Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote the obituary for the post-World War 2 rules-based international order on stage in Davos, Switzerland, last week. His speech was not a eulogy. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it,” Carney stressed. “Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”
Exactly what the framework of a new global order might comprise, time will tell. But Carney was clear on one point: middle powers must work together to counter the rise of hard power and great power rivalries, if we hope to build a more co-operative, resilient world.
South African officials were quick to applaud Carney’s speech. Department of international relations & co-operation director-general Zane Dangor rightly observed that the ANC has expressed similar sentiments for years. “With other middle power countries,” he wrote in 2024, “we can work to transform the global political landscape to be peace-centred and rights driven.”
But words are one thing, deeds quite another. Major failings at home and abroad over two decades have caused people to tune out when South Africa speaks on the global stage. That could change in the new world intimated by Carney. Much will depend on South Africa’s willingness to ditch old ideologies and failed policies.
The old rules-based international order did, despite its flaws, deliver benefits across all societies. Open markets, financial stability and collective security through respect for international law and the sovereignty of borders was made possible by a host of multilateral institutions — the UN, World Trade Organisation, Bretton Woods — backstopped by American power. Will South Africa now help pay for or uphold these, and other, public goods and institutions that it previously took for granted?
Though the rules always favoured the powerful, smaller countries did have a fair chance to take advantage of opportunities and thrive in a global trading environment, as illustrated by decades of rising prosperity and incomes for developing and developed countries alike.
That era is now over as America walks away from the rules-based world it created. Great powers, says Carney, are now using integration as weapons through abuse of tariffs, supply chains and financial infrastructure.
But small countries and middle powers are not bereft of options. Carney has laid out clearly a vision for alliances among like-minded countries that are issue and value-specific. Middle powers, he says, have the capacity to “build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. As such, Canada will aim to “be both principled and pragmatic … not every partner will share all of our values”.
This framing raises profound questions for how South Africa projects itself in the world. Officially, the liberal values enshrined in South Africa’s constitution are the fulcrum of its foreign policy. In practice, it plays lip service to them and applies them selectively.
Crimes against humanity are seemingly applicable in Gaza but not Mariupol. The inviolability of sovereign borders and illegal change of regime by force apply in Venezuela but not Ukraine. An oppressive and illegitimate government in Iran gets a free pass to brutalise its own people — more than 30,000 of whom may have been killed in the past month — because they promote south-south co-operation and hate the West.
Inconsistency and hypocrisy are not unique to South Africa’s government. But to be taken seriously and run a more effective foreign policy, the country’s commitment to neutrality and multilateralism needs credibility. Instead, the ANC’s ideology-driven approach renders it incoherent and ineffective. A worldview that divides the planet into politically hostile blocs is self-limiting when this country needs to build a wide set of alliances and improve access to markets.
Instead, what we have is essentially a rerun of the Cold War, involving liberation-era loyalties to rogue or authoritarian regimes that abuse the rights of their own citizens — Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia — while downgrading relations or picking fights with the imperial powers of yesteryear.
Donald Trump’s world view may be transactional and immoral, but there is brutal logic to how he operates. A country that picks fights with the US on symbolic issues will pay a price.
South Africa got away with this for a while. But the costs are coming home now. Preferential access to the American market is at risk if America’s African Growth & Opportunity Act — now renewed for one year — lapses due to South Africa’s alignment with US adversaries. Already $500m in American bilateral support for public health has been lost.
Donald Trump’s world view may be transactional and immoral, but there is brutal logic to how he operates. A country that picks fights with the US on symbolic issues will pay a price. It is the Patriotic Alliance’s Gayton McKenzie who made the most telling observation of this reality, citing his lived experience of township life: you don’t publicly insult people you take money from without accepting consequences.
New world order requires sense of urgency
The responsible middle power status that South Africa aspires to requires a grown-up approach to global challenges and opportunities. It cannot afford the current drift and indulgence of outdated policy. The wisest move the president could make would be to drop the ANC’s stranglehold over foreign policy and open it up to new thinking and critical voices across society, even other voices in the government of national unity.
A drastically altered world order requires a sense of urgency on ways to build future prosperity: policies designed to exploit international opportunities that grow the economy on a sustainable, labour-intensive basis; and the courage to drive tough, structural reforms. A decade of growth below 1% in South Africa is proof enough that the status quo is unacceptable.
Good trading relationships need to be nurtured. Europe and the West can’t be taken for granted. They provide unparalleled preferential market access, most importantly for most of South Africa’s value-added and manufactured exports. Accounting for nearly half of all exports, these markets are far more valuable than the Brics bloc. Strategies for both the West and China and other markets of the Global South need to be overhauled. They do not need to be either-or choices.
If Carney is right about this uncertain and fluid new world, South Africa needs a long overdue foreign policy reboot if it is to make the best of it.
• Mason is an associate of Johannesburg risk and resilience consultancy Eunomix. McNamee is a senior fellow of the Montreal Institute for Global Security.
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