The African Union’s crisis diplomacy on the US-Israel war with Iran

The Israeli and US airstrikes on Iran, which began on 28 February 2026, occurred during ongoing Oman-mediated negotiations between Washington and Tehran on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The attacks, widely accepted among experts as illegal under international law, have sent diplomatic shockwaves across Africa. Besides blatant UN Charter violations and worrying precedents – such as the unlawful use of white phosphorus by Israel – the airstrikes and Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israeli targets and US bases across the region have destabilised global energy markets. As in other recent global crises, Africa’s dependence on global fossil fuel markets has been exposed.

In this crisis, the AU speaks through its Commission. Under Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the AU Commission continues the practice of commenting on global crises that affect African countries, established by former AU Commission chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat. While offering a pan-African discursive perspective on global issues, these statements do not bind AU member states and are not formally adopted at the member state level, nor do they bind members.

Where does the AU stand in speaking to global crises?

The AU has increasingly commented on crises beyond the continent, most prominently after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. But this outward-facing posture rests on fragile institutional and political foundations. In the absence of political will for the Peace and Security Council or the AU Assembly Bureau to deliberate on highly polarising extra-continental crises, the AU often only speaks through the AU Commission chairperson. This produces a continental diplomacy with voice, but without foreign policy integration.

Statements on global crises epitomise Aspiration 7 of the AU’s Agenda 2063: the aspiration of “Africa as a strong, united, resilient and influential global player and partner”. But African agency varies sharply across contexts. The AU performs best where internal preferences overlap and global politics offers openings for African voices. It performs worst where geopolitical competition sharpens divergence among member states and fragments the cornucopia of multi-aligned African foreign policies.

The most politicised crises generate the weakest conditions for a coherent African diplomatic line. States preserve national room for manoeuvre instead of delegating authority upwards. For example, South Africa’s forcefully worded statement condemning the Israeli-US attacks as “anticipatory self-defence” that “is not permitted under international law” stands in stark contrast to Morocco’s condemnation of the “abject Iranian missile attack that violated the integrity and security of brotherly Arab states”. This crisis is a poor starting point for continental diplomatic unity: you don’t start a fire with the wettest wood in the pile.

Three AU statements: Between markets, legality and Gulf solidarity

On the first day of Israeli and American airstrikes, the AU Commission reacted immediately with its first statement on 'US-Iran military escalation', adopting a relatively multi-aligned posture. It called for restraint by all sides, stressed international law and the UN Charter, highlighted spillover risks for African economies and endorsed diplomacy without explicitly taking sides. 

This is the AU at its most balanced: legalist, de-escalatory and multilateralist. This first statement kept the illegal Israeli-US attack at the centre of the crisis frame, without saying so in maximalist language, in stark contrast to the statements issued the same day by several EU member states and Gulf countries. Once the opening escalation is understood as an illegal use of force, the AU’s insistence on sovereignty and peaceful dispute settlement gains much sharper meaning. 

The second AU statement on 'escalation of conflict in the Middle East', issued a few hours later, shifted the frame toward Arab states in the Persian Gulf region. It emphasised stability in the Gulf as vital for global energy security and the international economy, with direct consequences for African economies. The illegality of the Israeli attack was deprioritised, and the solidarity expressed with Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia needs to be read in the context of Gulf states’ growing role in mediation, infrastructure development and investment across the African continent, including at the AU Commission itself.

A third AU statement on the ‘situation in the Persian Gulf', issued on 9 March, sharpens the economic security frame. Its centre of gravity lies in attacks on critical infrastructure, especially energy and transport facilities, and in the cascading effects of those attacks on a series of clearly identified economic interests, namely “the export of perishables from Africa” and “African airlines and travel connectivity”.

This third statement integrates the logic of the first two: international law remains firmly in place, but is embedded in concern with systemic stability, market disruption and the safety of African nationals across Iran and the Gulf countries. This theme harks back to the AU’s seminal statement on ‘the reported ill treatment of Africans trying to leave Ukraine’ in 2022.

In parallel, a joint statement of the AU Commission and the executive branches of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the League of Arab States on 12 March 2026 voiced “strong condemnation of the continued closure by the Israeli occupation of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque to Muslim worshippers”. It relies heavily on international law and legally binding Security Council resolutions, but also shows how pan-Arabism and Muslim solidarity are important strands within the AU’s overlapping foreign policy identities in the Afro-Arab diplomatic space. This long-standing joint resistance against Israeli attempts to change the status of Al-Aqsa Mosque constitutes an important legal and faith-based backdrop to the new dynamism in Gulf-Africa relations via the AU.

The AU’s overall discursive approach constructs a frame in which legality, de-escalation and African economic exposure are tightly interwoven. There is growing emphasis on the Gulf as a strategic region whose stability directly affects African economies. However, the statements also reveal that the AU lacks the tools to mount an effective continental response to energy supply chains and aviation routes. Words alone do not make continental foreign policy.

What African multi-alignment reveals in crisis

Multi-alignment is the deliberate and simultaneous cultivation of close diplomatic relations with multiple major powers. For African states, it has become an increasingly popular strategy. It expands room for manoeuvre by allowing African states to diversify partnerships, extract concessions and reduce dependence on any single external power. But the multi-alignment pursued by AU member states in a myriad of bilateral agreements fragments continental solidarity. It risks undermining universal norms and reproducing structural asymmetries under new conditions.

In the game of African multi-alignment, proximity to Gulf states is vital, as these relationships are tied to finance, energy, gold exports, remittances, trade and food systems. Once the war directly affected Gulf partners and regional infrastructure, the incentives for selective AU alignment increased.

The cost of that proximity is visible in the uneven defence of universal norms. Squaring the circle between rules-based multilateralism grounded in the UN Charter and solidarity with increasingly important Gulf partners becomes far harder once an illegal Israeli attack triggers escalation and regional partners become direct targets.

A genuinely continental position in crisis diplomacy would require agreement on when illegality must be named, how consistently legal standards are applied across phases of escalation and how much diplomatic cost member states are willing to absorb when strategic partners are implicated. William Ruto, as AU champion for institutional reform, also knows these conditions are not yet present.

However, alternative, subsidiarity-based formats for crisis action – including coalitions of the willing, regional economic resilience through enhanced intra-African supply chains, sectoral common African positions and regional blocs’ economic crisis responses – could act as more realistic stepping stones towards the lofty goal of a unified continental foreign policy. 

The views are those of the author and not necessarily those of ECDPM.