Trump, trade, and tensions: What’s at stake in Ramaphosa’s US visit?

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JEREMY MAGGS: Now I don’t need to tell you that tensions between South Africa and the United States have escalated, with Washington placing a freeze on any G20 collaboration. All of this coming as President Ramaphosa now embarks on a working visit to the United States.

Read:
Ramaphosa heads to US to ease tensions with Trump
US agencies banned from working on SA G20 Summit – report

I guess the big question this week is, is this meeting going to move the needle at all? Is it going to change anything? I want to talk now to Dr Laurence Caromba, researcher in humanities at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.

Laurence, a very warm welcome to you. One has got to ask, I suppose, can the president realistically reset this relationship, or do you think the window is already closed?

LAURENCE CAROMBA: Actually, I think that he can. I think that Trump is a very unpredictable figure, and sometimes he changes his positions on things. This is one of the strange things about studying diplomacy in the age of Trump that as much as his foreign policy is unpredictable and sometimes irrational in the sense that he seems to believe certain things that are objectively not true.

At the same time, he’s willing to take risks, and he’s willing to depart from doing things the way that things were done in the past, and this can have unpredictable consequences. We see this in the case of, for example, US negotiations with Iran, which are going, I think, surprisingly well, better than a lot of observers of international politics would have expected.

So there definitely is room for a turnaround. But obviously you need to have an understanding of what South Africa’s goals are, and South Africa needs to approach these negotiations in a careful way.

Looking at some of the bad examples that have happened in the past, like obviously the meeting between Trump and [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, for example, is a good illustration of how we do not want this to go.

JEREMY MAGGS: As they sit down in what will obviously be a very public meeting. Do we have any leverage in terms of this bilateral relationship? In other words, what does the United States want from us?

LAURENCE CAROMBA: So I think there’s two things. First of all, there is the issue of trade, where it seems to me like the United States wants to move away from Agoa [African Growth and Opportunity Act] and switch to some sort of bilateral trade deal with South Africa. That seems like that’s something that we’re looking to do as well. So there might be an alignment of interests there.

But then the other thing is that international politics, you can think of from a strategic point of view or from game theory point of view as a two-level game. So there are two things that are going on, the one is governments are negotiating with each other, but at the same time, each government is also trying to maintain support from its domestic support base.

Read: ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break’

So there’s this domestic political game that’s going on at the same time. A lot of what Trump does is he makes deals on the international stage that seem to be calculated to give him wins or deals or things that he can take into the domestic context in the United States and say, look, I’m winning, I’m making deals, I’m a successful president.

So I think where there is scope for South Africa to make concessions, the ideal situation from a South African perspective would be if we can give him almost symbolic wins that he can take to his domestic audience and say, look, I’ve got South Africa to concede on this and this and this. But it’s not such a big deal for us, it’s largely a symbolic thing.

But if we can get more concrete concessions in return, that will actually benefit the country, that would be the ideal outcome. Whether that’s actually possible, obviously is uncertain, but I think that’s the strategic approach that our government is hopefully thinking about.

JEREMY MAGGS: Practically, though, isn’t this meeting going to be completely overshadowed by the arrival of the 49 so-called refugees?

LAURENCE CAROMBA: Ja, I think it would be beneficial in South Africa’s interests to try to downplay this issue as much as possible. So, yes, this will be the focus of media attention, but we need to focus on what our real strategic goals are. Because our first one is we want to maintain a status of non-alignment in this global great power competition that’s going on between the US and China.

So to do that, we need to get off Trump’s list of enemy countries, we need to convince him that we’re a neutral participant, and we’re not his enemy.

Then our more narrow, short-term or medium-term goal is that we want to negotiate some sort of trade agreement to replace Agoa, because I think it’s clear that Agoa is not going to be around forever. It behoves us as a middle-income country to be able to negotiate bilateral trade deals, not just to rely on one-sided deals from other countries, which is what Agoa is.

So these are our real strategic goals, and I think that’s what we need to focus on.

If we can shift the discussion away from the refugees, but from a South African perspective, people can choose to leave the country, we do not accept the status of refugees. But at the same time, we’re not forcing people to stay if you don’t want to stay. So it need not be an issue of contention.

JEREMY MAGGS: What is at stake for South Africa if this visit doesn’t result in a thaw in relations?

LAURENCE CAROMBA: Well, like I said before, the example of a bad scenario would be something similar to what we saw with the Zelenskyy meeting, where Trump and his team ambushed a visiting head of state and used him to score points for their domestic audience.

That would be the worst-case scenario immediately that South Africa is trying to avoid, which would then set a pattern for worsened relations in the future.

We could look at South Africa being locked out of US markets for trade, and we could see the emergence of almost like a permanent hostile relationship, similar to what we see with the US and its relationships with countries like Iran, for example, where there’s this continual pattern of conflict.

But that’s definitely not in the South African interest and I don’t think that’s in the US interest either. Remember, South Africa has things that we can offer, we have things like access to critical minerals supplies, which the US needs, as part of its long-term great power game. It doesn’t want to be reliant on China for things like critical minerals supplies. So there is scope for South Africa to offer things to the US as well.

But we need to couch these arguments in the sort of things that Trump responds to, which is transactional dealmaking, giving him symbolic wins that he can take to his supporters, not trying to lecture him on morality, because unfortunately, I think it’s been shown previously that that’s not a successful negotiating tactic and it’s unlikely to work.

JEREMY MAGGS: And that meeting takes place midweek. Dr Laurence Caromba, thank you very much indeed, from the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection. I do appreciate your time and your insight.

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