Al-Qalam 
By Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool
Since the announcement that I was to represent South Africa again in the United States of America, my life has been in turmoil, both personally and politically. Personally because of a disruption to my life carved in the last decade in which I could have a global reach through the World for All Foundation, African impact on infrastructure through the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and a vastly present family life.
But the political turmoil comes from all the dimensions which make this posting a potential mission impossible: Firstly, the ascendancy of President-Elect Trump makes geopolitics both unpredictable and volatile; secondly, the existence of draft legislation and threats aimed at ‘dealing with South Africa’ economically for ostensibly being on the ‘wrong side’ of both the conflicts in Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East; thirdly, the hosting of BRICS by South Africa and its expansion is seen as threatening the hegemony of the global North, and hence the need to curtail South Africa’s influence; fourthly, the threat of exiting South Africa from trade agreements, like the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) and related investments pose a significant threat to our fragile economy; and finally, the politics that SA now advances must take into account the existence of the Government of National Unity (GNU) after the elections earlier this year.
Yet, despite these complications, SA has been unwavering in presenting its memorials to the International Court of Justice, in which its legal team will present the evidence of a genocide and hope to win the case. SA has not stood back from its commitment to BRICS and the hope for a multi-lateral world in which the architecture of global and financial governance is made fairer. SA has also not stood back from its economic relations with countries like China and insists that the USA cannot demand exclusivity of trade and investment. All these firm steps by SA speak of a foreign policy founded on firm values as the point of departure.
South Africa’s, and by extension, my dilemma lies in the execution of a foreign policy grounded in values, but cognisant of our interests, especially also those related to our economic relations with, amongst others, the USA. While our interests appear economic, they are significantly connected to values attached to reducing 31% unemployment, the greater impact on livelihoods that come with exporting beneficiated goods, and defending the lives of families threatened by the threats of stopping fruit, cars, minerals, and other exports to the USA, a country that facilitates employment of our people.
So, diplomacy is not in trading off interests for values or vice versa. Amidst the silence of Palestine’s neighbours in the face of genocide, SA’s own history impelled us to act and even compensate for such silence, and so our pendulum swung significantly to our values, even when endangering our interests to which we attached our own human values. Not only did we magnificently deploy a legal team, but our government, especially through Minister Naledi Pandor, picked up a global megaphone to join the heroic megaphones of our civil society, multi-religious communities, and others to rouse the world to their duty with great success. Diplomacy is now about asking how would we, in the face of grave threats, rebalance the pendulum, not retreating into narrow interests, but, somewhere in the middle where both can be achieved?
The President has a clear mandate for me to achieve that balanced, middle position: we are not backing off on the ICJ and will fully support our legal team to complete successfully what they have so far driven magnificently, while ensuring that we engage the Trump Administration in ways that secure trade, investment, economic growth, employment retention and growth, and the general well being of South Africans and Africans. This is also not a trade-off of our relations between BRICS and the North, because even BRICS countries strive to advance their economic relations with the North. In fact, SA’s leadership of the G20 offers hope in the world that a balanced, middle position can prevail in the world.
The critical factor in this is that while the government pursues this, our society will continue to be a beacon, beckoning us and the world to its finest values, but remaining cognisant of our interests. In such complex times, civil society does not have to do deft balancing, it simply does what is sees as the right thing to do.
