President Donald Trump holds a chart on reciprocal tariffs during an event titled ‘Make America Wealthy Again’, at the White House in Washington, DC. Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war.
Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP
The spectre of diplomatic strife between South Africa and the United States looms heavily over the upcoming Presidential G20 Summit to be held in Johannesburg later this year, particularly as the diplomatic tensions between the two countries continue to harden.
Over the weekend, US President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform to express doubts about the participation of the US delegation in the summit.
While he described the G20 meeting as “very important”, Trump coupled this endorsement with unfounded allegations concerning violence against white farmers and land confiscation in South Africa.
The G20 membership not only boosts the national prestige of South Africa on the world stage but provides a useful platform for the government to coordinate global policy approaches on a wide range of issues.
Speaking exclusively to Business Report on Saturday, Michael Walsh, a senior fellow at a US think-tank the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said Trump was signalling that he valued the G20 as an important international forum for the US despite being not known for putting much value on international forums.
Walsh said South Africa’s chosen themes for the G20 Presidency - solidarity, equality, and sustainability - had put it in “direct confrontation” with the Trump administration's strategic priorities.
Walsh said the Trump administration was likely to argue that South Africa lacked the meritocratic qualifications to maintain its status within this elite group and was only there on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) since it has the lowest GDP of all the G20 Member States.
He said there were two ways that South Africa could lose its seat at the G20 table.
“The first is that its membership could be suspended or terminated by the other members. That could happen for a wide range of reasons (e.g., meritocracy; State sponsor of terrorism designation). The second is that the G20 could cease to exist as an international forum,” Walsh said.
“Since the Trump administration values individuality and values meritocracy, you basically have opened up the opportunity to put these things into play. If the Government of South Africa lost its seat at the table, then South Africa would become more politically and economically disconnected from the United States and other Western countries.”
In March, Western countries under the European Union (EU) pledged €4.7 billion – around R90bn – to support the just energy transition in South Africa after the US pulled its $1bn commercial investment from the Just Energy Transition (JET) partnerships.
However, Walsh said EU Member States would not be able to go to the G20 Summit and would not be able to fulfill their investment pledges to South Africa since there was now talk of targeted sanctions against certain politicians and if South Africa was designated as a State sponsor of terrorism over its relation with the Hamas and Iran.
“If the US moves forward with that designation, it would have very severe consequences for the aid that South Africa's government could receive from any US allies or partners around the world, not just the EU,” Walsh said.
“So I think that's why this discussion around the targeted sanctions, the whole way up to the State sponsor of terrorism designation carries huge implications because even if the EU wanted to make that commitment, the EU would have a very huge challenge once you start putting sanctions regimes in place.
“The EU would potentially have to violate some of those sanctions or violate that designation in order to provide that aid, and that's gonna be a huge problem for them as well.”
South Africa already looks likely to lose out the benefits of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), a trade preference program, later this year in spite of Trump temporarily suspending 31% tariffs he had imposed on imports from the country.
Joel Pollak, editor of American far-right syndicated news, Breitbart, who was also tipped to be US Ambassador to South Africa, on Friday said there was a unique window of time to get these differences ironed out and reach a bilateral agreement before the G20 Summit.
“I think the onus is on the South African government. Suppose it wants to be seen as having successfully led the G20 rather than having been the country in charge when the G20 lost its relevance and essentially fell apart. In that case, I think South Africa needs to start making compromises,” Pollak said.
“I think the G20 summit could be extremely successful and you could see senior members of the United States government, perhaps even the President attending and South Africa handing off the presidency of the G20 to the United States in a triumphant way in a way the G20 summit gives us a kind of vision of what could be possible if these differences can be resolved.”
