Sorry we missed you, President Trump, but maybe it was for the best

As the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg at the weekend drew to a close, it became obvious that neither would there be any Americans in the room to participate in the actual discussions nor would they be there at the closing to take a ceremonial handover for next year’s summit.

The conference marked an unprecedented moment in the history of international organisations — the US, as a nation central to an organisation’s creation, had declined to participate in its deliberations.

Well, okay, yes, there is one other example — and the lesson from its failure is sadly obvious. Under the influence of strong isolationist feelings (the phrase “America first” would come into common usage two decades later, paralleling the rise of fascism in Europe) in the Congress and among many citizens, the US failed to join the League of Nations following World War I.

This was despite President Woodrow Wilson having been the league’s chief proponent and — effectively — its architect in producing the first global intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. The league collapsed in ignominy over its inability to stop the rise of the Axis nations, and thus the outbreak of World War 2.

Invitation declined

This time around, over the past year, the Trump administration ramped up its signals that, among other things, it was unhappy with the planned agenda and themes for this year’s G20 (solidarity, equality and sustainability), with the expanded invitation list and with the host government’s policies.

As a result, the US announced its president would not attend; then, his deputy, Vice-President JD Vance, would stand in for him; and then, finally, that Vance would not be coming either — and in fact, neither would anybody else from the US administration.

The ostensible reasoning for this was the Trump administration’s objections to the themes promulgated by South Africa, as well as the host’s plans to invite numerous other nations — many from Africa — as participating observers. These attendees would range from Nigeria and Ethiopia to oil-rich specks on the map like Equatorial Guinea.

As the year progressed, the question of US participation became entangled with the continuing turbulence of US-South African bilateral relations. In Donald Trump’s eyes, collectively, these things made the US’s participation ever more problematic.

As is well known to readers of Daily Maverick, since Trump took office in January, he has been railing about the supposed persecution — even a genocide — of white Afrikaner farmers in South Africa, and the government’s supposed connivance in this.

Read more: Trump’s Afrikaner refugees — the search for white victims

In reply, he reconfigured the US’s refugee asylum regulations to provide preferential admittance into the US to the supposed victims of that persecution, and effectively ended US participation in its highly effective Pepfar programme that addressed the HIV/Aids epidemic, along with medical research grants on that disease, among other cuts.

(Such aid cuts were not solely directed at South Africa, but, as a major recipient of such funding, the loss was keenly felt in South Africa.)

By the time South Africa’s president visited the White House for a conversation with Trump over such tensions, that came along with South Africa’s ambassador to the US being declared persona non grata, reportedly for calling the US president a white supremacist in an online webinar. Then, too, steep tariffs against South African products were being put into place, ratcheting up tensions further.

Read more: Withdrawal of US aid has hurt South Africa’s HIV management programme

Will they, won’t they?

Once the G20 Leaders’ Summit began, there was an additional squabble about whether US embassy officials could attend sessions as observers or even participate symbolically in the handover of the chairmanship to the US as next year’s host and chair, which they ultimately did not.

Regarding the latter, the South African government chose to play a diplomatic protocol card, saying President Cyril Ramaphosa could not possibly participate in a handshake with a “low-level official”.

That was a touch disingenuous, given that the “low-level official” was the highest-ranking US diplomat in South Africa, the chargé d’affaires, Marc D Dillard. (He was a senior career diplomat with decades of experience and was the chargé d’affaires because the next US ambassador, the nominee, Leo Brent Bozell III, had not yet been confirmed by the Senate.)

For his own part, now rather dog-in-the-mangerishly, Trump ruminated that besides his problems with the themes for this year’s meeting, the gathering was now simply too big, with all those bit players in it — especially the extra nations invited by South Africa.

And maybe South Africa itself shouldn’t be part of the G20 next time around and would be left out of next year’s gathering in Miami, Florida. The meeting is scheduled to take place at Trump’s Doral country club and golf course.

This possibility was raised despite South Africa having been a party in the G20 conversation since the group was established as part of an effort to broaden the conversation on international economic and financial issues beyond the narrower reach of the G8 (now G7, with Russia suspended for its invasion of Ukraine).

Further, there is no real mechanism for excluding a G20 member. Because it has no secretariat, its management largely falls onto the host country, a role that rotates among the members. There are no statutes specifying who gets included or excluded. Attendance is determined by a decision of the year’s host, with the consensus of its other recognised members.

The net result of this furore was that no US delegate or observer was in the room throughout the meeting, right up to when this year’s G20 adjourned sine die. Instead, the now suddenly contentious handover was set for a low-key, no-frills event, at the South African government’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation offices between a South African official and the US charge’.

The Trump in the room

It is a shame that one of the nations that initiated the group in the first place elected to sit outside the tent, grousing about the arrangements, the table settings and the guests.

This is doubly so given the reality that, whether one likes it or not, the US remains the world’s largest economy. It continues to be the most important site for capital for global investment, and its hard and soft power are still second to none, despite the current administration’s apparent intentions to dissipate and denigrate them.

Nevertheless, at the meeting, the shadow of the Trump administration (and the US) loomed over the discussions, to remind participants of the question: “How will the US react to the deliberations and decisions contained in our joint resolution?”

Absent US engagement, the reality is that it is difficult to see how some of the proposals and ideas could be carried out, even if all of the other participating members agreed to do so.

(The most recent climate conference, the COP30, in Brazil, seems to have felt a version of the same fate, absent the US’s active engagement, as fossil-fuel-producing states wrangled with those most likely to be affected adversely by global climate change.)

Read more: G20 South Africa goes post-Trump as middle powers signal fresh path

Interestingly, in a real counterpoint, at the B20 business leaders meeting held just before the G20 gathering, hundreds of US business representatives attended, fully attuned to the possibilities and opportunities for rewarding deals and connections on the African continent — and all those eager, young consumers.

In truth, there is nothing in the G20 structure that can compel a nation to carry out the calls for action in the joint resolution, but, as things stand now, it will be nearly impossible to see how Americans can be encouraged to implement many of the policies contained in the final communique, given that the Trump administration can say it was not involved in the decision-making and that it disagrees with many of those points.

Further, this self-imposed absence will make it that much harder to find continuity with this year’s engagement (along with the two previous meetings in Brazil and Indonesia), leading into next year’s event, given the lack of US participation this year, plus its threats to refocus the discussions — and even to decide who gets a seat at the table next year.

Sorry, not sorry

But — consider this thought: How would things have gone if Trump or Vance, or even Marco Rubio, had attended?

Given the truculence of the US government’s top officials and their current policies, the two-day meeting, given the agenda, as set out by South Africa, would have been the scene of nearly constant bickering over details — as well as broader policies.

Even the core legitimacy of the gathering could have become contested territory. There would have been no consensus about a way forward, and the gathering would have seen snarling between the US and others over the US’s tariff policies (and the resulting retaliatory non-tariff barriers imposed by others in response) as well as the geopolitics of trade issues still more generally.

Conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere would have become central to the discussion as well. It is possible that the G20 process could have been ruptured.

It is also possible that while the US was absent from this year’s G20 meeting and ultimately seemed not to take it very seriously, this may have been because its government leadership was focused on several domestic and foreign issues instead.

For Trump, personally, the continuing tug on his attention from the messy Epstein files case and a growing fissure within the ranks of his earlier supporters in Congress because of it are more immediately important to him.

Then, too, there have been its time-consuming but amateurish efforts in trying to obtain a negotiated end to the fighting in Ukraine (using proposals reportedly written in Russia), as well as the uncertain circumstances of the Gaza peace process that have almost certainly absorbed more of his time than any of the Nasrec discussions — especially since the G20 joint resolution is a non-binding document.

As it was, that proposed Ukraine agreement was sufficiently embarrassing, with a deadline for Ukraine’s agreement so impossible to implement that it provoked a rebuke from major European nations, even as their leaders were in Johannesburg for the G20 Leaders’ Summit. The ghost of Neville Chamberlain and his Munich cave-in to Adolf Hitler in 1938 is now being recalled by many commentators both in the US and abroad.

Read more: US peace plan for Ukraine ‘riddled with flaws’ — Norwegian PM

We can presume that had the Trump administration actually participated in this G20, issues like these would have almost certainly overwhelmed the discussions. Ramaphosa would have had a much more difficult task to steer — adroitly, as it turned out — participants towards broad agreement on a resolution both rich in detail and broad in its expanse.

Instead, we would now be writing about the failure of the gathering and thus a grievous wound to the principles of multilateralism as a result of major power disagreements at this year’s G20. Perhaps, then, serendipitously, the entire G20 process dodged a bullet precisely because of this US boycott. DM