South Africa under Trump’s wrath - Diplomacy, defence, or surrender?: Isaac Mogotsi

Key topics:

• South Africa faces severe pressure from Trump’s second-term BRICS attacks.

• Tariffs and verbal assaults threaten SA’s democracy and global standing.

• SA must navigate whether to resist, appease, or retreat from US pressure.

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By Isaac Mpho Mogotsi

Just over thirteen years ago an article I wrote was published first by Mail & Guardian and then on the online Politicsweb under the title On SA’s membership of BRICS.  

I concluded the article by stating that:

“Hypothetically, it is conceivable, that in the future some of the severest monumental and existential challenges that will confront South Africa’s diplomacy will arise, not from the usual and expected quarters, eg NATO, but from our country’s very membership of IBSA ad BRICS, if our diplomacy gets complacent and smug from the feel-good factor arising from being counted among the top five global emerging powers.

There in (sic erat scriptum) lies the potential future danger to our country’s diplomacy in the coming decades.”

I also stated in the same article that SA membership of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) represented former president Jacob Zuma’s finest diplomatic hour.

Is the finest diplomatic hour today turning into our worst diplomatic nightmare?

Just over a decade has passed since I made that prediction and there is no doubt that the 47th USA President Donald Trump’s second term administration is deploying a massive diplomatic, trade and unchecked verbal wrecking ball to dismantle, bricks by bricks, so to speak, BRICS geopolitical group, aiming a particular diplomatic potshot at democratic South Africa, which Trump perceives to be the weakest link of BRICS.

And how Donald Trump hates weaklings! 

Trump has in addition promised to impose a special punitive BRICS tariff to counter what he perceives as BRICS’ “anti-Americanism” and malign influence on world affairs.

South Africa is not just suffering whiplashes but is being dealt severe body blows from Trump’s diplomatic, trade and unrestraint verbal wrecking ball that have the real potential to unravel all of our collective national efforts in the last three decades to build Africa’s most promising, vibrant, shiny, market-friendly, multi-ethnic, multiracial and stable democratic and constitutional national project that is broadly friendly to western powers.

One should never underestimate the existential threat for democratic South Africa emanating from the second term Trump administration’s wrecking diplomatic, trade and infantilised verbal diarrhoea ball. 

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Structural engineers take it as an article of faith, rightly, that no structure can endlessly withstand increasing and ever more potent force from a much more powerful vector applied on its weak pressure points, day in and day out, week in and week out, and months after months. 

At some point something will give in, somewhere along the line something will crack and break, and it can all go pear shaped and unravel very quickly and most horribly like Yugoslavia did in the late 1990s and early 2 000s and like Iraq, Syria, Libya and now the Sudan did.

This Donald J. Trump, as a real estate mogul, should and must know.

In the case of democratic South Africa the question to pose, for crying out loud, to the far right second term Trump administration is:

If it ain’t broken, why try to fix it?

Why not fix Mississippi or West Virginia in the USA, which are majority white, first before turning your unwelcome gaze and attention on democratic South Africa? 

South Africa’s membership of BRICS and South Africa’s referral of apartheid Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for the Gaza genocide have become the red flags waving before the American bull in a china shop.

Post-apartheid and democratic South Africa has never before faced an imminent and present global threat against its core domestic and international values as it does now from the second term far right Trump administration. And South Africa’s formal diplomatic establishment is caught completely off-balance, if not napping and snoring at the wheel, by the ongoing cruel machinations, virulence and venom emanating against it from second term Trump’s White House and State Department. 

It’s a far right, altright deluge.

Hard though it may be to believe and process, it is a self-evident fact now that the United States of America under second term Donald J. Trump, and not global terrorism or natural disasters or an internal revolt, has become the single biggest national security threat to our ongoing collective national efforts to entrench our fledgling democracy and constitutional order whose architecture drew so much from the American Declaration of Independence, from the peerless writings of American Founding Fathers, from President Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address, from Senator F. Robert Kennedy’s  1966 “Ripple of Hope” University of Cape Town (UCT) Speech and from America’s glorious and immortal Civil Rights Movements and from its unmatched titans like Dr Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X.

Funny that it is precisely these very noble and ennobling American influences which inspired post-apartheid South Africa’s democratic and political construct so much which today the far right second term Trump administration finds particular offensive and galling and seems hell bent to work tireless to squash, in cahoots with vocal but minority local and USA-based bitter white South African émigré elements apparently animated by a vision to Make Apartheid Great Again (MAGA) in South Africa.

The deeply hurtful and mindless torrent of diplomatic, trade and undiplomatic verbal abuse unleashed by the second term far right Trump administration against democratic South Africa are putting real question marks over the long term sustainability and durability of our nascent democratic and constitutional experiment.

Can our democratic and constitutional Walls of Jericho hold against the tidal wave ensuing from across the Atlantic Ocean?

It is as if the second term far right Trump administrations desires to see South Africa becoming a failed state or a banana republic, or as Trump would say, another “shithole” country in Africa mired in civil strife, chaos, ethnic wars, bloodshed and national despondency .

Make no mistake, the stakes are that very high.

Clearly South Africa’s diplomacy for long self-deluded to believe that there would be only upsides to hankering after being viewed as Africa’s top Alpha dog on the international stage, such as being a founding member of IBSA, a core member of BRICS, being a tag-along member of the G20, or desiring to be a permanent member of the United Nations (UN)’s Security Council in the near future and being viewed as the closest thing to western values and normative standards outside the minority Collective West led by the USA. 

Are all these now mirages and striking us as delusions of grandeur that have exploded on our national face?

Can democratic South Africa come out of this vicious and frontal diplomatic, trade and verbal diarrhoea assault lunched on it by the second term far right Trump administration not irreparably damaged?

I doubt it.

Whether you are a taker or giver in the market of international politics and diplomacy, there is hell to pay either way.

Democratic South Africa is learning this the hard - in fact the hardest - way since Trump’s return to the White House.

How does a small, developing and African country like democratic South Africa project diplomatic power on the world stage way out of proportion to its national resources when it is persistently challenged and beleaguered by the richest and most powerful country in the world, which in addition is a brittle nuclear superpower which once threated to annihilate North Korea from the face of the Earth? How do we measure South Africa’s influence and power globally when it is constantly, directly and crudely rib cage elbowed by an unhinged and rogue global superpower every step of the way that is shredding all the international norms and standards established following the Second World War, international norms and standards democratic South Africa committed itself to abide by voluntarily, eg the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) of 1995?

The price democratic South Africa is paying for its post-apartheid obsequiousness and slavish obedience to these western norms and standards and to so-called “western investors” suddenly feels like a Faustian Pact.

This is not a David against Goliath fight.

This looks more like an innocent and defenceless worm about to be mercilessly crushed by a raised American imperial jackboot for no reason other than that the imperial American jackboot can do so if it so wishes to pleasure itself at another national sovereign jurisdiction’s expense to demonstrate its unbridled power on the global stage.

John Perkins, writing about America’s 1989 invasion of Panama during the Presidency of George H. Bush Senior, stated that the invasion and capture of Panama leader Noriega threw him into depression and “the more I became convinced that it signalled a U.S. policy turn toward the old methods of empire building…” (Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Ebury Press, 2004, page 176)

It often feels like the far right second term Trump administration too has reverted to the same, same old methods of empire building.

Power after all is said to be the most powerful aphrodisiac.

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Should democratic South Africa fight back like the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an economic, military, industrial, manufacturing and technological superpower, has just done? 

Or should it take flight as many of the other countries, including leading, powerful and much richer countries of the European Union and NATO, are doing when faced with Trump’s reckless blackmail and threats? 

Should it head a global anti-Trump campaign akin to the former global Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM)? 

Or should it put its tail between its legs, lick the wounds inflicted already on it by Trump so far, like the 30% tariff on our good and services entering the rich USA market and the incessant badmouthing and unending stream of blatant lies about our country being spewed by Trump, especially the patently false allegation of a so-called genocide against white Afrikaners?

 Or should it surrender and sue for an unjust peace and one-sided settlement from Trump, open our domestic market to be flooded by American goods, withdraw our genocide case against apartheid Israel at the ICC, withdraw from BRICS, repeal our transformation laws which Trump, Elon Musk, Democratic Alliance (DA) real and effective leader Helen Zille’s family friend Joel Pollak and other bitter USA-based hard altright and far right white South African emigres deeply detest, and quietly and wimpishly  retire to a corner to wait for the Trump diplomatic, trade and putrid, fetid verbal tsunami to recede, so that Trump can this year be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he is busy shamelessly campaigning for and covets?

This is a question confronting South Africa’s diplomacy as it comes under severe and unrelenting pressure from the USA Republican and Make American Great Again (MAGA) administration of 47th President Donald J. Trump on all sorts of bilateral and international issues conjured up by Trump’s flip flopping and febrile mind from thin air.

No three countries in the world have been hardest hit and most shaken by the second term Trump administration than India, Brazil and South Africa, or what former president Thabo Mbeki named IBSA for short when he proposed the formation of a Group of South (G-S) in 2001. This is because these countries view and fancy themselves as leading democracies in the Global South, as if that would be a bulletproof vest for them against western, especially American, hostility and animus. 

Or so they probably imagined to be the case.  

How them times a-changed!

Granted that even Michel de Nostradamus did not have enough smarts to predict in his Les Propheties that America would one day turn so dramatically, so viciously, so dastardly and so remorselessly, like an enraged American Pit Bull Terrier, on three leading IBSA developing countries very friendly to it and which fancy themselves as the foremost democracies in the Global South (one the biggest democracy in the world, the other the biggest Latin democracy in the world and the third the newest and most vibrant African democracy in the world).

Like an enraged American Pit Bull Terrier, the far right second term Trump administration is, unprovoked, displaying only highly explosive aggressive diplomatic, trade and theatrical behaviour towards democratic South Africa and other democracies within BRICS, and its tenacious and locked diplomatic bite is devastating, especially on us here in Africa.

Second term Trump is accustomed to bragging ostentatiously about the many wars Trump has apparently “ended.”

It should equally publicise the number of countries around the world Trump is ball wrecking at an astonishing and alarming rate just in the last six months, especially through tariffs, including the IBSA democracies.

*Isaac Mpho Mogotsi: Historian, former Freedom Fighter, former Teacher, former Diplomat, Economic Diplomat, Award-winning author of the novel The Alexandra Tales (Ravan Press, 1995) and the self-published book Whispering against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 – 2022 (CEDIA Publications, 2024)

Founder & Executive Chairman: Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)