The United States’ G20 presidency has begun with open hostility toward South Africa. At the launch of Washington’s G20 agenda, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Pretoria of turning its just-ended term into “an exercise in spite, division and radical agendas”, and of chasing “diversity, inclusion and aid dependency” instead of growth. The statement drew a clear line between President Donald Trump’s vision of “innovation and entrepreneurship” and what Rubio called South Africa’s “politics of grievance,” signalling that Pretoria’s exclusion from the first Sherpa track meeting was anything but procedural.
South Africa will not beg to be included in G20 deliberations under US stewardship, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said. His remarks underscore Pretoria’s stance that its foreign policy decisions are guided by principle, not by favour, and that it will not be swayed by diplomatic pressure or ideological posturing from Washington. Officials at the department of international relations and cooperation echoed that sentiment.
Responding to South Africa’s exclusion from the G20 Sherpa track meeting, the department’s head of public diplomacy, Clayson Monyela, earlier this week said that the country “will not be intimidated into abandoning its values or its commitment to international law”. The two countries are also on opposite sides of Israel’s war on Gaza, with Pretoria opening a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Tel Aviv, a key historical ally of Washington. “At times, diplomacy requires a level of stubbornness or resilience.
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And I think this is one of those times that South Africa, not just as a middle-income country but in particular as an African country and a leading country amongst the developing world, has to remain quite resilient on the international field,” Williams said. “The United States has taken an adversarial, aggressive stance against multilateralism in general. Even in the first term of President Trump, he did the same with the G7 and other multilateral forums.
South Africa will not be able to force the United States to cooperate but will have to ride out the storm. Resilience is the word of the day for the next year.” That resilience will be tested not only by Washington’s foreign posture but also by its internal politics, which continue to shape how the United States engages with the developing world, analysts said. The confrontation cannot be separated from America’s domestic politics, another international relations analyst, Lwazi Somya, said.
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