In South Africa, Turkey and China, the American agenda is now perceived not as a set of domestic White House decisions, but as the main generator of risks for global trade, regional security and even the internal political polarization of other countries. At the center of the discussion are the fragile U.S.–Iranian settlement following the Islamabad Memorandum, the attempt by the United States to contain and negotiate with China simultaneously, and the American tendency to turn questions of identity and migration into instruments of foreign policy. The overall tone is notably skeptical: local commentators do not consider the United States a weak power, but increasingly describe it as a power whose strength has become less predictable—and therefore more dangerous for both partners and rivals.
The most acute issue is Iran. In the Turkish debate, this is not an abstract Middle Eastern crisis, but a question of oil prices, maritime security and Ankara’s ability to act as a mediator. In a July analysis for Anadolu Ajansı, researcher Bilgehan Alagöz interprets the events following the June 17 Islamabad Memorandum as “controlled escalation”: the United States and Iran are avoiding a major war, but using limited military strikes, sanctions and threats as bargaining tools. The episode of July 6–7 is particularly telling for Turkish observers, when an attack on merchant vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and the American response took place against the backdrop of the NATO summit in Ankara. To them, this indicates that the crisis can no longer be viewed solely as a bilateral U.S.–Iranian conflict: it is directly drawing Turkey into the role of a country through which both diplomatic and energy routes pass.
The Turkish view is less moralistic than pragmatic. Ankara’s authors are debating not so much whether the United States is “right,” but whether it is capable of formulating an achievable political objective. In an analysis by Independent Türkçe, former head of the Turkish Air Force Intelligence Department Gürsel Tokmakoğlu emphasized that a prolonged campaign simultaneously damages American law, the economy and the administration’s domestic political standing: an oil shock quickly turns into higher prices for fuel, food and transportation. In this logic, Trump is constrained by his own promise to protect the American wallet. A war that drives up inflation becomes not only a geopolitical problem for Washington, but an electoral one as well.
Chinese authors view the same story much more harshly—not as a difficult negotiation, but as a symptom of a structural crisis in American hegemony. In an article for The Paper, international relations scholar Liu Zhongmin describes Trump’s policy as a mixture of direct military intervention, “maximum pressure” and economic coercion, forcing the White House to lurch between threats and retreat. The key Chinese argument is that the United States’ problem is not simply Iran’s resistance. American strategy has become hostage to excessive objectives: Washington wants both to force Tehran into submission and preserve freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, avoid becoming bogged down in a prolonged war and prevent the region from finally slipping out of its influence. In the view of Chinese commentators, combining all of this is nearly impossible.
South African reactions coincide with Chinese criticism of American force-based policy, but add their own postcolonial and moral dimension. In a column for Mail & Guardian, Michael Bryan Lee compares the United States in the Iranian conflict to a football team that has reduced itself to ten men: pressure without a clear political objective, he writes, becomes violence equipped with a good PR campaign. This is particularly characteristic of the South African perspective. Here, American actions are assessed through the experience of the struggle against apartheid, distrust of the double standards of great powers and the memory that international solidarity can be a matter of survival rather than rhetoric.
But there is also a significant difference among the three countries. In Turkey, there is concern that the United States could destabilize the balance in a neighboring region. In China, the situation is seen as an opportunity to demonstrate the limitations of American leadership and strengthen Beijing’s image as a stabilizer. South Africa perceives America as a force interfering in its domestic racial and land disputes as well. After Washington expanded its admission of Afrikaners through the refugee program, the local press saw this not as a humanitarian initiative, but as the export of America’s “culture war” to a country with an extremely painful history of racial domination.
News24 draws attention to the stark contrast: while the overall U.S. refugee admissions cap remains low, infrastructure for expedited processing of applications from white South Africans is expanding. Historian John Broich puts it bluntly: “whiteness” is beginning to function as an official migration criterion. For a South African audience, this is not merely a dispute over visas. It raises suspicions that the White House has chosen one ethnic group and thereby granted international legitimacy to the claim of a “white genocide,” which local courts, researchers and many civil society organizations consider false and politically destructive.
Significantly, South Africa’s conflict over this narrative is unfolding not only between Pretoria and Washington, but within the country itself. An article in Mail & Guardian cites Judge Bernard Ngoepe’s conclusion that the organization AfriForum itself created the conditions under which its international campaign could be understood as promoting the idea of “white genocide.” The most painful aspect of the local reaction is not even Trump’s words, but the fact that part of South Africa’s political struggle was transferred into America’s partisan and ideological ecosystem and returned in a more radical form.
On the second major common issue—the relationship between the United States and China—Turkey and China use similar language, but place different hopes in it. In Ankara, Trump’s May trip to Beijing was viewed as a transition from trade war to pragmatic bargaining. Professor Tarık Oğuzlu, in an analysis for Anadolu Ajansı, called it an attempt to buy time rather than end the rivalry. His conclusion is important: Turkey does not expect a lasting U.S.–China reconciliation, but is interested in keeping competition between the two superpowers manageable. For an economy dependent on trade, energy and foreign capital, even a temporary reduction in tariff and technological tensions is itself beneficial.
China’s official and expert narratives present the same meeting as a move toward “constructive strategic stability.” In an Xinhua report published by The Paper, Xi Jinping posed the question in the broadest possible terms: can the two countries avoid the “Thucydides Trap”—a war between a dominant power and a rising one? And in an interview with The Paper, American Chamber of Commerce in China head Michael Hart conveys the business community’s mood in even simpler terms: what matters most to companies is the possibility of regular contact, because tariffs imposed and lifted at short intervals make normal planning nearly impossible.
This is perhaps the main conclusion shared by South African, Turkish and Chinese observers. What concerns them is not American power as such, but its abrupt shifts between modes: from sanctions to negotiations, from military pressure to promises of a deal, from talk of free trade to tariffs, and from protecting refugees to selective humanitarianism. China is trying to turn this inconsistency into an argument for its own role as a stabilizer; Turkey sees it as space for mediation and strategic maneuvering; South Africa views it as a reason to defend sovereignty and reject externally imposed racial polarization.
That is why, outside the United States, Trump is increasingly perceived not as the architect of a new stable world system, but as a politician forcing other states to build insurance against America. In Beijing, that insurance takes the form of negotiations and economic interdependence; in Ankara, multilateral diplomacy and a regional mediating role; in Pretoria, resistance to ideological frameworks imposed from abroad. It is precisely this drive to “hedge” against American risk, rather than simple anti-American rhetoric, that is becoming the most noticeable common reaction across these three very different societies.
