What lies behind the deterioration in US-SA relations – and how to fix it
The theatrical attempts by South Africa’s Presidency to change the mind of the Trump administration and avoid punitive measures have so far failed, despite the investment of time and considerable taxpayers’ money.
The Trump administration has imposed 30% tariffs on South Africa, which take effect tomorrow, threatening the already faltering South African economy, which has been consistently shrinking in real terms for more than a decade.
As deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen neatly summarised it recently, the economy faces three “strains”: low growth of under 1.2%, “rising borrowing costs, shrinking fiscal space, and a debt-to-GDP ratio above 75%”, and a combination of the “energy crisis, logistical bottlenecks, and policy uncertainty [which] have throttled private sector investment and job creation”. He puts the cost of port efficiencies, for instance, at around R350 billion annually, amounting to a staggering 5% of GDP.
As if this is not enough to deal with, literally hundreds of thousands of jobs are now at risk from increased tariffs in a range of manufactured and agricultural goods.
The South African government has preferred to understand the Trump administration in terms of half of Washington’s expressed concerns with South Africa, as articulated in the White House’s February Executive Order – the discrimination against white farmers.
Hence the focus of the SA case presented at the White House meeting on 21 May, and the presence of a multiracial team, including two famous golfers, supposedly thereby appealing to the golf-mad Trump. But the SA narrative failed, miserably, to change Trump’s mind and may have done further damage by making a case that whites were not being singled out for violent assault because all South Africans were victims of vicious acts of violence, old men and young children, black and white alike.
The South Africans failed, in their enthusiasm to see everything through a racial prism, to realise that this was Trump speaking to his MAGA base. It was a proxy, thus, for US domestic politics, a drama in which golfers and billionaires were unwitting extras in a movie scripted for an audience largely uninterested in their fame or fortune.
Express enemies
But it also failed to move the dial on tariffs. The reason for this relates to the second issue raised in the February Executive Order – South Africa’s relations with express enemies of the United States. About that concern, Ramaphosa and his team have done absolutely nothing, niks, nada, fokol. The fundamental issue in this respect concerns South Africa’s hot-to-trot ties and business interests with Iran, and Hamas, and the complete breakdown in relations with Israel.
The problem is not the nature of the odious Netanyahu government or the depravity of its actions in Gaza, or indeed that SA is a critic of this government. Many other governments elsewhere are critical. It’s that there is no balance in the SA approach. The ANC has put Gaza and Israel at the centre of its foreign policy, without showing the same level of concern about human rights everywhere − which includes the role of Hamas in Israel itself, or Russia in Ukraine, or abuses in Maduro’s Venezuela, in Iran or across countless African geographies, or in China. Just ask the Uighurs or Tibetans about their rights.
Instead, South Africa has singled out Israel, built strong relations with Iran and Hamas and trotted out the case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The timing of that action so soon after 7 October suggested that it was designed less to protect innocent lives than offer another front for Hamas. Again, the SA taxpayer has borne the cost of such opportunism, which now involves much more than costly legal fees but risks endangering not only South Africa’s impartiality but its economic wellbeing.
Clear steps
The one way out of the bind with Trump is thus to improve – or at least normalise – relations with Israel. There are clear steps which could signal a rebalancing, including:
A visit to Israel and Palestine by Ramaphosa or his foreign minister Ronald Lamola to hear both sides;
Exchanging ambassadors, appointing a South African who would not see their role as a loudhailer for radical interests, but as assiduously working with all sides;
Dialling down the rhetoric more generally, and, critically,
Devising and implementing steps to suspend or withdraw the ICJ case.
None of this means that South Africa has to approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza. It just means that the SA government is laying down its store of stones, recognising that its glasshouse is at risk.
The ANC, morally bankrupt at home, is using the ICJ case to pretend to the world that it holds to high ethical standards. But the price is that the country is identified as a partisan nation allied with Iran and Hamas.
Discontinuance of such ICJ proceedings is a recognised and common practice. Article 89 of the ICJ Rules of Procedure lays down the method by which this can be achieved. There is a long list of precedents from cases such as the one between France and Egypt over the protection of French nationals in 1956, to the Lockerbie bombing and maritime disputes, more recently, between Singapore and Malaysia.
If South Africa were to instigate a discontinuance, all current proceedings (including pending requests of other states to intervene) are believed to currently be incidental to the SA ICJ case and would thus fall away.
Some in South Africa would lose face over this strategic retreat, including the leadership of DIRCO, but their level of ideological disquiet and personal angst would be a small sacrifice to the benefit of the whole country. Anyway, DIRCO’s Director-General Zane Dangor would make a better ambassador to Tehran than he does Iran’s to SA.
Increasing statism
The cost of South Africa’s impasse with the Trump administration will not only be felt, of course, in the loss of economic activity and jobs and increasing poverty. It will most keenly be felt as the country slides towards increasing statism as its traditionally default response, not of the sort necessary for the vaunted development state, but rather an increasingly sloppy model where governance and authoritarianism go hand in hand.
In this, SA will increasingly resemble Iran, China, Cuba, Russia or other of its BRICS allies, where the focus of the law and the economy is simply politics by other means.
Then again, we could always have a National Dialogue to fix that, too.