The 20th G20 summit held in South Africa in November 2025 was the most geopolitically tense since the organisation was established in 1999. The tensions emerged from the spectacular ideological, political, diplomatic, and economic fallout between the United States and the rest of the G20 member states. President Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy instituted upon his inauguration in January last year as the 47th president of the US clashed with South Africa’s and Africa’s inaugural G20 summit.
The vociferous bickering over the G20 as a multilateral platform recalls the Italian Marxian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s dictum: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” The world order as we have known it since the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, is fraying at the seams. As in the early 1990s, shifts are happening in an episodic, real-time manner. The G20, like other multilateral organisations such as the UN agencies of the World Trade Organization, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund), and others, is under intense contestation. This is the time for Africa as a collective, as regional economic communities, and as individual countries to roll out self-interested strategies.
The inflection point for the Johannesburg G20 was the intense friction between the US and South Africa. It was not just a big test of the America First policy vis-à-vis multilateral institutions. It was also a theatre where specific US grievances against South Africa played out. Key among these was South Africa’s drift away from the US orbit and its embrace of Washington’s geopolitical competitors, coalescing into Global South formations. In an era of great power competition, the Trump administration sees South Africa as aligning with competitors nesting under the BRICS umbrella. The inclusion of allegations of white genocide crimes ostensibly committed by the South African state added fuel to the fire. This culminated not just in Trump declining to attend the summit but also in a no-show for the entire US government. The fact that the G20 processes and, eventually, the summit proceeded suggests that in a decoupling global order, resilience is a trait that African countries should nurture.
Other African countries broadly welcomed South Africa’s hosting of the G20. After all, it was a showcase of African agency in the global system, a demonstration of African capacity following the African Union’s admission to the G20 in 2023. But instead, they became collateral damage of the punishment unleashed on middle-income South Africa by the US.
African countries should have learnt that hosting agenda-heavy events such as the G20 is not a walk in the park. Yet, mounting such consequential events provides deep learning curves that boost the capacity to negotiate in an increasingly self-help, transactional international system.
What do we learn from the tensions that engulfed the G20 South African presidency? A crucial overarching one is that expectations for Africa and the rest of the world will be extremely low during the US’s presidency in 2026. The US did not merely signal opposition to partnering with South Africa. Washington sent Pretoria-based US diplomats to the summit venue as observers, rather than Trump or a high-level representative. The handover of the G20 presidency from South Africa to the US was a low-key, perfunctory exercise overseen by relatively low-level diplomats, days after the summit. This was a break with tradition, where the G20 presidency is handed over to the incoming host country’s president by the incumbent country’s president. Ultimately, this weakens the G20 as a collective. It also gives pause to the AU and African countries’ hopes of structuring more equitable relations with the top global powers, all of them members of the G20, and should instead strengthen intra-African platforms such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
South Africa’s theme of solidarity, inclusivity, and equality, and related resolutions across various sub-themes, are now off the table, at least through the G20 2026. Yet the effort that was invested in the deliberations leading to the final communiqué should not go to waste. South Africa and the AU would do well to consider other avenues to advocate for the continent’s interests in the global system. Granted, the international system is in what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney referred to as “a rupture, not a transition” during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. Yet the fact that all the other G20 members rallied around South Africa to enable the passage of the G20 2025 declaration indicates that, even amid the rupture, some global powers still find it useful to align with proposals from Africa.
The tectonic geopolitical shifts underway mean that the proposals touted at last year’s G20 can be pursued to reform the post-World War II global order as we have known it. For instance, the leaders of Canada, France, the UK, and the EU have recently invoked what some refer to as pragmatic realism in reaching out to China and India to negotiate trade deals. In January alone, Canada’s Carney and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited China to strike an alternative economic partnership with President Xi Jinping. In the same month, European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went to India to strike deals with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These historical developments are clear indicators of the shifting global order. Importantly, all these countries are not only G20 members but also among the most consequential in the organisation, with their impact reaching all the way to the global governing body, the United Nations.
What do these shifting alliances and allegiances mean for Africa? The G20 areas of agreement should be negotiated in the context of the thaw in hitherto frozen relations between certain Global North and Global South countries. The UK’s G20 presidency in 2027 will present an opportunity for this, returning to the 2025 G20 resolutions that the US will shred in 2026.
Shortly after the end of the South African presidency, the G20 website was wiped clean, along with all the deliberations and resolutions predicated on the themes of solidarity, equality, and sustainability. As of mid-February, the G2O US website has no content. The world waits to see how the US will envision the 21st summit to be held in Miami in December this year. The US has made it clear that it would not invite South Africa to this event. And in January, South Africa responded by temporarily withdrawing from the G20 in 2026.
In the meantime, Africa would do well to leverage the AU’s G20 membership in the processes leading to Miami. Strategies should include understanding US interests in Africa and using the G20 as a platform to structure deals that benefit the continent. The top priority for the US today is access to Africa’s vast critical mineral resources. Another is Washington’s interest in pushing its digital tech onto the continent. In both sectors, the African private sector would be a good partner with the more policy-orientated AU, given the US focus on commercial deals.
Bob Wekesa is deputy director and research and communications coordinator at the African Centre for the Study of the United States, based at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nairobi and Master’s and doctoral degrees from the Communication University of China, Beijing. His area of teaching, research and public engagement is the intersection of journalism, media, and communications on the one hand and geopolitics, diplomacy and foreign policy on the other.
