South Africa and the US: A New Low in Relations

There has seldom been as ill-considered a rant as that placed on record by the South African Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool at an online dialogue organised by an African National Congress (ANC) think tank.

During a feverish ‘analysis’ of the US, Rasool managed to insult by name the US President, Donald Trump, his strongest ally, Elon Musk and the Vice President, JD Vance.

In one fell swoop he has placed himself (now persona non grata in the US) and his country in jeopardy.

But Rasool has not done so alone.

Responsibility for that must rest with the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa who put him in post for his second term in Washington, following a lacklustre first term during the comparatively amenable Obama years. While the South African president must burden his share of the blame for this fast and loose handling of foreign relations, it is the ANC and the system it advocates that is principally to blame.

Rasool, with his impulse to present himself as a left-wing ‘theoretician’, is no doubt admired by a party whose leadership, politely-put, lack intellectual depth. Who can forget Nomvula Mokonyane’s defence of a disastrous cabinet reshuffle by President Jacob Zuma: ‘Let the Rand fall, we will pick it up.’ Or the statement by then Minister of Minerals and Energy, Minister Gwede Mantashe, that he was a ‘coal fundamentalist’.

This is an ambassador clearly unfit and unsuited to being a diplomat. Sent to the US for his first term following a corruption scandal while Premier of the Western Cape province (now in opposition hands), in Washington he represented Ramaphosa’s predecessor, President Jacob Zuma, who was responsible for a R1.5 trillion (£65 billion) ‘state capture’ looting spree. But the ANC has long regarded the diplomatic service as a cushy pension plan for washed up politicians, just as it treats the civil service, now three times larger than during the apartheid years, as a vehicle for what it terms ‘cadre deployment’.

Finding Outside Causes

Until now, South African foreign policy has been officially predicated on upholding human rights. When that noble goal foundered at the end of Nelson Mandela’s rule, the guiding principle became solidarity – with Palestine, Cuba and African states with leadership cut from the same cloth, no matter their commitment to democracy or human rights. Foreign matters were a counterbalance to moderate economic policies at home, as if to cement the ANC’s radical credentials.

It is not as if the ANC was not warned what was coming. In early February, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order suspending aid to South Africa on account of its claimed mistreatment of white farmers, and Pretoria’s foreign policy. This was followed four days later by a letter the American president received from four US congressmen, Andrew Ogles, Tom Tiffany, Joe Wilson, and Jon Bacon, asserting that an ‘ethnonationalist gangster regime in Pretoria’ is ‘working to be the undisputed successor to Mao’s destructive land reform policies’. The letter went on to criticise the government of South Africa’s fidelity to the rule of law and alleged it has undermined US security and foreign policy interests, including holding sympathies for Hamas, and taking action against US-allies Israel and Taiwan.

As a consequence, the authors request the US President to ‘revoke South Africa’s preference benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)’ and suggest that Trump also ‘consider suspending diplomatic ties unless that [South African] government is prepared to engage constructively with our own’.

The battle lines were drawn and, in a fit of hubris, Ambassador Rasool undiplomatically blundered over them, declaring in a speech last week that Trump is leading a white-supremacist movement in America and around the world. He added that South Africa could lead the pushback to Trump’s white-supremacism, since the country was ‘the historical antidote to supremacism,’ and that it could use Trump’s ‘healthy disrespect’ for global institutions that South Africa feels are dominated by the West, commenting that Trump’s stance was like ‘a broken clock being right twice a day.’

The ANC’s Approach

Ramaphosa may be asleep at the wheel, or simply overwhelmed. Perhaps the ANC has intentionally been steering the process towards this showdown, a move to try and spark a BRICS-led international uprising. The timing of the announcement of the visit by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which was made in the immediate wake of the Ukrainian leader’s Oval Office meltdown, may be another indicator as to South Africa’s foreign policy intentions.

Most likely, however, the ANC probably thought it could continue to play the race-card at home and abroad scot-free. It is a reckless amateur move risking South Africa’s national interest, though part of the problem is that the ANC sincerely believes it represents the national interest – even though its collapse in the last national election to 40% of the vote would suggest otherwise. Rasool, who had run the party’s 2019 election campaign, had been ranked 75th on the ANC’s national election list for 2024, but this was not high enough for him to be returned to parliament given the decline in the ANC’s support.

The losers of this ‘idiocracy’ are of course the poor in South Africa, whose interests the ANC likes to pretend it represents. The US market is South Africa’s second largest for exports after China, and 600 American firms represent the largest single investor in the Republic, employing more than 130,000 South Africans.

The ending of the trade preferences to South Africa under AGOA now looks certain. Sanctions and export tariffs may also be inevitable. Perhaps Washington might like to use individual sanctions against ANC figures before it punishes the whole country for their ill-advised policies.

© Ray Hartley and Greg Mills, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors’, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

For terms of use, see Website Ts&Cs of Use.

Have an idea for a Commentary you’d like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we’ll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. View full guidelines for contributors.