When the room goes quiet: why SA cannot afford multilateral illusions
This week the African Union convened a Strategic Retreat in Malabo to prepare for the 2026 US G20 Presidency. The agenda is ambitious: lessons from South Africa’s G20 Presidency, positioning Africa under Agenda 2063, building a unified continental voice. The language is confident, and the symbolism is rich.
But there is something the AU’s 26 April statement does not mention: when the United States moved to exclude South Africa from the G20 earlier this year – threatening to strip Pretoria of the presidency it had barely assumed – the African Union said nothing. Not a communiqué, not a statement of solidarity, and not even a whispered expression of concern through diplomatic backchannels. The continent’s premier multilateral body, who’s permanent G20 membership South Africa helped champion, looked the other way.
Not with bitterness, but with clarity, South Africa should take note.
Pretoria has long organised its foreign policy around a principled multilateralism: the belief that collective institutions, rules-based frameworks, and continental solidarity provide the best shelter against a volatile world. While this instinct can be laudable, it is dangerously incomplete. In the new geopolitical and geostrategic reality, it turns out multilateral institutions are fair-weather friends. They amplify your voice when you are useful and fall silent when defending you becomes costly.
The geopolitical environment South Africa now operates in is not the one for which its foreign policy doctrine was built. Imperfect as it was, the post-Cold War liberal order at least maintained the pretence that rules applied equally and that institutions existed to protect smaller players. That pretence is gone. What has replaced it is transactionalism: a world where relationships are calibrated by leverage, where trade access is a bargaining chip, and where solidarity is offered only when reciprocal advantage is clear.
South Africa cannot win in that world by appealing to norms that the powerful have already abandoned.
What Pretoria needs instead is a hard-nosed recalibration, one that keeps multilateral engagement as a tool, but stops treating it as a strategy; the real work now is bilateral. Trade agreements negotiated country by country, sector by sector, on terms that reflect South Africa’s actual comparative advantages: critical minerals, agricultural capacity, a sophisticated financial services industry, and a legal and regulatory infrastructure that most of the continent cannot match. These are assets. They should be leveraged with discipline, not offered up in exchange for vague institutional goodwill.
Equally urgent is defence. South Africa’s military has been chronically underfunded for two decades. This decision made a certain kind of sense when the regional security environment seemed manageable, but it no longer does. A country that cannot credibly defend its own interests, territory, or economic infrastructure has limited standing at any table, multilateral or otherwise. Investment in defence capability is not militarism; in the current climate, it is a prerequisite for being taken seriously.
None of this means South Africa should retreat from the AU, abandon BRICS, or withdraw from the institutions it helped build. Multilateral forums still generate intelligence, build relationships, and occasionally produce outcomes worth having. The Malabo retreat may well yield something useful. But attending a retreat is not a strategy. Chairing a G20 is not, by itself, a foreign policy.
The lesson of the past year is simple, and the AU’s silence has taught it more effectively than any analyst could: when pressure mounts and choices become difficult, institutions protect themselves first. South Africa must do the same.
Bilateral leverage. Defence investment. Economic resilience. These are not retreats from principle – they are the preconditions for principle to mean anything at all.
