The new age of diplomacy under the Trump administration

Le Quotidien

02-07-2025

The recent White house visit of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa has sparked a lot of incredulity around the world. The African leader quickly realized that the State visit had turned into something that can only be described as an ambush.
If you're wondering how visits from heads of states turned into inaudible bickering on live television, look no further than the reality-TV man himself, Donald Trump. And yes, he also happens to be the president of the world's most powerful nation. Since he returned to power at the beginning of 2025, the leader of the MAGA movement has been trying his best to give a new meaning to the word diplomacy, and he just may be succeeding as far as the United States are concerned.
Though I could offer a dictionary's definition of the word 'diplomacy', I'm tempted to share a teaching from my father who, years ago, warned me about not embarrassing people even when I was in the right. He would say that there was always benefit in providing people with a dignified exit ramp even in the most contentious of disagreements because we share the same world, and we may have to deal with each other again. Other people may also see how I behaved when I was in a position of strength, and they would afford me the same grace if I someday found myself on the weaker side of the exchange.
As evidenced by the South African President's experience in Washington DC, Mr Trump would obviously disagree with the above perspective. In fact, it's fair to say that the exact opposite is true for this administration. The United States current government seems to view international relationships through a narrow, personal, and quite frankly imperialistic view that cannot possibly benefit the country in the long run. In just a few months, the MAGA billionaire has managed to not only upend America's longest and strongest alliances across the world but also turn the oval office into a backdrop for painfully comedic scenes.
Those comedic scenes of course refer in part to the exchanges between the South African delegation that was sitting across Mr. Trump and his few members of his cabinet including the mega-donor and tech industry magnate Elon Musk, a native of South Africa himself. The American president would go on to present Mr. Ramaphosa with false claims of a 'white genocide' supposedly happening in South Africa and would go as as far as showing 'evidence' in the form of a video montage. The video of course showed no such thing, as it was showing protesters with white crosses and not tombs as the US president asserted. It has since then been reported that the video might not have even been shot in South Africa at all.
CNN© US president and Vice-President in the middle of tense exchange with Ukrainian president ZelenskyyIt would be easy to focus on the racial element of the discussion and the fantastical claims of white genocide in a country where white people own 72% of the land despite only making up between 7 to 8% of the population. I however believe that doing so would be doing Mr Trump's bidding because these sordid allegations are just the latest weapon of mass distraction that he and his supporters have chosen to deploy to stir us away from his disastrous start to his second presidency. The shocking element should be that a man in his position would offer demonstrably false allegations for the whole world to see, not because he cared about South Africa's white farmers, but because he wanted to send a signal to South Africa and other similar countries that he could summon and humiliate them because he had the power to do so. No one should be confused that the ambush of President Ramaphosa was mostly payback for South Africa's position on the Genocide in Gaza, and the case it initiated before the International Court of Justice that resulted in Israeli leaders being indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was also likely due to pressures from the members of the Trump circle like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller who have tacitly or explicitly embraced white nationalist causes. Miller, who is a fixture in the white house, even suggested that Habeas Corpus should be suspended in the United States, allowing the government to detain individuals without just reason.
It should shock and alarm us all indeed, that this iteration of the United States has seemingly given up on diplomacy and is trying to re-assert a waning influence on the world through naked intimidation. The exchange with the leader of the ANC party is unfortunately not the only example of this new direction of American diplomacy. Just a couple of months earlier, the Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelenskyy was treated in a similarly undignified way in the White House, all while his country is in the midst of a conflict with Russia that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives on either side of the war. Zelenskyy was publicly berated by Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance and told in no uncertain terms that his and the survival of his people depended on the US; something that he had better show gratitude for. That entire ordeal concluded in the Ukrainian leader's visit being cut short by his American counterpart. With allies like that…
Politico© Donald Trump during a state visit to Qatar during which he accepted a $400 million plane as a gift
Following the 2nd war and the devastation it left on most of the world, the US was the world's lone remaining superpower, and de-facto became a police state, even with the creation of the United Nations and related bodies aiming to enforce the newly enshrined international laws among all member nations. Despite its military power, the US has always been wise to build coalitions and secure allies before acting on the world stage. Whether that was genuine coalition building or a purely symbolic gesture from the world's most powerful country is up for debate, but what is no longer questionable is that the Trump administration is determined to go at it alone and do away with all pretenses of diplomacy. As Cyril Ramaphosa subtlety suggested, the only way to have good relationships with America these days might just be directly through Mr. Trump's or his family's various businesses.
America is undergoing fundamental internal changes perhaps not seen since the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1960s, and we can only hope these changes don't reflect the current perception of the US on the world stage; which is worryingly going from that of a police state to a potential mercenary-state.
Dema Sane, Bayonne NJ