Cyril Ramaphosa vainly hopes Trump’s threats – on racial redress, woke G20 management and calling out Israel’s genocide – will be retracted over a round of golf and a bilateral trade deal

Surviving the Washington vs Pretoria diplomatic storm – which is increasingly beyond the protagonists on each side to manage given the lack of cool heads in U.S. President Donald Trump’s maniacal regime – will entail one of three routes forward:

First, surrender immediately, and do what the bullies demand.

Second, act as individualized states and societies, taking umbrage at brash yankee ignorance, misinformation and open racism – but in essence, come to the gunfight with just a water pistol, by acting alone.

Third, organize other states and societies to encourage a full-fledged backlash against Trump and his main corporate supporters in Big Tech, banking and fossil capital, and in the process provide bottom-up solidarity to social forces in the U.S. and everywhere that are truly dedicated to equality and sustainability.

The South African government is at a fork, not sure whether to choose the second or third route, but with powerful local and international elements promoting the first.

Why are Trump-Musk-Rubio so insanely aggressive?

On February 6 at 2am, Trump’s foreign minister Marco Rubio announced a boycott of a February 20-21 event: “I will NOT attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg. South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability. In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change’.”

The DEI that Trump’s chief budget-cutter Elon Musk hates most is legislation aimed at apartheid-rectifying affirmative action for South African corporations, which are the world’s most unethical according to PwC. What is termed ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) aimed to create a black bourgeoisie, e.g. BEE’s two main beneficiaries, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his brother-in-law, fellow coal mining tycoon Patrice Motsepe. If Musk introduces Starlink satellite internet connections to South Africa, as Ramaphosa had requested last September during a New York meeting, BEE requires that Musk find a 30% co-ownership partner.

Musk calls these ‘openly racist ownership laws,’ apparently anathema to a white lad raised by an emotionally-abusive father, and trained in apartheid-era South Africa. As Musk told CBS reporter Lesley Stahl in 2018 of his youth, “It was very violent. It was not a happy childhood.” Stahl: “I do know that you were bullied at school.” Musk: “I was almost beaten to death, if you would call that bullied” – i.e., training elite white kids received at Bryanston (Johannesburg) and Pretoria Boys high schools, in order to run the apartheid system and corporate South Africa.

On February 7, Trump responded to Ramaphosa’s vague “we will not be bullied” State of the Nation Address remark the night before, with another blast: “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Trump ruled that Washington “shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” (The latter charge is a canard as very little land reform has occurred.)

Moreover on February 10, Trump imposed 25% tariffs on all imports of aluminum and steel, including South African products. It is a fair bet that the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade deal will soon be cancelled, or at minimum, that South Africa will be expelled.

How to reply, effectively?

Across the world, while many national leaders (e.g. from Denmark and Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Colombia and Canada) take the second route of individualistic back-lash, there are those Trump intimidates – e.g., King Abdullah of Jordan – who make unnecessary concessions.

In the latter category, it was highly symbolical that Ramaphosa’s presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya spoke just hours after Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu announced their desire for U.S. ‘long-term ownership’ of Gaza and the strip’s conversion into a real estate development that Trump termed the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. The world was disgusted, including even Washington’s Axis-of-Genocide allies in London, Berlin, Brussels and Paris.

But in a February 6 press conference, just after Rubio’s insults, Magwenya repeated an invitation first made on December 2 (the day after Trump threatened 100% tariffs on South African and BRICS exports): Ramaphosa expects Trump for a state visit before the G20 leaders’ summit in November. As Magwenya explained, “We are hoping that there will be time even for a round of golf. We have been trying to urge the president to steal a bit more time to get his swing back in order and back in the groove so that when he takes President Trump out for a round of golf, he’s able to put up a decent game.”

How can one have a decent game with the ‘Commander in Cheat’ who was nicknamed ‘Pele’ by caddies for his ability to kick the ball from the rough to the fairway, if the Presidency lacks the courage to utter even a word about Gaza’s fate, Israel’s repeated violations of the ceasefire, or even more murderous military attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Another losing game is betting on intra-corporate trade, especially when Trump slaps illegal, willy-nilly tariffs on imports, almost whimsically. Yet on February 15, Bloomberg reported that Pretoria’s neoliberal Trade Minister, Parks Tau, is offering concessions to Washington in search of a bilateral free trade deal. The effect will be to assure profits for some of the world’s most destructive corporations’ South African branch plants and their major U.S. exports: BHP Billiton, ArcelorMittal, New York-listed (former South African oil parastatal) Sasol, the main German and Japanese automakers, and a handful of agri-corporates.

Trump has three realistic choices for trade with South Africa: 1) the status quo; 2) kick SA out of AGOA; and 3) kill AGOA completely. The latter seems most likely, given his hatred of Africa. The most unlikely would be a fourth option: a US-SA bilateral free trade deal, one favored by Tau, who is so pro-corporate he opposes ending South African coal sales to Israel because he celebrates WTO ‘non-discrimination’ (against genocidaires). This option would also mean Tau splitting South Africa out of Africa from the standpoint of........

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