A Strained Alliance: Rasool’s Expulsion and the Future of US–South African Relations

Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool arriving at the Cape Town International Airport on March 23rd, 2025. Source: AP

This past week, following critical comments about what he saw as President Trump’s “assault on incumbency,” the South African ambassador to the United States Ebrahim Rasool was expelled from Washington, declared a persona non grata, and given a week to leave the country. In a post announcing the expulsion, Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned Rasool as a “race-baiting politician” and linked a post from a right-wing news site reporting on Rasool’s comments on a recent webinar for a South African think tank. A State Department spokesperson declared his remarks—which suggested that Trump’s political movement was partially a response to a “supremacist instinct—” unacceptable to the President and “every American.” 

Upon his return to Cape Town, Rasool and his wife were welcomed home by cheering crowds as he reaffirmed his previous statements, saying he would wear his persona non grata status as a “badge of dignity.” Rasool and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa expressed disappointment in the Trump administration’s decision but a firm willingness to maintain the long-lasting diplomatic ties between the two nations. While Rasool noted the importance of repairing its relationship with the US, he said that President Trump had falsely accused South Africa of being anti-American well before expelling him, suggesting that divisions go much deeper than this relatively minor diplomatic spat. 

This rare expulsion comes at a tumultuous time in Washington-Pretoria relations, following South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel, a close US ally, and, more recently, the Trump administration’s February executive order cutting off all federal aid to South Africa. Some estimates indicate that freezing this aid, which almost exclusively goes toward lifesaving care for HIV/AIDS patients, could cause more than half a million deaths over the next decade. The order cited, among other things, South Africa’s new Land Expropriation Act as its primary motivation—a policy Trump has openly criticized in recent years. In 2018, Trump condemned South Africa in now-debunked allegations about “land seizures” and “large-scale killing of…white farmers.” The executive order seemingly mirrors this sentiment, accusing the South African government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” This month, Trump offered to resettle white South African farmers and their families as refugees in the US—a shocking move after his January suspension of the asylum system at the southern border.

South Africa’s new Land Expropriation Act, which was signed into law by President Ramaphosa on January 23rd of this year, is similar to the American practice of eminent domain, a process making it easier for the government to expropriate private land for public use. A crucial difference in this policy, though, is the special circumstances in which owners may not be compensated. These rare cases, which include instances when the land is abandoned, purely held for speculative value, or already heavily invested in by the government, exist within a broader framework of reconciling historical injustices in post-Apartheid South Africa. For reference, white South Africans today comprise 8% of the country’s population but control around 72% of freehold farmland. 

President Ramaphosa has staunchly defended South Africa’s land reform efforts and has since stated that South Africa “will not be deterred” by the recent aid cut. However, this discord between the two administrations, aggravated by Rasool’s expulsion, could underlie more serious impacts on this decades-long mutually beneficial diplomatic relationship. These escalating tensions seemingly coincide with growing fears about diminishing American economic dominance, especially in light of efforts by BRICS countries, like South Africa, that have perceivably laid the groundwork for a world economy less dependent on the US BRICS, an informal economic and diplomatic group initially formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has expanded its membership to include about 40% of global GDP and more than half of the world’s population. Member states like China and Russia have urged for a BRICS currency to challenge the US dollar, which is currently the most used currency in global trade. Trump recently criticized these efforts, calling for a BRICS pledge to forgo any rival currency and threatening a “100% tariff” on those who do not comply. 

Given this contention with BRICS nations at a moment in which the US is taking an increasingly aggressive, so-called “America First,” foreign policy stance, some see Rasool’s expulsion and the aid freeze as part of a series of punitive measures exercised by the Trump administration against South Africa for its role in BRICS and continued efforts toward economic self-determination. While these two events alone have significant costs for South Africa, the bigger fear is that they may trigger greater economic penalties against the country. If the US, South Africa’s second largest trading partner, were to limit the country’s exports or, more concerningly, remove them from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a highly beneficial preferential trade agreement between various African nations and the US, the economic impacts could be dire, if not recessionary. 

Though the US has made it clear through recent foreign policy measures that it can impose corrective measures like those used against South Africa on some of its closest allies, the question is whether it should. Scholars of international relations have expressed concern that the US’s recent aggressive stance toward other long-term partners, such as Canada and the European Union, might have serious implications regarding the trust and credibility underpinning decades of US international relations. Considering how integral these values are to ensuring its interests abroad, this latest diplomatic scuffle with South Africa brings to light an interesting dichotomy in which, as a reaction to fears about diminishing US dominance, the US might end up pushing these countries further towards alternative, more predictable sources of diplomatic and economic cooperation. Following the Trump administration’s USAID shutdown in February, Columbia political science professor Elizabeth Saunders said, “I think diversification away from dependence on the US is going to be the name of the game.” 

In the presence of an emerging isolationist shift by the US and an overtly confrontational approach toward all who stand in the way of its foreign policy objectives, Rasool’s expulsion and the executive order that preceded it could be results rather than causes of a growing divide between the US and South Africa. Like many other nations, South Africa has maintained a strongly unaligned foreign policy stance and embraced diplomatic and economic goals that have sometimes clashed with US interests directly. These efforts have seemingly placed the country in the crosshairs of a wider transition by Washington away from its traditional allies, a stance that might irreparably damage its credibility in Pretoria and the world more broadly.