Inside the Desperate Diplomatic Efforts to Salvage U.S.-South Africa Ties

Top U.S. and South African officials and lawmakers have engaged in a flurry of behind-the-scenes diplomacy to try to salvage ties that have been roiled by South Africa’s support of Russia in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

South Africa has long maintained a special relationship with Moscow, dating back to the Soviet Union’s support for the resistance movement against the racist apartheid South African regime that fell in the early 1990s. But ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, South Africa has faced growing pressure from the West to rethink its bond with Moscow and its support for Russia amid the war, leading to a series of diplomatic headaches that have shaken ties between the United States and South Africa and led to calls in Washington for a complete overhaul of the relationship.

A top Biden administration official and, separately, an influential U.S. lawmaker have plans to travel to South Africa in the coming weeks to find ways to mend ties and pressure South Africa to reappraise its relationship with Moscow, according to four current and former officials as well as congressional aides familiar with the matter. One of the State Department’s top-ranking officials, Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, is expected to travel to South Africa in the coming weeks, while Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and an influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is mulling plans for his own trip to South Africa next month, officials and aides said. These officials and aides cautioned that the details on the trips weren’t set in stone, and neither Meeks’s office nor the State Department responded to a request for comment confirming or denying travel plans.

The planned travel highlights the brewing diplomatic battles between Russia and the West to rally support for their competing causes in the so-called global south. While Washington and its allies that support Ukraine have pushed to completely isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin on the world stage, Putin’s top aides, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, have in turn sought to counter the Western campaign of isolation with their own flurry of shuttle diplomacy throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Russia plans to host a major two-day diplomatic summit with African leaders later this month in St. Petersburg.

As both Russia and Ukraine are major global exporters of food staples, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and other commodities, the war in Ukraine sparked economic shockwaves that have roiled vulnerable economies across Africa. A delegation of African leaders, led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, visited Ukraine and Russia last month in hopes of laying the groundwork for peace talks, but those efforts ran aground after Putin dismissed large parts of their proposed peace plan and Ukraine vowed to continue fighting to liberate its territories under Russian control.

When Putin pulled out of a U.N.-brokered deal allowing Ukrainian grain safe passage to global markets through the Black Sea this week, Korir Sing’Oei, a top Kenyan official, condemned the move as “a stab on the back at global food security prices” that “disproportionately impacts countries in the Horn of Africa already impacted by drought.”

Still, while many African countries have condemned Russia at the United Nations, they have been reluctant to take additional steps, such as cutting economic or diplomatic ties with Russia or joining in Western-led sanctions on Moscow.

“In Africa, the narrative is that this is a European war far from them. They have other important issues to handle, and it’s not their war, even though they are a collateral victim of that war,” said Rama Yade, senior director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council think tank.

But back in Washington, U.S. officials have grown increasingly incensed with South Africa’s support for Russia as the death toll from the conflict in Ukraine and evidence of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians mounts almost daily. Frustrations boiled over when the U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Reuben Brigety, in May accused South Africa of secretly smuggling arms to Russia through a cargo ship connected to a sanctioned Russian company.

A bipartisan group of four influential lawmakers last month sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan urging the Biden administration to scrap plans to hold a major U.S. trade summit in South Africa. “We are seriously concerned that hosting the 2023 [African Growth and Opportunity Act] Forum in South Africa would serve as an implicit endorsement of South Africa’s damaging support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and possible violation of U.S. sanctions law,” wrote the lawmakers in the letter, which was obtained by Foreign Policy.

The four lawmakers who wrote the letter—Meeks; House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul; Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and senior Democratic Sen. Chris Coons—also suggested that the United States should reassess whether South Africa is eligible to remain in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the cornerstone U.S. free trade compact with sub-Saharan Africa.

Risch introduced two amendments to the massive $886 billion U.S. defense policy bill making its way through Congress. The first requested Biden to find a new location for the 2023 AGOA summit, and the second would compel the secretaries of defense and state to submit a report to Congress on “actions of the Republic of South Africa that threaten United States national security interests.” It is not yet clear whether either amendment will make it into the final version of the defense bill.

Last week, a delegation of senior South African officials visited Washington, in part to defend the country’s foreign-policy approach and tamp down mounting frustration from U.S. officials and lawmakers over its relationship with Russia. The delegation included Trade Minister Ebrahim Patel, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana, and Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni. They met with Biden administration officials, lawmakers in the House of Representatives, and senior Senate aides, according to the officials and aides familiar with the trip. It followed a hastily arranged trip to Washington in May from South African National Security Advisor Sydney Mufamadi amid Brigety’s accusation.

Yade argued that the U.S.-South African relationship is too important for either side to let it collapse, both in terms of their mutually beneficial trade ties and South Africa’s strategic importance as a political and economic powerhouse in Africa.

“The leading role of South Africa on the continent is too strong. These days, with strong competition with Russia and China as well as other regional powers on the continent, the United States cannot afford to break up with South Africa without endangering the rest of their relationships in Africa,” Yade said.

Still, the conversations the South African delegation had on Capitol Hill were a rude awakening, said one congressional aide familiar with the discussions. “Despite past cooperation and potential trade benefits, South Africa’s political actions—which baldly threaten U.S. national security interests—have outweighed the traditional stabilizers and benefits in the relationship,” said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Directly challenging U.S. interests has tilted the balance unfavorably, contradicting the outdated narrative in Washington that South Africa’s bilateral relationship with the United States is ‘too big to fail.’ Staff told the delegation it is already failing.”

South Africa has faced outsized scrutiny over its relationship with Moscow since Brigety told reporters he was “confident” that weapons were covertly loaded onto a sanctioned Russian cargo ship docked in South Africa’s Simon’s Town Naval Base in December 2022. The South African government initially denied the charges and said it would launch an investigation into the claims. That investigation has wrapped up, though the findings will not be released publicly, despite pressure and outcry from civil society organizations, as South Africa’s Daily Maverick reports.

Beyond that scandal, South Africa has deepened its military ties with Russia since the invasion and has previously abstained from U.N. votes condemning Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, setting itself apart from other African countries that denounced the invasion. South Africa held joint military training drills with Russia and China in February 2023, coinciding with the first anniversary of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and allowed a sanctioned Russian military cargo plane to land at a South African air base. Last week, South Africa abstained from a U.N. Human Rights Council vote to assist Ukraine with human rights initiatives, in the latest bellwether of its stance on the war in Ukraine.

South Africa narrowly avoided another major diplomatic and legal headache this week when it announced that Putin would not attend a summit with fellow leaders from Brazil, India, and China, the so-called BRICS bloc, in Johannesburg next month. Lavrov will attend in Putin’s place, the South African government announced, though the Kremlin has not yet commented on the matter.

Putin’s no-show appears to be the first concrete result of the arrest warrant issued for him by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March for crimes against humanity. As a signatory to the Rome Statute that founded the ICC, South Africa would have been obligated under international law to arrest Putin.

“Russia has made it clear that the arrest of its sitting president would be tantamount to a declaration of war,” Ramaphosa wrote in an affidavit to a South African court, published Tuesday, before his government announced Putin wouldn’t attend the summit in person. “It would be inconsistent with our constitution to risk engaging in war with Russia.”