South Africa’s Foreign Ministry summoned U.S. Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III for what it described as “undiplomatic conduct” on Tuesday. That marks the third time Bozell has been issued a “démarche” (diplomatic parlance for a formal protest) for his inflammatory remarks, in just eight months since he assumed his post in Pretoria. |
The backdrop for Bozell’s most recent démarche was the announcement by the Trump administration in mid-September of visa bans against unnamed South African officials it accused of being complicit in policies that discriminate against white South Africans. The State Department justified the bans by pointing to a list of demands it made of the South African government that had gone unaddressed. |
These included prioritizing policing of rural crime, which the Trump administration has characterized as a genocide against white farmers, and reforming the country’s affirmative action laws, which among other things require foreign companies operating in South Africa to be half-owned by Black South Africans. The South African government was reportedly stunned by the travel ban, as they were announced just days after Pretoria had offered to engage with the U.S. on its demands. |
That said, given the litany of attacks and hostility emanating from the Trump administration, as well as the lack of any basis in reality for many of Washington’s concerns, it is hard to imagine what South Africa could have done to assuage them. |
Bilateral relations began to sour almost immediately after Trump took office in January 2025, when he took aim at a recently passed land reform law that he characterized as expropriating land from white farmers without compensation to distribute it to Black South Africans. This was followed by his April 2025 tariff announcement, which hit south Africa with a 30 percent rate. |
When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House in May 2025 to try to reset relations, he instead got the “Zelenskyy treatment” in the Oval Office, as Trump confronted him with a provocative video montage and a sheaf of news reports ostensibly documenting his accusations of a “white genocide” and once more railed against the land “expropriations.” |
In reality, as Ramaphosa calmly tried to explain, the claim of disproportionate crime against white South Africans, to say nothing of a genocide, is a longstanding trope among the global far right that has been widely debunked. And the land reform law that Trump demonized only allows for court-ordered and compensated expropriation as a last resort when no other resolution can be reached. |
Despite the evidence to the contrary, the Trump administration used the accusations to all but boycott the G20 during South Africa’s rotating presidency in 2025. And it has excluded the country from attending this year’s meetings under America’s auspices. It later accepted thousands of white South Africans of Afrikaner descent into America as refugees, after having closed off almost all other channels of asylum for other nationalities. |
In fairness, the U.S. and South Africa also experienced tensions under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, particularly due to South Africa’s refusal to downgrade its ties with Russia in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration also objected to the case South Africa brought before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. |
Moreover, the Black ownership laws the Trump administration has targeted, which are meant to function as restorative justice mechanisms for the economic exclusion suffered by Blacks under apartheid, have often served to line the pockets of elites connected with the ruling African National Congress. That points to the chronic and endemic corruption that has characterized the ANC for years. Ramaphosa has repeatedly promised to tackle it, but doing so would require a divisive purge of the party, with no guarantee that he would survive as leader. |
That said, while U.S.-South Africa ties had their frictions before Trump, and the ANC-led government is far from perfect, it is hard not to see Trump’s vindictive policies as being driven at least in part by racial animus. Though his rhetoric of white genocide dates back to his first term in office, the aggressive and confrontational posture he adopted toward South Africa immediately upon returning to office coincided with Elon Musk’s presence as a close adviser to his administration. |
Musk grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, where his maternal grandfather had moved from Canada in 1950 because of the appeal of its apartheid laws. Other Trump administration officials have also trafficked in the white supremacist conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement, whereby elites (often coded as Jewish or under the influence of Jews) in Europe and America have relaxed immigration laws so as to replace their white populations with nonwhite people. This is also expressed in the Trump administration’s focus on defending “Western civilization”—characterized as Judeo-Christian and ethnically European—as a pillar of its domestic and foreign policy. |
In many ways, then the U.S.-South Africa run-in was preordained. But it also represents the new model of American diplomacy under Trump, in which ambassadors are less diplomats than pugilists, and the goal is not to reach mutually acceptable compromises, but rather to cow the other party into submission, even on grievances invented out of whole cloth. |
South Africa’s government isn’t showing any sign of caving, however, in part because doing so would mean not only treating invented crises as real, but also renouncing core aspects of its post-apartheid political identity. |