On Thursday evening, many South Africans will tune in to Cyril Ramaphosa’s opening address to Parliament on behalf of his newly installed multiparty government. But few in the world will take notice.

This is not just because Sygnia CEO Magda Wierzycka, no doubt accurately, opined recently that “South Africa has become irrelevant in terms of global discussions on where to invest”. She recalled her recent attendance at an investor conference in Miami. There, a participant commenced his discussion on BRICS and stated that no investor could ignore Brazil, Russia, India and China as investment destinations.

“And then he stopped,” she recounted in an interview with Biznews. “I realised that he thought the ‘S’ in BRICS was a plural not a country.”

Focus on Trump

The eyes of the world on Thursday evening will be focused not on the Cape Town City Hall, but on the basketball indoor stadium in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, Donald J Trump will deliver his acceptance speech, for the third time in eight years, as the Republican nominee for the US presidency. And now, as the very likely winner of the election in November.

There is no shortage of objective reasons – beyond the spectacle of the convention itself – for the global fascination with domestic American politics. Expressed simply, and despite conventional predictions on its decline, America matters ‘hugely’ (a favoured Trump exclamation) to the world.

US military expenditures – by far the highest in the world – make up 40% of all other countries’ military spending. And its research and development and innovation for the new economy – a key driver of competitiveness going forward – dwarfs all others, with 32% of global R&D in 2021.

Equally, all is not well with the world’s hyperpower. Its deep divisions, its propensity for violence, and its turn away from engaging with the world – many of these attributes will also be on display in Trump’s likely speech on Thursday.

And Trump’s narrow brush with assassination in Pennsylvania on Saturday was a reminder of how, in so many ways, the summer of violence in a past presidential election in 1968 rhymes uncomfortably with present times.

Back then, two iconic US political figures, Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy were gunned down. The cities were aflame with both race riots and protests against the Vietnam War. And the mayhem of police violence unleashed against student protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago doomed the candidacy of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, allowing Republican Richard Nixon to win, narrowly, in November.

Mark Twain wrote that ‘history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes’.

There are some striking parallels between then and now in the US and the world today. As in 1968, the Democrats will hold their own presidential convention in Chicago in mid-August. Its president, Joe Biden, is about as unpopular today as Democratic president Lyndon Johnson was in 1968, though Johnson heeded calls to stand down, which Biden this time around has not.

And Robert Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, has bolted the party of his forebears to run as an independent candidate. This will further complicate the already steep climb of Biden to reach again the summit of US politics.

Trump’s supreme confidence vs Biden’s enfeeblement

Biden’s enfeeblement, on painful and recent display in his disastrous debate against Trump, rather than entanglement in a foreign war, is the principal cause of his electoral problems. However, US foreign policy today, principally its support for Israel in Gaza, is likely to fuel the protests expected at the Democratic Chicago Convention in a few weeks’ time.

Trump, displaying supreme confidence in his election prospects, has chosen as his vice-presidential running mate, young first-term Ohio Senator JD Vance. This signals that he is doubling down on his Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda of protectionism, xenophobia, Christian nationalism, foreign disentanglements (except for unflinching support for Israel and staunch opposition to China).

And dodging death, as Trump did this past weekend, will animate and enthuse his supporters as never before in the belief that providential destiny rescued their hero.

SA’s newly appointed Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau heads off soon into this unpromising political atmosphere in Washington DC. His mission is to offset the recent resolution of the US House of Representatives to institute a full review of US-SA relations.

The review decision, strikingly enacted with 272 affirming votes (meaning over 50 Democrats supported the bill) is bad news for the prospects of SA remaining part of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This unilateral trade access regime has allowed us duty free access to US markets for a range of goods, particularly automotive and citrus exports. It is worth about R50 billion in trade receipts.

If Biden’s unpopular presence at the top of the ticket in November likely sweeps in a Republican majority in the US Senate and increases their hold on the House of Representatives, then the bad news contained in the House review will become the new reality of the bilateral relationship.

Clearly, our diplomatic work on the Hill in Washington (even with a Democratic majority in the Senate) has been feeble at best. And given our embassy’s propensity there to engage with friends (such as the Congressional Black caucus), rather than with the think tanks and influencers of the likely Trump majority (such as the influential Heritage Foundation), compounds our difficulties going forward.

Yet not even the best ambassador and the most engaged and effective diplomats stationed abroad (nor a quick visit by the trade minister) can change the two key drivers of our possible isolation and ejection by a future Republican presidency astride a Trumpian majority in both houses, as predicted by the current polls.

Trump’s view of Africa 

First, Trump himself, now with an even more isolationist vice presidential nominee by his side, disdains foreign trade deals. His 2024 party platform (as manifestos are called in the US) is MAGA on steroids. It reminds voters that “for decades our politicians sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas with unfair trade deals and a blind faith in globalism”.

In language that might make even former trade minister Ebrahim Patel blush, the Republicans promise to “support baseline tariffs on foreign-made goods, pass the Trump reciprocal Trade Act (which increases presidential powers to impose duties on imports) and respond to unfair trade practices”.

Second, Trump has an infamous view of Africa.

Back in 2018, during the first Trump presidency, I hosted in Cape Town The New York Times’ international correspondent, Roger Cohen, whose parents were South African and someone with affinity for this country.

Cohen wrote after that visit: “Trump has struggled with Africa. He twice alluded to a non-existent country he called ‘Nambia’, an apparent stab at Namibia addressing the United Nations last September, before he lumped the continent among the ‘shithole countries’ earlier this year…[South Africa] sits at the bottom of a continent Trump disparages.”

It is unknown whether any sheen or gloss has been added to this unvarnished view in the intervening six years. The core job of foreign policy and diplomats, though, is to make the best of the world as it is rather than the world as you wished it to be. This is especially true of a country like ours, which in 2021 had just over 0.55% of global trade flows.

When Parks Tau and new International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola peer into their inherited diplomatic toolbox, they will find it filled with out-of-date and rusted instruments. The US House of Representatives citation of it is unsparing. Their Review Act slams South Africa for its history of siding with ‘malign foreign actors’, including Hamas, which the US designates as a terror organisation as well as its pursuit of closer ties with China and Russia.

But South Africa does not want to ditch its so-called non-aligned status and be dictated to on its foreign policy.

Here, its BRICS partner, India, offers a way out of our current and costly cul de sac. India follows a foreign policy approach, headlined “dehyphenation”. The opposite of our binary approach (Western countries bad, Israel evil and developing world solidarity, above all else).

SA’s current approach is all about the hyphen: the tendency to group countries together based on history or shared characteristics on an issue. India, by contrast, delinks countries, to its own advantage, even adversaries in the same region. Thus, it champions the rights and statehood claims of Palestine, for example. And simultaneously embraces warm and economically advantageous relations with Israel.