US President Donald Trump and South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa have been at odds on multiple issues. Credit AFP

Trump’s freeze on aid to South Africa caps years of growing tension over a myriad of issues from Russia and China to Israel. And both sides could lose if tensions grow further.

United States President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order freezing aid to South Africa, citing a recent land expropriation law passed by the country that the American leader and his allies claim discriminates against white farmers.

But the aid block is only the culmination of a series of pressure points between the US and South Africa that had been building up even during the administration of former President Joe Biden, and have now reached a crescendo under Trump.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, saying “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.

“The United States won’t stand for it, we will act,” he wrote. “Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of the situation has been completed!”

The executive order that Trump subsequently signed early this month claimed that the expropriation law, passed in December 2024, enables “the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

“This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners,” the order said.

When speaking to the press shortly after he signed the order, he doubled down on those comments while addressing reporters. “Terrible things are happening in South Africa,” he said, referring to the land law.

In the executive order, the US also offered to resettle Afrikaaner South Africans, a suggestion that has been rejected by Afrikaaner groups, including those that have lobbied the US and Trump specifically against the South African government.

From US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to South-African-born multi-billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk, the broadsides against South Africa have been unrelenting since the US president’s first comments. Marco Rubio also confirmed that he would not be attending the G20 summit which comes up at the end of February.

The South African government, which is made up of a coalition of diverse political parties, has responded firmly but diplomatically. President Cyril Ramaphosa said the country would “not be bullied.”

South Africa is the first country on the continent to hold the rotating leadership for the Group of 20. The foreign ministers from the group of the world’s biggest economies are due to meet in Johannesburg at the end of February.

The South African government on its part has insisted that there has been no forcible confiscation of land, and that any expropriation that happens will follow a “constitutionally mandated legal process”. Experts have criticised attempts to suggest that South Africa’s law is in any way similar to Zimbabwe’s forcible confiscation of land belonging to white farmers since the 2000s.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the country will not be bullied into dancing to America’s tune. Credit: Al-Jazeera

The South African law bars the arbitrary takeover of land and provides for compensation in most cases. It also requires authorities to first try to reach a reasonable agreement with the landowner, only failing which might the land be expropriated.

Land can only be expropriated for public purposes – such as to build schools, hospitals or highways – or for public interest, which includes land reform. More than three decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa’s minority white community – which constitutes 7 percent of the population – controls more than 70 percent of the country’s land.

Ramaphosa issued a statement denying Trump’s accusations: “South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African Government has not confiscated any land.” He also pointed out that Trump’s threat about cutting funding has little relevance, saying: “With the exception of PEPFAR Aid, which constitutes 17% of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS programme, there is no other funding that is received by South Africa from the United States.”

And with Trump’s recent freeze on almost all foreign aid, it’s no longer clear if PEPFAR — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — is likely to survive anyway.

Yet white South African farmers have long had an obsession with Trump.

In 2018, during his first term in office, Trump alleged that South Africa had witnessed “large-scale killings” of white farmers. There is no evidence to back the claim, and South Africa at the time said Trump was misinformed.

But while Trump’s attacks on South Africa are in keeping with the narrative of white victimhood that the US president’s political movement has long relied on, tensions between the nations didn’t vanish in the four years that Biden was president.

As a matter of fact, they rose.

In early 2024, South Africa’s then-foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, flew to the US on a crisis management trip. The US Congress was discussing a bill to punish South Africa for its staunch criticism of the Israel conflict in Gaza. South Africa had in December 2023 taken Israel to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, accusing it of allegedly committing genocide in Gaza. Since then, the ICJ has passed interim orders against Israel, while many countries have joined South Africa’s case.

The ICJ is yet to issue its final verdict, but some US members of Congress decided that South Africa needed to pay a price.

The US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act, introduced in the US House almost exactly a year ago on February 6, 2024, accused South Africa “of siding with malign actors, including Hamas, a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and a proxy of the Iranian regime”.

World’s richest man, Elon Musk who grew up in apartheid South Africa has backed Trump’s executive orders against South Africa and has publicly accused the South African government of victimizing white farmers. Credit:NPR.org

In Washington, Pandor tried to meet members of Congress and spoke to think tanks to articulate the apartheid-era roots of South Africa’s opposition to Israel’s policies against Palestine, and the war in Gaza.

That bill is yet to pass, but Trump in his executive order and Rubio in his recent comments both also referred to South Africa’s Israel policy as a reason for Washington’s blowback.

“South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements,” the executive order said.

But what are the “aggressive actions” that South Africa has taken against the US? Rubio also accused South Africa of “anti-Americanism”. What was he talking about?

The 2024 bill in Congress offers a glimpse of the deeper strategic tension that’s been shadowing ties for a while. The 2024 bill accuses South Africa of pursuing “closer ties with the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’) and the Russian Federation”.

In May 2023, the US ambassador to South Africa accused the country of supplying weapons to Russia for its war against Ukraine through a cargo ship that docked secretly at a naval base near Cape Town.

An investigation by the South African government concluded in September 2023 that “no evidence” was found for claims that South Africa supplied weapons to Russia. Ramaphosa said the allegation “had a most damaging effect on our currency, our economy, and our standing in the world; in fact, it tarnished our image”.

Earlier that year, in February 2023, South Africa, Russia and China held joint military exercises in the Indian Ocean.

The US responded by saying it was “concerned”.

And Pretoria has been careful to balance relations between Russia and China, on the one hand, and the US and its allies, on the other.

Despite the ICJ case, South Africa continues to maintain robust trade ties with Israel. For some periods over the last year, South Africa was the biggest supplier of coal to Israel, even as the Ramaphosa government faced domestic accusations of hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, South Africa also convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin not to attend the BRICS summit it hosted last year. South Africa is a member of the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant against Putin over the war in Ukraine. Members of the ICC are expected to arrest individuals with warrants against them.

A supporter of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-leaning group, walks on a farm, in Free State province, South Africa. Credit: Reuters

South Africa is the US’s largest trading partner on the African continent, with $9.3bn worth of US exports going to South Africa in 2022. About 600 US businesses operate in the country.

South Africa is also a critical strategic partner for the US – a democratic bulwark in a region where many other post-liberation movements have turned towards authoritarianism.

There’s plenty at stake for South Africa if relations with the United States deteriorate further.

Though China is by far South Africa’s largest trading partner, the US is the fourth-largest source of its imports – after China, Germany and India – and the second-biggest destination for its exports, after China, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC).

South Africa benefits from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a US law passed by Congress in 2000 that grants many sub-Saharan nations, including South Africa, duty-free access to US markets for 1,800 products. South African exports to the US in 2022 stood at almost $11bn, OEC data shows.

The threat of South Africa losing that status under the AGOA now hovers over the relationship, as Trump takes on trade relationships that he believes are unfair to the US.