Ex Africa semper aliquid novi
Pliny the Elder
We are facing neither East nor West. We are facing forward.
Kwame Nkrumah
(Ghana’s first Prime Minister, in his Accra conference speech of 7th April 1960)
Introduction
The loud and confident return to the world stage by geopolitical realism, that old favorite of strongmen politicians the world over, during the last year or two has sharply raised a few questions regarding the political alignment of all countries in general, but the so-called middle powers in particular face urgent, existential questions.
Which team should we be on? What happens if we get this wrong? For many, these questions were, for a while, softened by assurances of global cooperation, unipolar realities, diplomatic solutions, and several other polite masks that were ripped off the diplomatic persona within the first month of the second Trump administration early in 2025.
It became all too clear that decisions will have to be made, that alliances and loyalties were demanded, directly or indirectly. Various bizarre and hitherto improbable scenarios played themselves out across the already developing multipolar world. Public demands and threats against Canada and Greenland, a catastrophic US chosen war against Iran, a range of trade wars and tariff impositions and a long list of other global conflicts, many initiated by the US, made it clear that the days of ignoring the question of alliances were over, for good or bad.
South Africa was not spared these machinations. In public pronouncements that included President Trump himself, executive order 14204, ominously titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” was issued on the 7th February 2025. Amid this and other blatant attacks on the country, the government was accused of a spectrum of offences, including land seizures of Afrikaner property, using hateful rhetoric that fuelled disproportionate violence against racial minorities, and “genocide” against the white Afrikaner community, and various “race-based” examples of legislative abuse, including the government’s BBB-EE policies, more general land expropriation and the alleged neglect of protecting the white farming community.
The South African government was accused of taking “aggressive positions” towards the US and its allies (specifically in accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice), by strengthening commercial, military and nuclear ties with Iran, and generally supporting “bad actors on the world stage”. Sanctions and other punishments such as the freezing of US foreign aid and assistance were implemented or threatened, and the country was unceremoniously removed from the G20 membership list, among some of the more important accusations and responses.
South Africa, like Canada, Greenland, Cuba and several others on the receiving end of these unprecedented attacks on its sovereignty, has to make urgent, and crucially important decisions not just on its own geopolitical course for the next few years, but those questions as they are affected and made more complex by these Trump administration events. These decisions would have been urgent and necessary without the second Trump administration’s complications.
In broad strokes, and in public discourse, the options seem clear-cut. There are advocates, here and abroad, with strong arguments, clamouring for South Africa to bend the knee to the US, do whatever it takes to repair the current diplomatic ruptures, and to stay in the US corner, as this is obviously in the country’s best interests. Or so the arguments go. As could be expected, there are proponents, here and abroad, also armed with strong arguments, demanding the cutting of ties with the US, or at least minimizing their influence as far as it may be in conflict with other arguments, and that we align ourselves with a variety of other power centres as they are developing in the new, multipolar world. In contrast to these two polar opposites we have well-developed, and popular suggested solutions, such as the often vaguely understood concept of non-alignment (a few models of which we will consider).
In simplified terms – pick a side, or stay neutral, do not get involved. As is often on display by the current South African government, this seems to include the option of making no decision, as a decision. Non-alignment is often in these debates used as a strong option, as an effective counterargument to the insistence on alignment. Winning by refusing to participate.
All of these arguments have their strong and weak aspects. They can each be assessed and evaluated using a variety of economic, political and diplomatic lenses, and these debates will remain urgent for another two or three years, until these decisions become academic.
For our journey here, we will take a robust look at these questions through a conflict management lens. In doing so, we will find that none of the conventional solutions are really strong enough foundations on which to build South Africa’s best interests and future on, and we will consider a tailor-made conflict option that is superior to current strategies, such as they are. South Africa is entering one of its latest developmental periods, as it seeks to shape and find its own identity as a modern, effective nation worthy of its promise and potential.
The ANC, handed a crown it could not wear, and the Democratic Alliance, its uneasy partner in the Government of National Unity, will probably continue to steer the nation for a while, with several contenders and alternative leadership models waiting in the wings.
South Africa’s internal turmoil and volatility may very well, from a conflict management perspective, be viewed as an opportunity, as growing pains, as a belated chance for the correction of a series of leadership mistakes and poor conflict option management, to at long last resolve or improve a range of crippling ongoing national conflicts. That may be so, but those internal conflicts do not play out in a theoretical vacuum, so beloved of us conflict scholars.
South Africa, as part of a variety of geopolitical groups and alliances, which we will consider later on in the series, is also forced to navigate the brave new world being born. In this world, the stakes are higher than ever before, as we will see. The confident return of geopolitical realism, the multipolar powerplays flexing its new-found muscles across the world, the realities of even the most conservative of assessments of the trajectories and economic realities that artificial intelligence will enforce on the world, and the consequences of getting even minor strategic decisions wrong in the next five years, should have been confronted by a stable and settled South African government, one that could carefully and in a measured way have considered and executed its options in navigating its place in this epochal times.
This is not the case, and these historical, nearly existential, decisions, will have to be made against the backdrop of a state that has very little to show for the thirty years it has been trying to lift the country’s head. A possible scenario is that our internal quagmires so consume us, so paralyze the relevant decision-makers, that it drags us down the rather predictable slopes to what awaits a number of states that get the next few years wrong.
Another is that we manage to use the one conflict to help us solve the other. We will analyse the main trajectories and design conflict solutions for all of them. As much as the future is an opaque lens, and there are no second chances in this particular part of history, we can take heart in a few lessons from history, and conflict patterns and practices that show us the best way through these mists.
Decisions, by commission or omission, will need to be taken with the necessary skill and sense of urgency. Questions of timing and sequence will make the difference between success and failure, concepts in themselves that we will consider. Before we start to consider solutions and answers, we need to ensure that we have the questions right.
The differentiation phase of any complex conflict needs to provide the correct data, and South Africa’s geopolitical position means that missing by an inch will mean missing by a mile. We need to understand what role South Africa can and should play as a middle power, what that disputed term means, what our options are, what the challenges, risks and threats are, what our conflict options are, what contingencies we can anticipate, and what the consequences of our options, and conflict outcomes, would be. In accurately assessing these and other questions, we also need to lose a few bad habits that accrued in our diplomatic and national leadership decision-making histories.
We need to guard against complacency, and against fatalism, against the Scylla of isolationism and the Charybdis of trying to hide in the crowd. If South Africa is going to navigate these straits effectively, it will need to stop reflexively reaching for debunked and outdated theories and ideologies.
We will need to aim for where the world will be at various specific stages in the next months and years, not where it is at the moment. It will need to learn with confidence, not arrogance, it will need to understand that the Mandela magic has rubbed off, that it has been squandered on all sorts of errors and weaknesses. We need to find power in a world where power looks different, but also a world where power is the only real conflict currency, now more than ever.
South Africa, like so many countries, faces a future full of volatility and uncertainty, and even the short-term horizon is full of variables. Will the ANC retain its tenuous hold on power, will the government of national unity continue to try and steer the ship based on the current fractious foundation, and how will one or more of a handful of complex, interlinked and cyclical, unresolved conflicts affect and change the country in the next three years? Any effective conflict management strategy must of course be aware of such volatility, predict as best possible, and plan accordingly.
Complex conflicts bring with them the vastly increased potential both for chaos and for success. The course that we will steer throughout the series therefore takes into consideration all of the anticipated possibilities and probabilities, leaving our assessment out of the reach of political vicissitudes. Whoever is in de facto charge of South Africa in the next few years has these responsibilities, regardless of what permutations may deliver power to these decision makers.
The thesis of the series
The thesis of my analysis is simple:
1. The world in general, and South Africa in particular, is in the process of epochal changes and power realignments, changes far more consequential, far more complex, than normal incremental changes in people and policies;
2. This volatile environment requires political, leadership clarity and conflict competency never seen on the diplomatic stage;
3. Success or failure in navigating these urgent, complex challenges will have enduring effects, whether positive or negative, on a country such as South Africa;
4. South Africa’s best course in these next few years will require a very specific set of strategies, which is then the focus of our work.
The idea of middle powers
Before we test the concept itself, what should we understand to constitute a middle power in the first place? In its simplest form, it is a state positioned between the great powers and small states in the global hierarchy. That vague start makes for an endless range of definitions and understandings of what exactly a middle power is, and is not.
So we find purely material calculations (based on population, economies, military capabilities and so on), or behavioural, self-identified, or functional considerations in making this decision. As can be expected, this gets further stratified into traditional / classic middle powers (mostly Western, liberal states) and emerging middle powers. All of these distinctions are helpful, especially in particular settings and debates.
While the concept of middle powers was recognized at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), the concept gained some practical popularity just after the Second World War, with countries like Canada and Australia seeking to gain greater influence in the UN and other organizations. It is widely recognized in scholarly circles, and just about all participants in such debates will know what is being discussed. Greater disagreement and lack of clarity mostly arises in precise criteria and membership lists.
Criticism of the idea
The concept itself is also not without valid criticism. Definitional ambiguity and a certain circularity in defining qualifying states make such criticism inevitable. Normative assumptions of the validity and currency of liberal internationalism add a few further telling blows, at least to the list of contenders of qualifying countries. Among its harshest critics we find calls to historicize the idea as an outdated 20th century concept that serves no further purpose.
My specific use of the term for our discussion
I have no particular objection to the concept of a middle power, while I concede most of the criticism brought against it. For me, the idea highlights the potential of real-world agency for particular states, it focuses identities, and it is most certainly helpful in geopolitical conflict debates.
I can assure the reader, for, against or indifferent to the concept of middle powers, that nothing in our discussion will require an exact qualification of South Africa as a middle power, and I am not seeking to smuggle in any conclusions by using the term itself. It is a commonly used, practical term, and it need not serve any rigorous purpose in itself for our assessment. My arguments must stand or fall whether we use this term, or any of the other favoured (and used in practice) terms such as regional powers, emerging, niche, secondary powers, or Gabriele Abbondanza and Thomas Wilkins’ wonderful “awkward powers”.
Nothing technical turns on my use of the term “middle powers”, and it is simply a preferred descriptor that I do not believe has outlived its utility. The series deals with South Africa’s geopolitical decisions and strategic options, and what other states, in similar and comparable positions (however defined), can learn from it.
South Africa as middle power
South Africa is widely treated by IR scholarship and policy analysis as an emerging or Southern middle power. Harvard’s Belfer Center Middle Powers Project, for example, explicitly includes South Africa among its thirteen case study middle powers. The recognition is not uncontested, as may be expected given the vague boundaries and disputes involving the concept itself. Our material capabilities sit at the lower end of typical middle power ranges, and our foreign policy record contains a few contradictions that invite such criticism. The label fits sufficiently, though.
In the next article in the series we look at the South African government’s internal distractions, its alleged anti-Western posture and we start unpacking the various models and options available to the country
End of part 1 of 3
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading
1. The Non-Aligned World by Jorge Heine, Carlos Fortin and Carlos Ominami, Polity Press (2025)
2. Statecraft by Jack Watling, Macmillan (2026)
3. My essay on Mediation and Peacebuilding can be accessed in the Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (2nd edition), Chapter 19, Taylor & Francis (2025)
4. Our blog at www.conflict-conversations.co.za has a rich variety of articles expanding on specific aspects of the article.
(Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.)
(c) Andre Vlok September 2026
* Author’s note on the use of artificial intelligence in writing this article
I learned to draft, argue and write in the hard school of litigation. I enjoy and value the very human process of creating ideas, of testing my own knowledge and thoughts. It is a process that I need, for answering some of my professional and even personal questions, it is cathartic and inspiring. Other than the most basic research assistance I do not use any AI in the creation of my written work, this article included. It is a matter of pride, of preference, and of mental health. Whether that is a wise choice or not, I will leave to the reader to decide.