How does an ambassador navigate his way when sent to a country led by a protocol-busting, hard-charging populist and protectionist who ransacks state institutions, tears up international trade agreements and announces, at their inauguration, “we must not import a single nail”?
This was precisely the situation I found myself in circa 2009 when I was despatched as South African Ambassador to Argentina.
Its president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of the leftist Peronist movement, did a fair anticipatory imitation of Donald Trump.
Of course, other than membership of the G20, Argentina, whose economy is the size of South Africa’s, hardly bears resemblance to the United States and lacks, like us, its mighty reach in the world.
However, the turbulence of the times and the eccentricities in governance in Buenos Aires back then, posed stiff challenges to diplomats of all stripes from all countries.
Before I left South Africa, I had an exit interview with the then minister of international relations and cooperation, Maite Nkoane-Mashabane. She offered few instructions, bar one, of some use.
‘Think twice, say nothing’
She advised: “Don’t send me any cables (emails via an ‘official communicator’) that I can see on CNN.”
Shortly after arriving in the post and trying to avoid landmines placed under the terrain of a country where SA had some vital economic interests, from banking and agriculture to mining, I sought the counsel of a seasoned emissary.
Indian Ambassador “Vish” Viswinathan advised me: “The job of an ambassador is to think twice… and then say nothing.”
Splicing together both pieces of advice meant that I reported back every week with an uncensored analysis of Argentina’s political, economic and social landscape. This provided Pretoria with an accurate and unvarnished account of matters affecting bilateral relations, doubtless mostly unread. But it was more than could be seen on CNN.
In public, I punted South Africa and kept my counsel on what I really thought about Kirchner’s economically destructive and politically questionable acts.
South Africa in Argentina and in the world is a small player. The United States is not.
Leaked cables
Thus, while I was still finding my diplomatic sea legs, my friend and near neighbour, US ambassador Vilma Martinez, was hacked by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. My cables to Pretoria were of no interest to him; hers to Washington DC, were.
Assange publicly leaked dozens of confidential diplomatic despatches from the US embassy in Argentina, all under her signature, which chronicled – among other items in well-written prose – the mental stability of President Kirchner and widespread allegations on the dubious origins of her family’s multi-millionaire status.
How Vilma’s government responded was instructive. The crisis was defused when US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, made a direct phone call to Kirchner apologising, soon enough followed by an in-person visit.
Of course, the US mattered a great deal to Argentina in terms of trade, hemispheric influence and global importance. Expelling its ambassador would be – even by the self-harming standards of the Kirchner administration – a step too far. So, Kirchner stayed her hand, and Vilma Marinez stayed in the post.
Little of the above provides a template for the far greater crisis, not as Cyril Ramaphosa characterises it, “a hiccup”, after the undiplomatic utterances of Ebrahim Rasool and his swift expulsion as Ambassador to the United States. Except, in the immediate aftermath of Rasool’s remarks and the US response, Pretoria simply “noted” events as “regrettable”, but did not apologise for both his “supremacist” depiction and the public forum he used to disseminate them. Even this presidential “regret” will be undercut on Sunday when the ANC hosts a “hero’s welcome” in Cape Town for the expelled Rasool.
For the Ramaphosa administration, which always bangs on about “protocols observed” – a breach of the same should have led to some swift repair work. And Trump, who personalises every issue and takes umbrage (indeed revenge) at every slight, is not one to brush off an insult. However, neither proactive nor even reactive swiftness is in the CR playbook.
Wrong forecast
Six weeks have passed since President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting South Africa, and Ramaphosa’s promise of international emissaries being sent to Washington DC has yet to take flight.
Second, to reprise John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Rasool, whatever his diplomatic blunders, alleged Hamas sympathies and inability, pre-expulsion, to obtain any access to either the White House or State Department, was chosen as SA ambassador in May 2024. This was on the wrong forecast – as it often is in reading the international weather – by Pretoria that Joe Biden would be re-elected as president and the Democrats would maintain control of the Senate. When Trump’s electoral sweep ushered out the Democrats, Dirco saw no reason to change its course or its appointments.
There’s much speculation on who will be named as Rasool’s successor and who Trump will pick as his ambassador to SA. However, even if we sent a diplomatic superstar to Washington, a homegrown Henry Kissinger, such a mythical diplomatic beast would find the going hard, the terrain treacherous, and the terms of engagement fraught. This relates to SA policy and our brand of gesture politics.
For all the boasting abroad about the “government of national unity” at home, there is nothing unified about our foreign policy. It is sole preserve of the ANC. And ANC, and thus government, foreign policy is still antique in design and has not advanced much from the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 and has barely noted the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years later, in 1991.
Saddled with an anachronistic world view, the ANC adds to its misreading of the swiftly changing international tides, with a pretentious public preening.
Rasool expressed this when he proclaimed SA “a moral superpower”. There might have been some basis for this posture in 1994, when Nelson Mandela captured the world’s attention, and we engaged with its leaders based on admiration and respect. But that legacy, and its promise, has dimmed since.
2025 is not 1994; and absent of profound rethinking, in a short time frame, of old assumptions SA will be adrift. But if you like to live in the past, consider this: the fall of apartheid was owed in some measure to the imposition of financial sanctions against SA by the United States. If this is even remotely on the future menu of the Trump administration, there is no telling the damage it could wreak on this country anew.
Many note that Rasool’s undiplomatic remarks were, in fact, truthful and that others (from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy) have said far worse things about Trump. Of course, both of them swiftly changed tune on his election.
And the same chorus suggests that Rasool’s conduct was simply used as an excuse for his expulsion, since in Trump’s own remarks this week, he has “South Africa on our watchlist”.
Unequal relationship
All the above might be correct. But this then begs a question or several of them. The relationship between the US and SA is not one of equals. The imbalances are mostly in favour of the US (bar some minerals and our trade surplus – the latter, though, is a disadvantage in Trumpworld) and staggeringly so with regard to economic, diplomatic, military and strategic heft.
Absent American leadership participation, our presidency of the G20 this year loses its significance. America might be “a bully” (as local politicos brand it), but you don’t confront a 900-pound “bully” who has a bazooka when armed with a pea shooter.
From the IMF to the World Bank and the G7, it is America which sets the direction and controls the purse strings. Even in our backyard in Africa, there is a change of course from countries as far apart as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Botswana to Kenya. All have departed from Pretoria’s script in engaging Washington. And each of them right now has access to the White House and State Department at the highest levels.
So, with this obvious change of facts on the ground, have we changed our mind or even moderated or slightly adjusted course to meet the new reality? This is not a call for “sovereign surrender” as some blowhards suggest. Rather, it’s deciding which essential domestic priorities, from jobs to investment, should determine foreign priorities and rhetoric.
Far from changing the acts and engagements which have placed us in Trump’s crosshairs, we have simply doubled down: recent ANC diplomacy with Iran, an additional R37 million budgeted for the ICJ case against Israel and a refusal, as recently as last week, to scrap the name change of Sandton Drive (home of the US consulate) to Leila Khaled, the hijacker of an American aircraft. (To its credit, the Presidency engaged the City of Johannesburg on Thursday to reconsider the street renaming).
Barack Obama, a favourite of the ANC, said when he was US president, “don’t do stupid sh*t”. We didn’t listen to him then (even his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, described South Africa as “a frustrating partner”).
Now, with the arch-enemy of Obama in control of the US, who does not view us as partner, frustrating or otherwise, we persist with “stupid sh*t”. Absent a sea change, prepare for the coming storm.
