Some of the policy and political elite have realised that the new world order ushered in even before US President Donald Trump’s second inauguration requires strategic game play thinking, and sensitive communications and diplomacy.

We had swept out the problematic, convoluted, messy overlay of government and ANC foreign policy positions of the previous administration under Naledi Pandor, and switched to a reset of a quieter ANC with a calmer, more thoughtful tone under Ronald Lamola.

People have probably underestimated the amount of thought that has gone into how relations with the Trump administration should be approached. The president’s meeting with Elon Musk at the UN General Assembly last year didn’t just happen by accident.

The problem is how joined up the thinking really is across the government of national unity (GNU), and the ANC in particular, on foreign policy messaging, and how much understanding about playing a game there is. People balk at this idea, but diplomacy is ultimately a game between competing sides with their own self-interests that must be realised in the long term.

The question is therefore how tactical you are in the short term, how much you are willing to play transactional foreign policy with a broader range of state and nonstate actors such as Musk.

The ANC at this point normally throws its hands in the air and wails about human rights and its important international role, with the implication that this is being abandoned. No-one is even remotely suggesting that. But in the game that will play out for the next four years the precise goal is how to keep SA’s domestic and foreign interests in play through the craziness.

A number of “obvious” things have to be done: ANC members not randomly going to Iran for photo ops; the ANC not sounding off on neocolonial what’s-whats.

The SA international relations team in Washington is coming from a weak base with poor relations with the incoming administration, and needs to be rebuilt urgently. An ambassador alone — no matter how much the marketing has been done around him since his appointment — cannot run a foreign mission single-handed, especially not in a situation this complex.

Government has been quick on all sides of the GNU to use calm language with common lines. The DA has been sober in its response to Expropriation Act after Trump’s intervention, and indeed beforehand (contrasting with some unfortunate previous DA hyperbole on the land issue, which did not help the broad landscape).

It has contrasted strongly with the bombastic, ill-considered intervention by Gwede Mantashe at the Mining Indaba. Feeding into the normal soup of mining policy uncertainty that means SA cannot really be considered a “mining country”, the more interesting point was not so much his idea of stopping mineral exports to the US (no such plans or discussions are going on in the government) but the stupendous lack of message discipline.

This will only reinforce in people’s minds that the ANC is prone to foot shooting, and that some people are seriously out of their depth in this new normal. Many ANC leaders would no doubt laugh it off as a joke, but that is to underestimate the damage Monday’s intervention by the minister has already caused.

Yet through all of this — not just the Trump intervention this week but also the signing of the Expropriation Act itself — markets and investors have been remarkably calm. It shows how far we’ve come since the investor and market freak-out on the proposed amendment to section 25 of the constitution about a decade ago.

The rand has already largely recovered to where it was averaging last week. Investors know all countries have expropriation laws, that legislation is imperfect sometimes but reflected through the emotive issue of land this can be blown out of proportion, and that the courts in SA are sound and independent, and the rule of law stands.

There is too much overreading from the polity that some vagueness in the legislation that can be cleaned up with law and secondary regulations is a sign the rule of law is collapsing, and the ANC is after your house or farm (visions of Zimbabwe).

In the period ahead SA should communicate clearly to global (especially American) and domestic audiences on what the Expropriation Act is about, and what is going on with reforms (positive) and how perceived negatives are or are not playing out. In particular SA needs to be proactive in how it can substitute hits from the US — such as on the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) or climate financing — with other sources of support, domestic and foreign.

Moreover, work to diversify trade is urgently needed to reduce the risk of general or specific tariffs, let alone that of SA being dropped from the African Growth & Opportunity Act, a not insignificant risk in the coming 18 months.

The need to communicate on reforms and show serious progress in the agenda over Operation Vulindlela is crucial in the rocky four years ahead. All role players need a sense of forward momentum from this week’s state of the nation address (Sona).

The Sona is a test that investors, markets, corporates and diplomats will be watching to see whether SA “gets it” in this new paradigm.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.

This article first appeared in Business Day.