U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. As is tradition with incoming presidents, Trump is traveling to Washington, DC to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House as well as Republican members of Congress on Capitol Hill. (Photo: Allison Robbert-Pool / Getty Images) Former South African Ambassador to United States Ebrahim Rasool addresses the Cape Town Press Club on December 15, 2020 in Cape Town, South Africa. It is reported that Rassol deliberated on the US Elections, the transition from Trump to Biden and its implications for South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach) 
South Africa’s incoming ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, says he will put away South Africa’s “megaphone” on Gaza to avoid antagonising President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans gunning to kick South Africa out of Agoa because of its stances on contentious foreign policy issues like the Middle East, Russia’s war against Ukraine and China.
Rasool also believes that Pretoria and Trump are basically “in alignment” on Russia’s war against Ukraine because both share a “healthy disrespect for Nato” and oppose the Biden administration’s imperative that Nato should “surround Russia”.
Rasool, 62, leaves later this month to take up the post of ambassador in a very different and more difficult Washington than the one he left exactly 10 years ago after four years – generally considered successful – as ambassador to President Barack Obama’s administration. Before that, Rasool was the premier of the Western Cape from 2004 to 2008 when the ANC controlled the province. He ran for Parliament in this year’s general election on the ANC’s list but declined to take up his seat in favour of his job as chairperson of the DBSA (from which he has now resigned to take up the ambassadorship).
From 20 January next year, Trump will be back in the Oval Office, vowing to Make America Great Again, regardless of the costs to other countries. For South Africa, the great concern is that he and Congress will carry out the threats by many Republican – and even some Democratic – legislators to rescind SA’s benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) which gives SA and other eligible sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the lucrative US market for many of their products.
The entire Agoa programme expires next year and must be renewed by Congress. This year, the House of Representatives passed legislation which would demand that the US Administration review US-SA relations because they see it as too friendly to Russia, China and Iran. The review could trigger SA’s expulsion from Agoa or at least some of its benefits.
Read more: Uncertain future: how a Trump presidency could reshape South Africa’s economic landscape
Balancing SA’s values and interests
In an interview with Daily Maverick, Rasool said he was very aware that being SA ambassador to the US would be much more difficult this time round with a president who is “probably populism perfected. So I’m not going there thinking of business as usual… I understand the need to completely recalibrate.”
That required the government to rebalance its values with its interests in foreign policy. Over the last two years, the pendulum had swung too far towards values, he said.
“We stuck to our guns on Ukraine and Russia. We took on Israel and by implication, its backers in the International Court of Justice.”
South Africa also worked hard to rebalance the world order by helping to give birth to a multipolar world through expanding BRICS – because the unipolar world led by the US had created three decades of insecurity and wars, said Rasool.
But now Rasool’s mission was “not only to be the purveyor of values, but I’ve got to fight damn hard to protect South Africa’s interests as well” – to move that pendulum back towards the middle, to a position that would be comfortable both for SA on the one hand and on the other, for the United States in particular, but also the West in general.
In other words, moderating South Africa’s positions on the foreign policy issues that have annoyed the Americans? Would he be able to do that on his own, Daily Maverick asked him.
Rasool replied that he had just had a good chat with President Ramaphosa and had left with the understanding that South Africa would not give up on the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – “which is tied up with our founding values and identity as a people”.
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“But we have taken it to the point in which others are accusing us of overreaching. And therefore we will stick by the case, but let us now trust our legal team, trust the evidence that we have placed in front of the judges of the ICJ, trust the judges of the ICJ to come to a sustainable, just solution – but that we need to put away the megaphone now.
“And the President’s words were, it is now sub judice. So our government doesn’t have to reach for the megaphone any more.”
War in Europe
Rasool said, “Trump’s idea about Russia-Ukraine is different to Biden’s idea.”
The Biden administration and the liberal establishment generally weren’t satisfied simply with having won the Cold War – “They needed to surround Russia with allies who joined Nato. If you’ve won the Cold War, why expand Nato?”
“Where I think we have opportunities is the idea that I think Mr Trump has healthy disrespect for Nato.”
Rasool said Trump was not pro-Putin. But he also didn’t share the Biden administration’s imperative to treat Russia as a revanchist power wanting to take over.
“He’s going to find a solution to the war because he doesn’t share the primary objective of the liberal establishment, that Russia must not only be defeated, but it must be annihilated.
“And we must step into that language that war is bad. And that where Trump says war is bad, because it’s bad for business, we say war is bad because it’s bad for people. But we converge on the idea that war is bad, whether in the Middle East or whether in Europe. And so I think we’re aligned.”
Agoa … and Elon Musk
Rasool said to deal with the Trump administration – and protect Agoa – “we’ve got to get into the art of the deal and speak a transactional language, not a giveaway language, but a give and take language.”
Having the SA-born multibillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in Trump’s inner circle would help, he suggested. Musk would understand how much South Africa’s and Africa’s critical minerals were needed for the electric cars, the spacecraft, and the energy projects that Musk was building.
Musk would know what it costs to buy those critical minerals, already beneficiated, from China. Why not rather have Americans investing in South Africa to beneficiate local and other African critical minerals here, Rasool asked.
He said South Africa had about 78% of the world’s critical platinum minerals and also key smelters to process other critical minerals from the rest of Africa. The African Continental Free Trade Agreement and the building of connective logistics, like the Lobito Rail corridor from the Angolan coast to the mines of Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia would help to get those minerals to SA for beneficiation and then to the US.
“And that’s where I think we have to present Africa as fundamentally integrated rather than a set of isolated countries that you can choose to punish or not,” he said, referring to the threat to drop SA from Agoa.
Read more: Trade Minister Tau confident US will renew SA’s Agoa membership
Part of the transactional approach would be to ensure that the Trump administration and Congress understood that the South African oranges that entered the US under Agoa allowed Americans to drink orange juice all year round when Florida and California oranges were out of season.
“And why would you want to punish America with expensive cars when the BMWs coming from South Africa are going to be much cheaper than getting them from Germany or manufacturing your own?
“Likewise, to point out that American cancer patients are receiving medical nuclear isotopes that come from South Africa.
“So you must speak into not against … the American self-imagination and the imagination of a Donald Trump … to be able to frame a message that doesn’t evoke contrarianism or agro, that I think speaks into the angst of America, the angst that they are being overrun by others, that everyone is out to get them … that the cure for your angst is connectivity, not isolation.”
“And we understand that you may want to connect on your own terms, but let’s negotiate it, that’s the art of the deal. It is about framing the messages in particular ways that makes South Africa an ally.”
“I have absolutely no doubt that our preferred partner of choice has to be the USA. China can win that battle on the basis of volume of trade. America wins it on the basis of value of trade.
“And value is multidimensional, it’s not just how much gets on to a ship. It’s how many jobs stand behind that export. How much industrialisation goes into that export. How much does it raise your level of sophistication and technology in your economy?”
But Rasool said that even though the US could command priority based on the value of SA exports, “it shouldn’t demand exclusivity. Don’t tell us we can’t trade with China. Because if we put all our eggs in one basket, the moment your Congress decides we are kicked out of trade, we have nowhere to go.” DM
This article was updated at 9:53 on Thursday, 5 December 2024, to reflect that Rasool declined to take up a seat in Parliament following the 2024 elections.