South Africans should stop treating US President Donald Trump’s hostility towards this country as mere bluster. Yes, some of it is absurd. The claim of a “white genocide” in South Africa is not a serious description of reality. It is a conspiratorial falsehood that has circulated for years on the international far right, and it has been repeatedly debunked by journalists, researchers and South Africans who understand this country’s crime patterns.
South Africa has a terrible violent crime problem, but the overwhelming majority of its victims are black, not white. Yet it is precisely because the claim is false that it should be taken seriously. The real danger lies not in the truth of the allegation, but in its usefulness.
In February last year Trump issued an executive order accusing South Africa of “egregious actions” and directing the US to promote the resettlement of Afrikaners as refugees allegedly escaping “government-sponsored race-based discrimination”. That was not a throwaway remark on social media. It was formal state action by the White House. The US government then moved ahead with an Afrikaner refugee programme, and to date thousands of South Africans have reportedly entered the US under the scheme.
That matters because great powers rarely justify coercion in honest terms. They moralise it. They speak the language of rights, persecution and rescue when what they are often really doing is identifying obstacles, weak points and opportunities. Humanitarian rhetoric can become a political technology: a way of constructing another state as illegitimate, abusive or unstable, and therefore as fair game for pressure, or worse.
That is why South Africa should be paying closer attention to what Trumpism actually is. It is not simply American conservatism with louder branding. It is a worldview in which international politics is a zero-sum contest between winners and losers. Alliances are transactional. Institutions are disposable. Legal and moral arguments are tools to be picked up or dropped depending on whether they advance American leverage. Countries are not engaged as sovereign equals so much as assessed for strategic value.
South Africa has strategic value. The Cape sea route has always mattered, but it matters more when the world’s other arteries are under strain. Recent disruption in the Red Sea and at Suez has forced ships to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, increasing voyage times, raising costs and pushing traffic back onto the southern route. The result is the Cape is no longer merely a historic passage at the foot of Africa. It is again one of the world’s most important strategic maritime alternatives when the northern system is destabilised.
That strategic picture does not end with shipping alone. The wider southwest Indian Ocean is gaining importance as major powers compete over critical minerals supply chains and access to strategically important deposits in the region, including rare earth minerals in Madagascar. That does not by itself prove any imminent hard-power design against South Africa. It does, however, make the Cape route even more significant. South Africa sits beside an increasingly valuable arc of maritime and mineral interests at precisely the moment when Washington is thinking in harder, more transactional terms about power, dependency and control.
Any serious American administration interested in preserving global commercial and naval reach would notice that. A Trump administration, with its overt fixation on advantage and leverage, would notice it even more. None of this means a US military occupation of Simon’s Town is imminent. To argue that would be to outrun the evidence. But it would be equally foolish to assume coercion only counts when US marines come ashore. Power is usually applied in gradations: diplomatic intimidation, trade pressure, information warfare, ideological narrative-setting, elite cultivation, selective sanctions, maritime signalling, intelligence operations and the steady delegitimisation of a target government. Before hard power is used, softening operations are often already under way.
That is the real significance of the “white genocide” lie. It is not merely offensive. It is preparatory. It helps create an international moral vocabulary in which South Africa can be framed not as a sovereign democracy with serious problems, but as a rogue state abusing a vulnerable minority while adopting hostile positions towards the US. Once that framing is normalised, outside pressure becomes easier to justify to foreign audiences.
South Africa has made this easier than it should have. Our foreign policy has too often been theatrical where it should have been strategic. We posture. We sermonise. We drift into symbolic anti-Americanism without anything like the state capacity, alliance discipline, military capability or economic resilience required to sustain a serious confrontation with a hostile major power. This is not principled non-alignment. It is often simply a muddle: moral grandstanding without hard-headed calculation.
A serious state would ask some uncomfortable questions. How exposed are our ports, shipping lanes and coastal infrastructure? What would co-ordinated US diplomatic and economic pressure look like? How resilient are our supply chains? How penetrable are our political and information environments? What assumptions are we making about the limits of American behaviour that may no longer hold under Trump? Those are not paranoid questions. They are sovereignty questions.
South Africa does not need to panic. It needs seriousness. It needs to stop oscillating between denial and slogan. It needs a foreign policy grounded in interests, capabilities and consequences. It needs a maritime strategy worthy of its geography. It needs a clearer coalition-building effort across Africa and beyond it, including with states that may not share Pretoria’s rhetoric but do share an interest in resisting the normalisation of great power bullying. The Commonwealth may even be useful as a political and diplomatic forum built around shared values.
Most of all, South Africa needs to understand the moment it is in. Trump and his circle are creating a harsher world: one in which falsehoods are operationalised, legal language is weaponised and weaker states are tested for signs of division, confusion and weakness. In such a world, the lie of “white genocide” is not only propaganda. It is a warning flare. We would be foolish to ignore it.
- Eliott is MD of Bearfish Strategic Services.
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