Relations between the United States and South Africa – already strained over their previous governments’ positions on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine conflict and other geopolitical issues – have rapidly spiralled since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office.

Now, in a highly unusual move, the United States has expelled South Africa’s ambassador, whom US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X on March 14 is a “race-baiting politician” who “hates America” and Trump.

Rubio – who boycotted the G-20 foreign ministers meeting in February, as it was hosted and chaired by South Africa – reposted an article from right-wing website Breitbart that quoted the envoy, Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, as saying that Trump was leading a white supremacist movement, citing some of his recent remarks during an online lecture about the US administration.

At the webinar, Rasool said that Trump was “mobilising a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle”, pointing to South African-born billionaire Elon Musk’s contacting far-right figures in Europe, amid changing demographics that could see the white population become a minority in the US.

“We see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement – the Make America Great Again movement – as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white,” he said.

Rasool must leave the country by March 21, a US State Department spokesperson said. The office for South Africa's president said the decision was “regrettable”, adding that the country remained committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the US.

A former anti-apartheid campaigner who served time in prison for his activism against the racist system, Rasool went on to become a politician in the African National Congress (ANC), the party of the country’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela.

News website Semafor reported last week that Rasool has failed to secure routine meetings with State Department officials and key Republican party figures since Trump took office in January. (Perhaps not coincidentally, while Musk’s Starlink internet provider operates or is due to launch in 16 African countries, it is unavailable in South Africa, where foreign investors must cede 30% of equity to Black shareholders to get a telecoms licence.)

This is the latest in an escalating dispute between the US administration and Africa’s most-industrialised country. In February, Trump signed an executive order offering white South Africans a rapid pathway to US citizenship, claiming that they are being discriminated against, saying, without citing evidence, that “South Africa is confiscating land” and that “certain classes of people” are being treated “very badly”.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “any farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship”.

An executive order Trump issued on February 7 that froze US assistance to South Africa cited “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners. It referenced the new Expropriation Act, claiming it targets Afrikaners by allowing the government to take away private land.

“As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavoured minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country,” the White House said in a statement.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in January signed into law a bill that would make it easier for the state to expropriate land in the public interest – in some cases without compensating the owner – a policy he defended as part of efforts to reduce racial disparities in ownership in the Black-majority nation.

South Africa’s 2022 census shows that white people – including Afrikaners, who are largely descended from Dutch settlers who first arrived in the 17th Century – comprised 7.2% of the population. A 2018 land audit by the South African government, showed that white farmers owned 72% of the country’s privately-held farmland.

Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) hangs in the balance

While South Africa does not rely on US aid, it benefits under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which grants products from dozens of African nations preferential access to the market of the US – South Africa’s largest trading partner after China.

In 2023, bilateral trade totalled approximately $21bn, with South African exports to the US valued at just under $14bn and US exports to South Africa at $7.1bn, according to the US Census Bureau. Approximately 600 American companies operate in South Africa.

Some US lawmakers have been lobbying the US administration to strip South Africa of AGOA benefits over its ICJ case and warm ties with China, Russia and Iran. Among them is Andy Ogles of Tennessee, a congressman from Tennessee, who said on X: “South Africa hates native whites, loves terrorists and consists of communists. It’s time to revoke South Africa’s duty-free treatments and their AGOA trade preferences”.

The “loves terrorists” charge seems to be an apparent reference to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over its handling of the war with Hamas, which the US State Department designated as a foreign terrorist organisation in October 1997.

Bloomberg reported in mid-February that South Africa was “preparing to pitch a bilateral trade agreement to the US if President Donald Trump’s administration revokes the nation’s preferential access to the world’s biggest economy as relations between them sour”, citing people with knowledge of the matter, who said the South African government considers such an accord better than preferential treatment because it would be a negotiated deal.

AGOA is set to expire in September, but US senators introduced a bill last year to extend it until 2041. To qualify, countries cannot engage in activities purported to undermine US national security or foreign-policy interests, engage in gross violations of human rights or provide support for acts of “terror”.

Israel, Russia, the global south ... and race

Bilateral relations became strained under the Biden administration when South Africa took a nonaligned stance on the war between Russia and Ukraine but continued to play an active part in working to expand the BRICS bloc, originally comprised of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

It further deteriorated when a Russian ship, the Lady R, docked at a naval base near Cape Town in December 2022. Then-US Ambassador to South Africa Reuben Brigety called a press conference to assert, without providing evidence, that weapons were loaded onto the Russian ship (it turned out to be food).

While the Trump administration may not have objected to South Africa providing military equipment to Russia, like the Biden administration, it is a firm supporter of Israel, and takes issue with South Africa’s decision to accuse Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

South Africa has continued to work to build a coalition from the global south to sustain international legal pressure regarding Gaza, showing its commitment to maintaining an independent foreign-policy stance, despite US pressure, noted Imraan Buccus, a senior research associate at South Africa’s Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute and a research fellow at the University of the Free State, in an analysis published in Foreign Policy magazine on March 10.

“Trump’s [executive order freezing aid] mentions the accusation of genocide levelled against Israel by Pretoria but focuses on the South African government’s extensive affirmative action policies, its plans for further land reform, and claims that Afrikaners are being targeted for hostile treatment by the state. This claim is patently untrue but follows years of attempts by the Afrikaner right to build relations with the right in the United States and Europe,” Buccus writes.

“Within South Africa, the leading figures who have been pushing hard in recent years to demand that South Africa abandon its nonaligned position on the Russia-Ukraine war, exit the BRICS grouping, withdraw the ICJ case, and align itself with the United States come from among the country’s white English-speaking minority and not the Afrikaner right. A set of think tanks and media projects, such as the Brenthurst Foundation and the Daily Maverick, among others, have pushed hard to demand that South Africa fully ally itself with the West.

“Trump’s order has now pushed the most stridently pro-Western voices to the margins of society as the bulk of South African opinion, including among whites, moves towards opposing Trump’s actions. Indeed, leading Afrikaner figures and organisations have made it clear that they prefer to remain in South Africa rather than to become refugees in the United States.”

It may 'play in Peoria', but what about Pretoria?

Rubio was not the only one to boycott the G-20 foreign ministers meeting in February. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also opted out of the meeting in Cape Town after the US objected to the themes of “solidarity, equality and sustainability” (reminiscent of the diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiative that is anathema to Trump and his supporters; recall that his hatchetman Musk has also attacked South Africa for what he says are its “racist ownership” laws that stop him from taking Starlink to the country unless he meets affirmative action requirements).

Buccus writes that a permanent deterioration in relations between Washington and Pretoria would likely accelerate South Africa’s pivot towards alternative power centres and firmly into the orbit of geopolitical competitors while achieving few concrete policy objectives.

“A recalibration that acknowledges South Africa’s positions, including its support for Palestine, while addressing specific areas of concern would better serve long-term US interests than pushing South Africa more firmly into the BRICS alliance,” he writes. 

“The government of national unity (GNU), formed after the ANC’s electoral losses in May 2024, has been plagued by internal contradictions and policy disagreements since its inception. Trump’s actions have, ironically, provided an external threat around which these disparate parties have rallied.”