On February 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors in Trump’s diatribe. Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept being refugees since South Africa is their home country. The post-apartheid constitution of 1997, echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of 1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.

An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S. history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia Araújo, in Humans in Shackles, and Howard French, in Born of Blackness, have pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media or public debate.

The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest.

In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological and material links from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two countries also date back at least to the early 20th century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds were between white America and white South Africa.

In a short history of the Boer War written by eight-year-old future CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather, Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the end of the 20th century, it was axiomatic that only whites had rights.

The parallels between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students in Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:

The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian John W. Cell, Americans and South Africans debated how to shape........

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