Kissinger Was Right: South Africa Learns the Cost of US Friendship the Hard Way

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”^[1]

• Henry Kissinger, cited in Buckley Jr. (1968) 

South Africa is learning the truth of this warning, not in the Cold War trenches where Henry Kissinger first earned his reputation, but in the quiet violence of 30% tariffs, frozen health funding, the US-SA Bilateral Relations Review Act and diplomatic humiliation dressed up as cooperation. The message is unmistakable: friendship with the United States is conditional, and Washington writes the conditions.

This moment did not emerge in isolation. In June 2024, South Africa formed a self-dubbed Government of National Unity (GNU) after the African National Congress (ANC) fell below 50% for the first time since 1994. The country’s political centre fractured, producing a grand coalition of strange bedfellows, from a pro-business, Western-aligned Democratic Alliance (DA), to the Black nationalist Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and the conservative anti-immigrant Patriotic Alliance (PA). What held them together was not ideology but arithmetic: no single party could govern.

In its Statement of Intent,^[2] the new government declared that its foreign policy would continue to be anchored in the African Agenda 2063,^[3] constitutionalism, multilateralism, peaceful resolution of conflicts, and a peaceful, just, and equitable world. Despite being a grand coalition of ten partners, foreign policy remains the prerogative of the Presidency and the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), effectively shielding it from intra-coalition friction. This early positioning signalled a carryover of ANC-era foreign policy shaped by its previous electoral dominance.

Six months later, Donald Trump returned to the White House. The difference between him and Joe Biden lies in method and degree, not in the absence of greater economic and political leverage over South Africa. Successive US administrations have tied access to markets and assistance to conditions that advance US economic and strategic interests. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA),^[4] for example, requires beneficiary states to make progress towards a market-based economy and the removal of barriers to US trade and investment; in 2015, the Obama administration threatened South Africa’s agricultural duty-free benefits until Pretoria lifted sanitary and anti-dumping barriers blocking the opening of its market to US poultry, pork and beef.^[5] Trump’s America First dogma strips away much of the diplomatic varnish, preferring transactional bilateralism and openly linking trade, aid and diplomacy to US priorities.

The collision was inevitable.

Flashpoints: The fuel that provoked Washington’s reaction

Washington’s reaction was catalysed by several domestic policies of the GNU: the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act,^[6] which seeks universal health coverage but was opposed by the DA and sections of South African business; the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Act, which quells discriminatory and inequitable school admissions and language policies was reframed by the DA, AfriForum and Solidarity as an attack on the independence Afrikaans schools; and the Expropriation Act, which allows the state to acquire land for a public purpose subject to constitutional requirements for just and equitable compensation was framed by Trump-aligned voices as unconstitutional assaults on private property, and white minorities. 

These distortions by the DA, AfriForum, and Solidarity^[7] were significant because they did not remain confined domestically. They travelled to Washington, where they became part of the justification for punitive US action against South Africa, as evidenced by Trump’s February 2025 executive order, in which these falsifications were cited as evidence of conduct supposedly hostile to US national-security and foreign-policy interests.^[8]

However, the Expropriation Act does not dismantle private property rights. It is not the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) call for “land expropriation without compensation”. The expropriation act is akin to eminent domain in the US, which allows the taking of private property for public use, but with just compensation.^[9] The United Kingdom (UK) uses compulsory purchase powers that allow public bodies to acquire land when justified in the public interest.^[10]

Claims of a targeted campaign against white farmers also sit uneasily with the available evidence. Then Police Minister Senzo Mchunu reported that, of six people killed in attacks on commercial farms between January and March 2025, five were African and one was white^[11]. On 27 March 2025, the Constitutional Court also ruled that Julius Malema’s “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” chant, in context, did not constitute hate speech.^[12] Similarly, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) and related redress laws are not dismantling equal opportunity; they are mechanisms to create it. Disaggregated data on household income, land ownership, education, and employment by race still show deep structural inequalities - evidence that race-conscious redress remains a constitutional imperative, not a threat to meritocracy.^[13]

Yet MAGA (Make America Great Again)^[14] narratives proved more powerful than evidence. Afriforum and Solidarity’s February 2025 White House visit amplified the white genocide myth.^[15] Elon Musk’s public attacks on black ownership regulations sought to replace B-BBEE obligations of 30% local black shareholding for Starlink’s market access with equity-equivalent investment programmes.^[16]

The collision course began in earnest when SA filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023.^[17] That move positioned Pretoria as a moral voice for much of the Global South, but in Washington, it was read as anti-West hostility. 

Added to this were long-standing non-alignment on the Russia-Ukraine war, joint naval drills with Russia and China in February 2023, and the Lady R saga in May of that year.^[18] The BRICS+ expansion, which welcomed Saudi Arabia and Iran, further reinforced perceptions that South Africa was pivoting eastward. Tentative energy cooperation with Tehran reinforced Washington’s concerns about Pretoria’s geopolitical direction. Even symbolic gestures like the proposal to rename Sandton Drive (where the US Consulate is located) to “Leila Khaled Drive,” honouring the Palestinian militant and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), attracted particular diplomatic attention because the US designates the PFLP as a terrorist organisation.^[19] Taken together, these confirmed the suspicions of many in the US foreign policy establishment: SA was no longer neutral; it was siding with US adversaries.

Executive Reaction: Tariffs and Aid Freezes

On 7 February 2025, Trump signed an executive order: “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa”, which froze all US assistance, including President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and instructed US agencies to resettle “persecuted Afrikaners” in America.

The consequences were immediate for clinics, universities, NGOs and research sites. The South African government later allocated R754.5 million through a special appropriation to the Department of Health to offset part of the loss.^[20] 

SA, the first African state to chair the G20, found itself ignored. On 20 February 2025, Trump’s Secretary of State, boycotting the foreign ministers’ summit, vowed not to “coddle anti-Americanism,” denouncing the ICJ case and mocking SA’s emphasis on solidarity and equality - dismissing them as “DEI and climate change” politics in disguise.^[21]

Then came the trade blows. The “Liberation Day tariffs” were followed by a 30% country-specific tariff on 8 August 2025. The US slapped a tariff on vehicles, wine, and agricultural products. Offsetting some of the benefits of AGOA, itself a deal that has benefited the dominance of US capital. South Africa’s AGOA access was subsequently reauthorised with retroactive effect until 31 December 2026. This provides only a temporary reprieve: as in July 2026, Washington imposed a new 12.5% Section 301 tariff on many goods from South Africa after alleging insufficient import restrictions on goods produced with forced labour.^[22]

The lesson is not that Trump invented coercive US power. Conditional access to markets, finance and aid predates MAGA. What distinguishes the current administration is the lengths it is prepared to go to in subordinating SA socially, politically and economically: domestic MAGA narratives are now exported to Afrikaners and are being used to shape bilateral relations. Economic pressure is applied more openly to punish political choices at precisely the moment when US global dominance is being challenged intellectually and materially.

Washington’s immediate attention has shifted towards its war with Iran, the aftermath of the US military capture of the Venezuelan President, and renewed pressure to control Greenland, including tariff threats against Norway and other European allies. South Africa may have receded temporarily from the centre of Trump’s foreign-policy agenda during this shift, but the governing doctrine remains unchanged: America first coercion simply moves from one target to another.

A Limited Menu of Choices

SA’s predicament is not unique. It reflects the structural reality faced by states in the periphery of the world-system: sovereign flags flying over externally constrained economies, where the ability to choose its own policy path is limited by the priorities and pressures of more powerful states.

Still, the GNU has four broad options:

Option 1: Lean into BRICS+ / South–South cooperation

It offers global south solidarity, trade diversification, and a chance to escape Western dependence. But BRICS+ markets are smaller, China dominates the bloc, and SA not only runs a deficit with them, on primary goods. Exporting primary goods does not address industrial development, which is critical to dropping unemployment. However, with the EU (27 countries), we have a surplus mainly of vehicles. 

Option 2: Play the Middle Road

Maintain BRICS+ while reopening working channels with Washington: negotiate trade disputes, deepen engagement with Congress and US business, explain military cooperation, and avoid symbolic confrontations that carry little material benefit. But de-escalation should not mean abandoning the ICJ case, B-BBEE or South Africa’s core foreign-policy principles. This path reduces risk, but both Washington and BRICS+ partners may still distrust Pretoria for “fence sitting”.

Option 3: Double Down on the US Partnership

Do whatever it takes to mend relations with the US. Seek long-term AGOA extension, regain PEPFAR, and scale down on “anti-West” geopolitical signalling. It may stabilise the economy, but risks a loss of sovereignty, surrender of foreign policy autonomy and moral capital.

These are not real choices; they are constraints. The language of sovereignty obscures asymmetric dependency.

Option 4: Build the capacity to choose

The more durable option is to reduce the dependency that makes the first three choices so constraining. This means rebuilding productive capacity through agriculture-led industrialisation and beneficiation, expanding local consumption and intra-African trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), domesticating critical health financing, and building public capacity in energy, technology and manufacturing. When SA exports raw minerals and imports the finished products, it exports jobs with them. Food sovereignty similarly requires developing local agro-processing capacity rather than relying excessively on food imports.

Beyond Illusions

Today’s global order is neither symmetrical nor rules-based. It is hierarchical, punitive, and transactional. Powerful states have greater capacity to write the rules, suspend them or weaponise economic interdependence when their interests are threatened.

SA must therefore confront a sobering truth: It will not escape dependency through diplomacy alone. AGOA will not industrialise us. PEPFAR will not build health sovereignty. Real autonomy demands the productive capacity to feed ourselves, create jobs through manufacturing and agriculture-linked industries, and beneficiate, notwithstanding the construction of deep pools of domestic capital to finance sovereignty (not just security) in energy, health, and technology. Until then, others will dictate the terms.

Sovereignty depends on whether a country can say no without being starved into saying yes.

SA is learning what Kissinger meant: It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy. To be its friend, however, may be fatal.

Mbasa Mvenene teaches political studies at iYunivesithi Walter Sisulu. He is a PhD candidate at Nelson Mandela University. He writes in his personal capacity. 

Note: The initial version of this article was written in late 2025 following a guest lecture delivered at the University of Johannesburg titled “South Africa-United States Relations under the Government of National Unity: Trade, Aid and Geopolitics”. It has not been published elsewhere, and has been lightly updated to acknowledge subsequent developments.

Endnotes