On 18 June US vice president, JD Vance told reporters Donald Trump is “the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this point in time.” He then warned Israel’s cabinet against attacking “the only powerful ally” it has left.
Coming from the second-highest official in Israel’s most important security partner, the comment did real work; it told Jerusalem that American support is a favour extended, not an obligation owed, and that the favour can be withdrawn.
This is not an isolated jab. Mr Vance has spent June arguing publicly that US and Israeli interests on Iran “diverge,” that Israel relies too heavily on military force, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “certainly gotten some things wrong.”
Each statement chips away at the assumption that sat underneath US-Israel relations for seventy years: that shared history and ideology guarantee shared action. Mr Vance is replacing that assumption with a different one: support is conditional, continuously re-earned, and tied to what Washington gets in return.
The pattern extends well past the Middle East. Washington’s posture on Nato burden-sharing, its use of tariffs against allies and rivals alike under Section 301, and its willingness to let a Strait of Hormuz crisis reshape global energy flows all point the same way.
Alliances and blocs once held together by values or history now hold together, if at all, by demonstrated mutual benefit. Every government, including those that assumed they were inside the tent, must now ask what it brings to the table this year, not what it brought thirty years ago.
South Africa cannot treat this as someone else’s problem. The country’s foreign policy has long banked on non-alignment and historical solidarity, first with the Soviet bloc, more recently with BRICS and the Global South, while assuming Western markets and capital would remain available regardless of diplomatic posture – that assumption is no longer safe.
The US has already shown its willingness to use trade policy as leverage against Pretoria over its foreign policy choices, and the threat of losing AGOA preferences remains live. The European Union and Gulf states are recalculating their own commitments along similarly transactional lines.
What protects a middle power in this environment is not the memory of past alignment; it is current capability and reliability. South Africa’s institutions and infrastructure are exposed to external shocks it does not control.
The Cape Route’s new relevance as vessels avoid the Strait of Hormuz is a genuine opportunity, but only if Durban and Cape Town’s port performance improves enough to capture the traffic; a capable state, predictable property rights, and a functioning judiciary are not abstractions in this context – they are the product South Africa is selling to investors and partners who increasingly shop around.
The choices made over the next eighteen months on fiscal consolidation, port and energy infrastructure, labour policy, defence capacity investments, and the management of relations with Washington, Brussels, and Beijing will decide on which side of that divide South Africa lands.
A government that treats those choices as discretionary, available to be revisited once growth picks up, will find that the world Mr Vance is describing does not wait. A transactional decade rewards countries that turn up with something to offer; it has little patience for those still trading on goodwill they have not renewed.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-array-of-international-flags-29303947/]
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