NANA K POKU | Trump, South Africa and the ICC: why we must resist the return of imperialism

It is difficult to determine the precise motives for the torrent of executive orders pouring out of the US administration of Donald Trump, but many of its public pronouncements appear to freely mix personal grievances, uninformed or mendacious assessments, capriciousness and hardened ideology.

The political disposition of the US would until recently have largely been conducted on the basis of managed change, deploying the familiar instruments of international relations and diplomacy, with little immediate impact on the everyday politics and lives of ordinary people worldwide. But no longer.

It is remarkable that the government of the US should seek to interfere in South Africa’s land policy — hardly everyday fare between two democracies that have a largely good history of relations, particularly post-Apartheid. But close on the heels of the US president voicing his disapproval came the executive order terminating all US financial assistance to South Africa — some $440m.

Notably, Trump included in his motivations his condemnation of South Africa’s initiative at the end of 2023 to open a case in the International Criminal Court against the state of Israel over the allegation of genocide in Gaza. We didn’t have long to wait before Trump also authorised economic and travel sanctions against the ICC. Whatever one thinks of the political dynamics always at work within international law, South Africa’s case was in support of a statute — the Genocide Convention — that could hardly be more fundamental to international peace and security.

There have been failures aplenty, but the overarching structure of international order has remained largely intact. However, there are now powerful actors at work trying to unravel the entire fabric of international relations underpinned by law rather than force.

In the coming weeks and months, most attention will rightly be focused on the ways the Trump administration’s radical (and apparently undeliberated) policy disruptions will affect the lives of millions throughout the world — particularly Africa, South Africa included — most worryingly with respect to the decades-long fight against the spread of HIV and Aids. It appears that Pepfar (The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) has been terminated, frozen or largely curtailed. In the ensuing uncertainty, Aids patients in the region have already been affected; and it is not possible to calculate the effects even in South Africa alone, where 20 percent of the country’s Aids budget is funded by Pepfar — a programme that is credited with saving 25-million lives.

But beneath the current tumult, a still larger struggle is unfolding: the fight to preserve a law-based international order. It is now largely lost on us that out of the terrible destruction of World War 2, our forebears created something unique in human history: not a world of competing empires, unquestioned imperialist impulses and the subjugation of much of humanity, but a single, law-based international system, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and reinforced by the establishment of the human rights regime.

The subsequent decades were hardly an immediate and triumphant transformation of the human condition, as no African needs reminding — particularly South Africans. But colonialism and its hybrids were gradually made unsustainable under the weight of the legal norms we established and the near-universal expectation of peoples everywhere that their human rights must be honoured.

There have been failures aplenty, but the overarching structure of international order has remained largely intact. However, there are now powerful actors at work trying to unravel the entire fabric of international relations underpinned by law rather than force. Most egregious is the invasion of Ukraine by a permanent member of the UN Security Council and Vladimir Putin’s sinister, imperialist threats to other nations in the region, the Baltics in particular. And astonishingly, Donald Trump has refused to rule out the use of force to acquire the Panama Canal and Greenland. How can either state now hold the other, or indeed, any aggressor to account when they have so casually disregarded Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, which explicitly prohibits force or the threat of force in international relations?

To add to this, we had the spectacle of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharing a podium in which the lives and livelihoods of some two-million Palestinians were spoken of as an incidental consideration to a grand real estate deal.

Until very recently, the drama coming out of the new US administration might have seemed distant from South Africa’s more immediate and pressing concerns. But the disastrous and shockingly inhumane decision to curtail Pepfar leaves few if any certainties, or even a hopeful expectation of continuity.

Of course, the US and every other nation is free to conduct its foreign policy as it sees fit, even though it is difficult to square a hyper-nationalist ‘America first’ disposition with the abandonment of a commitment to global health in a seamless, globalised world. But what is most worrying about the conduct of Russia and the US is that they now prepared to treat a law-based international order as an inconvenience that can be brushed aside; the proposal to casually dispossess the entire population of Gaza only reinforces this. As is the prospects of Ukraine’s future being decided without Ukrainians.

It is difficult to know why Trump took such strong exception to South Africa’s recent land law, but it seems likely that it was brought up to bolster the administration’s larger antipathy towards the ICC. By placing itself between the US and Israel through the instrument of the ICC, South Africa made itself vulnerable to Trump’s ire; and it is hardly a coincidence that the administration’s sanctions against the ICC and its withdrawal of foreign assistance to South Africa arose simultaneously.

South Africa has had its own share of lego-political contention with the ICC, but that does not diminish the credit it accrued because of its principled stand and to its jurists who brought and conducted the case (which is still ongoing). The larger meaning of the case is now clear: standing up for foundational principles of law-based international order when they interfere with imperial ambitions can be very costly.

And the return of imperialism is precisely what is now taking shape: what other name precisely describes the fact (Russia) and intention (Russia and the US) of territorial aggrandisement? How might we differentiate the proposal to dispossess the Palestinian population from the worst excesses of colonialism?

It is heartening to note the large coalition of states that quickly reaffirmed their commitment to the ICC, but the countervailing efforts to re-make international relations to give free rein to the powerful are both broad and powerful. States that have endured the ravages of a world so ordered should remain acutely alert to the risks. No-one could expect South Africa or any coalition of African states to assume the role of Atlas, shouldering the burden of our hard-won international order, but they are not voiceless.

Yet we can also regard Trump’s action against South African not only as a punishment, but also as a warning to other states. It will take serious political courage to speak up for the principles of sovereign integrity, human rights and the rule of law against the outrages that are likely in the coming months and years. But peoples everywhere who have suffered under a ‘might makes right’ ethos know what we all have to lose. Political passivity, silence and acquiescence will cost all of us and the generations to come very dearly — AMANDLA.

Nana K. Poku, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of UKZN, Senior Adviser at the United Nations, Principal Adviser at AU

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