Trump snubs South Africa

With US allies and rivals alike weathering a blizzard of daily announcements, insults and edicts from President Donald Trump, the rest of the world’s biggest economies did their best this week to show they were united.

At a gathering of Group of 20 foreign ministers in Johannesburg, established industrialized nations and members of the so-called Global South stressed the need to protect multilateralism and the international institutions upon which the post World War II order was built — all of which are under assault from Trump’s administration.

“Multilateralism is eroding,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Jennifer Zabasajja on Friday in the South African city.

“This is the most important issue that we’re facing now because if we can institutionalize properly multilateralism, it could be easy for us to address the problems of geopolitics, peace and economic problems.”

In just over a month in office, Trump has pulled out of the international Paris climate agreement, quit the World Health Organization and threatened the entire world with tariffs.

He’s expressed a desire to expand the country’s territory at the expense of friendly nations and cut his European allies out of initial talks with Russia to end its assault on Ukraine.

The pace of his diplomacy, often peppered with provocative statements about individual leaders, has left allies bewildered.

“Today we go to sleep here and then we wake up to some new statements,” said Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat. “It has been like this for the last month,” she said, adding that countries needed to now focus on their own actions and what Trump actually does rather than says.

The US snubbed the meeting, the first of a series to be hosted by this year’s G-20 host South Africa, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing his withdrawal in a post on X in which he derided South Africa’s G-20 goals and attacked a domestic land policy.

Trump cut off aid to the country and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will also skip next week’s G-20 finance ministers’ meeting.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was at pains to say the US isn’t boycotting the event. The country was represented by the Pretoria-based charge d’affaires, who is standing in as US head of mission until Trump appoints an ambassador.

Nevertheless, attendees including Kallas and Germany’s deputy foreign minister, Katja Keul, lined up to support South Africa’s aims for the G-20 in 2025 — the promotion of solidarity, equality and sustainability.

Those aims were translated by Rubio as a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change — themes that are anathema to Trump.

Countries that “understand the value of international law want to stick together, so there’s a lot of talk about keeping multilateralism alive,” Kallas said of talks at the summit.

“The feeling in the room is that those who share those values and principles really need to work together for those principles and build alliances that maybe haven’t been there before.”

Attendees also made a point of backing up host Ramaphosa in trying to keep some of the focus on Africa, with this the first G-20 summit held on the continent.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy and India’s External Affairs Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said that with war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, Africa’s own conflicts in Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel have been neglected.

“There remains a hierarchy of conflicts, with those on this continent finding themselves at the bottom of the global pile,” Lammy said in a statement.

Still, differences remain, as Ramaphosa pointed out.

“There is a lack of consensus among major powers, including in the G-20, on how to respond to these issues of global significance,” Ramaphosa said.

Tensions were also on display between European participants and Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov days ahead of the third anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Both Kallas and Lammy expressed irritation with the tone of Lavrov’s speech. Kallas, meanwhile, declined to appear in the family photo shoot if Lavrov was there — so South Africa cancelled it, according to two people familiar with the matter.