“Retrospective clairvoyance” was the arch phrase of Clive James for the miraculous ability of pundits (me included) to deduce this week an event that was “inevitable” last week, though it was not actually seen as likely at the time.
Thus, the sweeping win of Donald Trump last Tuesday has birthed endless analyses of why it happened.
The acutest offering the morning after the 45th US president’s arrival back in office as the 47th president was written by Financial Times analyst Edward Luce.
He wrote that “American voters bought what Trump was selling”. And into the bargain “America rejected the sale” offer of Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent:
As for America’s allies, opponents and trading partners (South Africa fits the third category and tries to hedge on the first two adjectives), “This is a game changer.”
Some believe that Trump’s winning sale (with a borrowed slogan from decades back) “Make America Great Again” means a return to the past and the certainties of previous administrations, not least his own erratic four-year spell between 2016 and 2020. This is almost entirely incorrect.
Trump never had, and in future likely doesn’t have, any intention of returning America into a sepia-tinged update of a Norman Rockwell painting of mid-century and middle-class prelapsarian amity and contentment.
Rage and resentment
His rocket fuel is rage and resentment, with a new and very detailed agenda to match. And soon to appoint an army of well-screened loyalists to implement it. His country, this nation and the world await the full meaning and consequence of the second presidency of Trump. He has vowed to bury the “deep state”, avenge his enemies and, deport millions and close the borders. Climate change, in his view, is “a hoax”. And he promises to be “dictator – but only on day one”.
That is quite a list, and a lot of it is unprecedented. But in one key respect, Trump’s proposal to protect American workers and industries by imposing a wall of tariffs on cheap imports threatens to ignite a new version of the trade wars of the 1930s.
He said, “tariffs are the most beautiful word in the English language” and the rates he suggests, especially on China and Mexico, make the 1930s trade wars seem puny.
Another Trump favourite also goes back to the dark days of pre-World War Two: his disdain for international multilateral instruments of continental peace and integrated commerce (from NATO to the World Trade Organisation). These have anchored the post-1945 era, and – as a minimum – the world will be unmoored now.
A new version of the isolationism of “America First” (another of his borrowed slogans, also from the 1930s) now sits at the apex of the world in Washington DC.
G20 chair
South Africa is about to assume the chair of the Group of 20 nations, a rather nebulous international forum of modest achievement. Given Trump’s famously short attention span, the G20 might be of far less interest and importance to him than to its incoming chair, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Then on the issue of selling, the core job of any country ambassador is to be a salesperson for their country. Making the sale for a country of our size and marginal influence on Trump’s MAGA agenda and advocates (compared to, say, the UK, Canada, Mexico, Israel and China) is going to be hard going.
However, the announcement last week that ANC provincial politician Ebrahim Rasool will be ambassador in Washington, DC, to salvage AGOA from the chopping block of a Republican Senate and, probably, House of Representatives, too, is interesting.
On the one hand, in addition to being a staunch ANC partisan (whether a liability or plus in DC is open to question), he does have the advantage of having previously served there as ambassador. But this was in the benign years of the Barack Obama administration, which angled toward close engagement with South Africa. And even during the recent Joe Biden administration, our very feeble (to state matters diplomatically) presence in the US capitol had some traction with one corner of the Democratic Senate and White House, namely the Congressional Black Caucus.
With Trump in the White House, conservative Republicans bestriding the Senate and very probably the House of Representatives, retelling stories of the struggle against apartheid will cut no ice.
Trump’s first pick for his foreign policy team is Representative Elise Stefanik, a hard-line Congresswoman from New York, soon to be, with cabinet rank, US ambassador to the United Nations.
When South Africa launched its ICJ prosecution on Gaza, she posted on X: “I joined a letter condemning South Africa for filing an antisemitic case against our ally Israel that perpetuates false and dangerous allegations against the Jewish state.”
Transactional
Trump’s administration is also going to be thoroughly transactional. And if your country runs a trade surplus with the US (South Africa) or is seen as a prop for China trade (South Africa too) and is a friend of and investor in Iran and enemy of Israel (South Africa again), sympathy and interest from the incoming Republican majority will be severely limited.
Given the role of the Middle East, Central America, and Ukraine/Russia as agenda-toppers, the arrival of a new SA ambassador will not be a breakout moment.
However, it is likely that some or other officials in the US State Department will look at the paper trail to provide a briefing for the new administration. Personalities count in Trumpworld, and so do “enemies”.
Just witness Trump’s description of his Democratic opponents as “demons”. He and those below him keep lists and nurture resentments.
Between his past and present ambassadorial roles, Rasool, for example, delivered a speech to the Cape Town Press Club in December 2020, just after Trump’s defeat in that election. He advised the audience that “Trump was bad for Africa’s economic prospects”. He went further and said that the US under Trump “had awakened supremacists globally and it has challenged non-racialism all around the world”.
He went on to describe Trump’s defeat, which Trump famously refused to acknowledge, to mean that “you have a revisionist power in the Oval Office…”
Rasool obviously forgot the first instruction in the diplomatic toolbox once described to me as “the ambassador’s job is to think twice and then say nothing”.
Of course, at the time of his remarks, Rasool was no longer our man in Washington. And Ramaphosa’s decision to reappoint him to the role in May 2024 (though only announced last week) was done likely on the assumption that Biden-Harris and the Democrats would continue to govern for the next four years. Now he confronts the ascendant Republican (really Trumpian) majority.
For the sake of our automotive, citrus and metals exports we can but hope that the new administration buys, without prohibitive tariffs, what Rasool is selling.
Kamala Harris promised in her losing campaign that “there is no going back”. Only for America and the world, there is. Of course it is entirely possible, like prognosticating on the survival of South Africa’s GNU, the immolations might not happen in the manner suggested.
Trump is famously unpredictable.
Perhaps with a nod toward the evangelicals who venerate Trump, it might be like the story in the Bible witnessed by Moses on Mount Horeb: the bush will be aflame, but it will not be consumed by fire.
