Ismail Joosub’s call for a so-called constitutional reset in South Africa’s foreign policy presents itself as principled and sober (“SA’s foreign policy needs a constitutional reset”, February 3). In reality it reflects a surface-level reading of global power that treats foreign relations as an ethics seminar, detached from history, coercion and intelligence warfare.
What is conveniently absent is any serious engagement with how the international order functions. States are not judged by abstract values but by alignment, leverage and coercive power. Iran is a clear example. Recent protests and unrest were not spontaneous eruptions of civic dissent. There is credible open-source evidence pointing to planning, funding and arming by Mossad and Western intelligence agencies. This context is erased to preserve the fiction of neutral human rights advocacy.
South Africa’s foreign posture is also severed from its own liberation history. Countries now labelled authoritarian were the very states that stood with the ANC and black South Africans when the West armed, financed and diplomatically protected apartheid. That solidarity was not rhetorical. It was material, political and costly. To discard it now in favour of Western approval is not constitutional fidelity, it is historical amnesia.
The Jeffrey Epstein files should have permanently shattered any illusion about the moral standing of Western political systems. What they expose is a ruling class governed through blackmail, sexual violence and intelligence capture. Foreign policy in Washington, London and Brussels is not driven by human rights but by kompromat, elite protection and imperial consensus. To demand South Africa align with this bloc under the banner of constitutionalism is to launder power as principle.
This is not about rejecting values. It is about refusing narrative laundering. Human rights rhetoric is selectively weaponised to discipline the Global South while crimes by Western allies are normalised, justified or buried. South Africa’s refusal to submit to this hierarchy is not a credibility gap. It is an act of political clarity.
The real constitutional threat is not nonalignment. It is the quiet demand that South Africa subordinate its sovereignty, history and moral judgment to systems now openly exposed as corrupt, predatory and violent. History will not judge South Africa harshly for standing outside this order. It will judge harshly those who mistook Western approval for moral authority.
Iqbal Jassat
Media Review Network
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