When negotiation rules are written in disappearing ink, can President Cyril Ramaphosa find an anchor point in his meeting with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, this week?
This is far from a trivial question. It goes to the heart of Trump’s long-standing penchant for strategic ambiguity, a tactic that turns clarity into a scarce resource and leaves trade partners scrambling to pin down a landing zone — that sweet spot of compromise where US demands and foreign interests overlap.
Ramaphosa’s challenge is twofold: convince Washington that Pretoria remains a valuable trading partner while wading through Trump’s unpredictable transactional approach to diplomacy. But therein lies the problem: what does the US actually want?
The rationale for the paused Liberation Day tariffs has shifted from reviving US manufacturing to curbing fentanyl imports, reducing trade deficits, and punishing unfair trading practices. Most recently, isolating China and redrawing international alliances. The result is a chaotic, contradictory approach that leaves trading partners guessing.
Purely from a detached point of view, Trump’s exploitation of vague language as a strategic tool in diplomacy has its merits, to be sure. At its core, this approach blends elements of political realism and Machiavellian pragmatism, favouring an opportunistic, outcome-oriented stance over commitment to clear positions and keeping trade partners off balance to extract greater concessions.
Still, the opposite is just as likely: if no-one knows where the trade sweet spot is, why bother negotiating at all? Without a defined scope, negotiations can veer into aimless frustration rather than resolution. The upshot is that no amount of spin can hide the basic truth: trade agreements require give-and-take.
Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in SA’s predicament. Facing an array of implicit demands from Washington, Ramaphosa and his team are caught in this fog. The US and SA officials are tossing around conflicting figures. The US insists its 31% is grounded in its calculations that SA is charging an effective 60% on US goods entering our shores, while SA insists it levies a modest 7.6% on average. That’s a wide gap. Too wide to find a firm baseline from which to start negotiations.
Of course, what complicates matters and potentially inflates the numbers are SA’s choices in global politics. Historically rooted in values of sovereignty, multilateralism and justice, SA’s claimed nonaligned stance has come under sharp scrutiny as the world becomes increasingly polarised.
The US has expressed concerns about our perceived closeness to Russia, and the genocide case against Israel and, lately, there has been Trump’s misleading crusade of protecting the rights of supposedly under-siege white Afrikaners. These geopolitical tensions cast a shadow over trade negotiations, adding layers of complexity to an already opaque environment.
SA’s delegation — led by trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau, international relations & co-operation minister Ronald Lamola and agriculture minister John Steenhuisen — have crafted a trade package aimed at repairing relations. But the real question is whether Washington is even interested in a structured agreement, or if Trump prefers to keep SA in a state of perpetual uncertainty.
Ramaphosa has made it clear that SA wants to remain a key US partner, telling delegates at the Africa CEO Forum last week that “there’s still a long way to go”. If anything, it would be logical to surmise that a phone call between Ramaphosa and Trump three weeks before Washington isn’t about to flirt with candour. Both parties will be stepping into a poker game.
The Trump administration has shown little interest in smoothing relations. Instead, it is doubling down on punitive measures, expanding its inflammatory refugee resettlement programme and threatening to skip the Group of 20 summit in November unless SA rolls back land reform legislation.
As SA watches, only time will reveal whether the meeting will mark a genuine departure from Washington’s theatrical ambiguity, or simply reinforce the notion that in Trump’s diplomatic playbook, the rules vanish as swiftly as they appear.
• Motsoeneng is Business Day acting editor.
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