HECTOR ELIOTT | Trump’s trade war is not economics — it is gunboat diplomacy by other means

The first thing South Africans need to understand about Donald Trump is that the tariffs, threats, bullying (the “white genocide” lie), and the sudden punishments of allies and rivals alike are not normal trade policy. It is coercion. It is the language of empire updated for a world of supply chains, sanctions and shipping routes.

When that economic coercion is paired with overt hard-power theatre in places such as Iran and Venezuela, the message becomes impossible to miss: the US under Trump is not simply asserting itself. It is reminding the world that it is willing to hurt countries that stand in the way of its interests.

That is what gunboat diplomacy looks like in the 21st century. The so-called “Donroe Doctrine”. Iran has seen the hard edge of it. Venezuela has seen the hard edge of it. The rest of the world is meant to learn from the spectacle. The lesson is simple: the US is neither a neutral guardian of rules nor a responsible superpower reluctantly carrying burdens for the common good.

It is a highly transactional great power, armed to the teeth, increasingly contemptuous of restraint and entirely willing to use pressure, force, blockade, sanctions and economic warfare to get its way. The US under Trump is far more dangerous to our freedom than the other continental powers, as odious and worthy of our caution and distrust as China and, particularly Russia, certainly are.

The lesson is simple: the US is neither a neutral guardian of rules nor a responsible superpower reluctantly carrying burdens for the common good. It is a highly transactional great power, armed to the teeth, increasingly contemptuous of restraint and entirely willing to use pressure, force, blockade, sanctions and economic warfare to get its way.

If this is true, South Africa needs to stop lying to itself. We are not watching some distant drama from the safety of the southern tip of Africa. We sit astride one of Earth’s most strategically important maritime routes. We live beside an increasingly contested southwest Indian Ocean. We are governed by a state that talks far more seriously than it plans, postures far more confidently than it prepares, and has allowed the practical instruments of national sovereignty to decay to the point of embarrassment.

That is not a sustainable combination. For years South Africa has comforted itself with the idea that the world has moved beyond naked power politics. We had rules. We had treaties. We had forums. We had legal process. We had all the pieties of the post-Cold War world and the Pax Americana, repeated so often that many came to mistake them for reality. But that world is dying in front of us.

Trump is not the cause of that death on his own, but he is one of the liberal humanist rules-based order’s most relentless, brutal and effective adversaries through his words and deeds, both of omission and commission. Countries that fail to understand such moments tend to learn the lesson the hard way.

The immediate practical lesson is obvious. South Africa should be rearming now, and the fastest, cheapest and most realistic place to begin is with drones. Drones have changed warfare. I saw this firsthand in Ukraine. They have changed surveillance. They have changed the economics of coercion and the economics of resistance.

A state that cannot afford prestige fleets can still build mass, reach, uncertainty and pain through drones. A state that has neglected its conventional power can still thicken its coastal defences, expand maritime awareness, watch its approaches, threaten hostile vessels and raise the cost of aggression through large-scale domestic drone capability.

South Africa should be doing exactly that. Not in five years. Not after another round of conferences, white papers and procurement scandals. Now. A serious South African drone programme should be treated as a matter of sovereignty.

Reconnaissance drones, long-range maritime surveillance and interceptor platforms, loitering munitions, cheap attritable systems, coastal monitoring grids, electronic warfare support — these are not luxury items for an unstable world. They are the beginnings of seriousness. They are the sort of tools available to countries that have understood that polite language is no substitute for hard capability.

A serious South African drone programme should be treated as a matter of sovereignty.

But drones are only the first layer. South Africa also needs a real maritime strategy, not the fantasy of one. That means a navy that can sail, an air force that can fly, ports that can function under pressure, coastal infrastructure that can be defended, and a state that understands the concept of denial.

Sovereignty is not always protected by being able to conquer others. More often it is protected by being able to make coercion difficult, expensive and uncertain. That means thinking in layers: surveillance, drones, air defence, undersea capability, strike options, coastal resilience, logistics, dispersal and readiness.

South Africa must start thinking like a state that expects trouble, not like one that assumes its moral posture will save it. And this is where the really uncomfortable question begins, because if Trump’s trade war is the biggest act of coercive diplomacy in the world today, and his behaviour towards Iran and Venezuela shows the overt military logic behind it, the wider lesson is inescapable: countries that cannot impose unacceptable costs on aggressors are eventually at the mercy of those that seek to impose their wider will on others.

That is why South Africa must be willing to revisit strategic assumptions that a more innocent age treated as closed. Yes, that includes the nuclear question. That is a grim thought. It should be. Only a fool or a maniac would welcome such a debate. South Africa is right to be proud that it once stepped away from nuclear weapons. That was the gesture of a world that hoped history was bending towards restraint. But hope is not a strategy. Nostalgia is not a shield. And no nation can defend itself forever by quoting yesterday’s moral triumphs while today’s strategic environment collapses around it.

Let us be clear. Reopening the nuclear question is not the same as romanticising the apocalypse. It is not a call for swagger, fantasy or cheap machismo. It is an acknowledgement that deterrence has returned to the centre of history. The old assumption — that law, goodwill, treaties and international institutions would steadily tame great-power behaviour — looks weaker by the month. The old assumption — that smaller states could safely outsource ultimate questions of survival to a rules-based order — looks weaker still. For example, Ukraine would not have Russian forces occupying 25% of its land mass if it hadn’t naively surrendered its nuclear arsenal to a promise of multilateral security by the US, Russia, France and Britain.

Nostalgia is not a shield. And no nation can defend itself forever by quoting yesterday’s moral triumphs while today’s strategic environment collapses around it.

South Africa does not need hysteria. But it does need to stop being unserious. It needs to stop pretending that institutional decay in the SANDF is just another bureaucratic irritant. It needs to stop treating maritime strategy as an academic niche. It needs to stop confusing anti-Western rhetoric with sovereign capability. It needs to stop talking like a country with options while behaving like a country with none.

Rearmament will cost money. Serious money. It will require reform. Real reform. It will require cutting through incompetence, patronage, corruption and lethargy. It will require a defence establishment that can once again command respect from its own citizens before it can hope to command caution from anyone else. It will require politically painful choices. Good. Sovereignty is painful. It always has been.

The alternative is cheaper only in the short term. In the long term it is ruinous, because states that cannot protect their coasts, monitor their approaches, defend their infrastructure and force stronger powers to think twice do not remain fully sovereign for long. They become objects of pressure. Then objects of intimidation. Then objects of arrangement.

That is the future South Africa should now be trying to avoid. The most urgent operational priority is drones. The most urgent institutional priority is military reform. The most urgent strategic priority is honesty. And honesty begins with this: South Africa can no longer afford to treat the ultimate foundations of deterrence as taboo simply because a more innocent age once convinced us that history had moved on.

It has not moved on. It has come back with tariffs, blockades, threats and warships. And it is knocking at the door.

• Elliot is MD of Bearfish Strategic Services.