{"id":844914,"date":"2025-11-28T09:37:01","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T07:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=844914"},"modified":"2025-11-28T09:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T07:37:11","slug":"south-africa-in-the-dogbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/844914\/south-africa-in-the-dogbox\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa in the dogbox"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When Donald Trump welcomes the Group of 20 to his private golf resort in Miami next year, he\u2019ll decide who\u2019s on the guest list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That much is clear after the US president said in a social media post Wednesday that he won\u2019t invite South Africa, the holder of this year\u2019s G-20 presidency and the object of the US president\u2019s ire for some time now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may be a breach of long-established protocol for a leader to decide which of the bloc\u2019s members can attend the summit \u2014 let alone to host the event at their own hotel \u2014 but Trump has demonstrated that he cares little for either convention or the multilateral order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, questions over who will and who won\u2019t go are starting to pile up, not least over which nation might make up the numbers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The move puts other G-20 members in a bind: ignore the insult and make the trip anyway, or stand in solidarity and risk the full force of a Trump blowback in trade tariffs, technology embargoes or worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is one of the most important multilateral forums we still have in the world,\u201d and a format that \u201cwe should not diminish unnecessarily,\u201d German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in Berlin on Thursday, when asked about Trump\u2019s comments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By boycotting last weekend\u2019s summit in Johannesburg \u201cthe American government unnecessarily relinquished influence, including in a part of the world that is becoming increasingly important,\u201d said Merz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

South Africa had been bracing to be blocked from the summit at the Trump National Doral Golf Club, and officials there remain concerned that the US could seek to boot the country entirely from the group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, any change in membership would require consensus among G-20 nations, as was the case before the 2023 summit in India, when the African Union was admitted as a full member.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The US leader\u2019s outburst caps a feud with President Cyril Ramaphosa sparked by Trump\u2019s repeated claims, made without evidence, that South Africa was committing genocide against White Afrikaners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ramaphosa tried to persuade Trump to stop floating the conspiracy theory during a visit to the White House in May, and was instead ambushed by a video montage amplifying the claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

South Africa in the crosshairs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The treatment of Africa\u2019s largest industrialized economy, the first African host of the G-20, highlights the president\u2019s tendencies to use the cudgel of the US\u2019s global position for domestic political ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

South Africa \u201cdoes not appreciate insults from another country about its worth in participating in global platforms,\u201d according to a statement from Ramaphosa\u2019s office which described Trump\u2019s comments as \u201cregrettable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They may also be damaging, as alluded to by Merz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By further undermining Washington\u2019s standing with the countries of the so-called Global South, the risks is of playing into the hands of China and Russia, fellow members of the BRICS forum which Trump has denounced as anti-American.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis bullying of major non-western states makes the task of China and Russia easier in winning wider support in the Global South,\u201d said C. Raja Mohan, distinguished professor at the Institute of American Studies of O.P. Jindal Global University in India. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is nothing to suggest that Trump is eager to reclaim a leadership position in the Global South.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not clear how the US might enforce Trump\u2019s ban on South Africa or any other nation\u2019s participation, although presumably the State Department wouldn\u2019t issue visas to officials seeking to attend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, his rhetoric fits with a grander vision of remaking the global order as he sees fit, picking and choosing the membership of clubs with scant regard for other governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only last week, the US dangled the possibility of inviting Russia back to reconfigure the old Group of Eight as part of a 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine, catching Kyiv and its allies off guard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The G-8 became the G-7 in 2014 after Russia was thrown out over its illegal annexation of Crimea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others that might benefit from Trump\u2019s graces include Poland, which has long clamored to be admitted to the G-20. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump in September\u00a0invited Poland<\/a>\u2019s new right-wing nationalist president, Karol Nawrocki, to the Miami summit in an unspecified capacity, heaping praise on the relative political novice and former amateur boxer whom he had endorsed in the election.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poland has seen its economy exceed $1 trillion in size this year and has repeatedly won Washington\u2019s plaudits for spending heavily on defense, mainly to buy US weaponry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nawrocki\u2019s credentials are further bolstered by seeing Poland\u2019s security and future resting in stronger ties with Trump\u2019s America rather than Brussels, in contrast to Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a former European Council president and longtime critic of Trump.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPoland has been great, and the man who won the election is fantastic,\u201d Trump told conservative TV channel GB News this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Whoever gets the nod for Trump\u2019s Miami summit, his display of disdain for close partners likely presages what will be a \u201ccombative and uncooperative stance\u201d during the US presidency, said Ziyanda Stuurman, a Cape Town-based geopolitical risk analyst and advisor at Africa Practice.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stuurman sees the US using its chair to rip up the work espoused by previous presidencies on issues like climate, health and equality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s G-20 events \u201care unlikely to be framed or conducted as meetings between equals, but rather as a platform to showcase what the US believes to be the group\u2019s limited utility for its own ends,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At worst, they may see a disregard for the multilateral world altogether in favor of one where Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping set the agenda, said Bill Emmott, author of \u201cThe Fate of the West\u201d and former editor of The Economist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump is set to visit China and meet with Xi in April during his G-20 presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s America feels to some like a nightmare vision of \u201ca coercive ex-partner that we cannot live without,\u201d said Emmott. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut our even bigger nightmare would be if he turned out to favor a G-2 world, one in which far from fighting each other, the US and China decided to carve the world up between them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Donald Trump welcomes the Group of 20 to his private golf resort in Miami next year, he\u2019ll decide who\u2019s on the guest list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":828901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[7185,853,20932,10022],"class_list":["post-844914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-g20","tag-south-africa","tag-trump","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844919,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844914\/revisions\/844919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/828901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}