US President Donald Trump’s fight with Pretoria reached a boiling point in May when he ambushed President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office
As the G20 Summit in Johannesburg looms, an International law expert, Professor Andre Thomashausen, says an assessment of the United States’ (US) leadership shows that the G20 has become an “irrelevant talking club.”
US President Donald Trump said he would not attend this year’s G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg in November, telling reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that Vice President JD Vance would represent the US instead.
Trump’s snub comes after months of attacks on South Africa over debunked claims that the country is carrying out a genocide on Afrikaners.
‘Irrelevant talking club’
Thomashausen told The Citizen the G20 may not be an important gathering for the US and Trump.
“I think the assessment of the US leadership, the G20, is really not worth a lot of time or effort any longer because it’s become a fairly irrelevant talking club. It was never an official organ of the United Nations; it has no status in international law, unlike, for instance, Brics.
“It is just a get together of 20 leaders that themselves decided that they’re more important than the 220 other countries’ leaders, and if it happened after the very, very big banking and financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, to try and discuss global issues,” Thomashausen said.
Thomashausen said he believes there is a dying interest in the G20.
“Then there is of course the issue of the frosty bilateral relations between South Africa and America and as has been as recently as three days ago in a long speech by foreign minister of international relations Lamola, he made very clear South Africa intends to remain hostile towards the EU and the US and Australia and Canada, the so-called West, and they interpret their non-alignment policy to be an alignment with some with what we’ve seen in the recent summit in Beijing, the alliance of China, India and Russia, and a couple of small countries like North Korea and Venezuela and Cuba.”
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Virtual
Thomashausen said even though Trump will not be attending the G20 summit physically, he will be taking part in the meeting.
“So there is a message in the fact that the president isn’t coming, but he is nevertheless taking part. There was a time when there were indications that America wouldn’t participate at all. Instead of the president, the vice president Vance is coming, so America is going to be present at the G20 summit.”
Lamola said he did not want to speculate on the reasons for Trump’s decision not to come to South Africa.
“That is for him to state. For us, we welcome that JD Vance has been assigned, but we also know that he is reluctant to travel long distances. But I believe the White House can share reasons for Trump’s decision.”
‘Talk shop’
In December 2024, Lamola said the G20 presidency would not be a “talk shop” and that South Africa would play an interactive role in mitigating world challenges.
“We obviously will have to navigate these challenging, difficult geopolitical issues as we host, and Brazil and India did the same. You cannot take the fast-moving train in a geopolitical situation.
“As we come in as South Africa, one of the key working groups and projects that we will undertake is the review of the last 20 years of the G20, what has been the impact. It is also going to be more of an implementation platform and also of assisting,” Lamola said.
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Trump snub
International Relations expert Professor Alex van den Heever told The Citizen that Trump’s not attending the G20 Summit is a “form of a snub.”
“It’s not unexpected, and I don’t think it really is based on any fact or any moral stance at all because it’s very clear that Donald Trump doesn’t have a moral compass. So this is really about whatever is driving his particular decisions at the moment and it has got nothing to do with any real set of issues.
“It’s quite clear he manufactures issues whenever he wants to, both domestically and internationally and basically just looks after his own personal interest,” Van den Heever said.
White genocide
Trump has seldom turned down a spot on the world stage, attending each of the first three G20 summits during his first term, with the fourth being held virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic.
While Trump could have come to South Africa to see for himself if there was a genocide against White Afrikaners, Van Den Heever said Trump is a transactional president and would probably not have believed the unfounded attacks on whites.
“I don’t believe that he believes in any of those myths. I think that he issues that have no basis continuously. So really, he could be saying he’s not coming to South Africa because the moon is made of green cheese.
“He is a transactional person as opposed to a president as well in that he wants things personally as gifts instead of actual, really solid engagement and a coherent vision of multilateral relations and international relations. You can’t be sure what’s really driving him. If he visited South Africa, who knows what he would’ve seen, pretty girls maybe,” van den Heever said.
‘Bad things in SA’
Trump backtracked on his decision not to attend the G20 events after a bilateral meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa in which the two leaders discussed a range of trade and investment issues.
In April, Trump took to his Truth Social platform, claiming that South Africa was confiscating land and committing genocide.
“How could we be expected to go to South Africa for the very important G20 meeting when land confiscation and genocide are the primary topics of conversation?
“They are taking the land of white farmers and then killing them and their families. The media refuses to report on this.
Trump’s fight with Pretoria reached a boiling point in May when he ambushed Ramaphosa at the Oval Office in the White House with a video purporting to back up his claims that White farmers are being targeted.
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