconstruct the administrative state”, the arch enemy of the conservatives. The point is that this image gap exists, and as Boulding described it, how countries see each other is at the centre of the workings of an international system. He thought of image as “the total cognitive, affective and evaluative structure of the behaviour” of nations (or countries).
So, how did SA plan to manage this image gap?
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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