– The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is often credited with saying, “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Such is South Africa’s dilemma in dealing with US President Donald Trump’s bombastic administration.
A struggle of some kind cannot be avoided, because Trump already threw down the gauntlet (probably at the urging of Elon Musk, a South African émigré) when he offered white South African farmers refuge in the United States, falsely claiming that they are being persecuted. His administration then topped that off by ending all US aid to South Africa and expelling South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, for suggesting that Trump had tapped into “a supremacist instinct.”
While these moves ought to have been enough to freeze bilateral relations, the two governments will be interacting regularly, because South Africa is due to hand over the rotating G20 presidency to the US in November. That process will not be easy. Trump has already taken a wrecking ball to multilateral institutions and the broader international order, having withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, gutted USAID, and sought to undermine the sovereignty of Canada, Denmark, and Panama – all longstanding US allies. The Trump administration’s refusal to send its Secretary of State and Treasury secretary to the G20 meetings in Johannesburg and Cape Town last month suggests that much turbulence lies ahead.
South Africa has four key priorities for its G20 presidency: strengthening global disaster resilience and response; ensuring debt sustainability; mobilizing funding for a just energy transition; and using critical minerals for sustainable development and inclusive growth. It has also pushed the G20’s 23 working groups to stick to technical issues, while leaving political matters – such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza – to the sherpas, foreign ministers, and heads of state. And there are a variety of G20 task forces focusing on inclusive economic growth, industrialization, employment, inequality, food security, AI, data governance, and innovation for sustainable development.
At the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Johannesburg on February 20-21, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Ronald Lamola, outlined his government’s full agenda for the group. He pushed for accelerated implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He bemoaned the rise of supply-chain disruptions, trade restrictions, unilateral sanctions, and economic coercion. And he warned that political divisions are creating a global climate of distrust.
Lamola then called for renewed efforts to address the high debt burdens across the Global South, and urged the G20 to focus on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, climate change, pandemic prevention, nuclear nonproliferation, development financing, and reforms to global governance institutions. He then concluded by promising a report evaluating the first full cycle of G20 presidencies by November 2025. The G20 finance meeting, held shortly thereafter, covered similar issues.
The US, now controlled by a personality cult that rejects the very principle of multilateralism, has played a spoiler role within the G20 since late January. It is almost as if Trump has exported his domestic war on “wokeness” to the international stage. One obvious reason for boycotting the recent ministerial meetings, for example, was to punish South Africa for bringing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Meanwhile, lower-level American officials who do attend international meetings dutifully repeat their dear leader’s words. The US was the only country to oppose a recent UN General Assembly resolution reaffirming the “right of everyone to an education”; and, within the G20, it has opposed commonsense clean-energy proposals – reflecting Trump’s insistence that climate change is a “hoax.”
Rather than support South Africa’s theme of “solidarity, equality, and sustainability,” Trump has embraced unilateralism, inequality, and nationalism. In obstructing the G20’s agenda, his administration has occasionally been joined by Italy’s right-wing government and Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist regime. This “terrible triplet” sees issues such as gender equality, clean energy, and the SDGs as somehow threatening their own sovereignty. They are the reason why the G20 failed to issue the traditional diplomatic communiqués following the recent ministerial meetings. Instead, the South African chair released non-binding short summaries that sought to capture the key outcomes of both meetings.
Fortunately, the European Union has provided consistently strong support for the South African G20 presidency. At a summit this month, the EU pledged to invest $5.1 billion (in grants and loans) in South Africa, which many saw as a move to replace the aid that Trump recently cut. The EU has also offered its support for the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the G20 Compact with African economies, the SDGs, UN Security Council reform, development financing, World Trade Organization reform, and climate action.
But many EU countries are also cutting development aid to Africa – albeit in a quieter fashion than the Trump administration has done. Across the Global South, many fear that those pushing a vision of “Fortress Europe” – anti-migration policies, agricultural protectionism, and draconian trade policies toward Africa – are gaining momentum.
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By contrast, South Africa continues to receive much support from other governments across Africa and the rest of the Global South. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, has emerged as an especially strong ally.
South Africa’s indefatigable, overstretched diplomats arrived in New York last week (March 24-30) to outline their priorities at the UN General Assembly and try to mend fences with a surly US administration. Though South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has laid a solid foundation for future progress despite US-led disruptions, the next round of negotiations at the Johannesburg G20 summit in November will be immensely challenging. Trump, who once described Africa as a continent of “shithole countries,” is not expected to attend.
Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara, and Iraq. He is the author of Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty (Routledge, 2024) and The Eagle and the Springbok: Essays on Nigeria and South Africa (Routledge, 2023).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. www.project-syndicate.org.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
