Trump’s total boycott of G20 casts shadow over its future

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Donald Trump’s unprecedented move to withdraw the US from the G20 summit this weekend has cast a pall over the first such gathering in Africa and marks a break with Washington’s previous role in multilateral governance.

The US will not participate at any level in the Johannesburg event, the first time any G20 member has totally boycotted the annual leaders’ gathering in its 26-year history. Not only will Trump shun the event, but the US will not send any officials.

That has cast into doubt its future as a forum for co-ordinating major global issues such as trade and financial stability among the world’s biggest economies.

“It’s bleak,” said one senior European diplomat involved in preparations for the summit, which begins on Saturday. “There’s really nothing that we can hope to achieve without the Americans engaging.”

Trump, who governs under an “America first” slogan, has attacked or criticised other major multilateral forums such as the UN, Nato and the COP climate change conference, but has not withdrawn all US participation from their big events.

The US president, who had previously said vice-president JD Vance would attend the summit, said the boycott was justified because white Afrikaners were being “slaughtered” in South Africa, a false claim that he has made repeatedly since returning to the White House.

Washington has written to the other G20 members informing them of its non-participation, a move that officials say means the consensus-based organisation will not be able to issue any joint statement.

But a White House senior official said: “It is a long-standing G20 tradition to issue only consensus deliverables, and it is shameful that the South African government is now trying to depart from this standard practice despite our repeated objections.”

The withdrawal stunned other delegations given that the US is the next holder of the group’s rotating presidency, and Trump is slated to host the planned 2026 summit.

“I don’t want to hand over to an empty chair, but the empty chair will be there,” host President Cyril Ramaphosa said last week.

Ramaphosa, who has long cast himself as a champion of multilateralism, said he would “symbolically hand over to that empty chair and then talk to President Trump”.

The US boycott has thrown pre-summit negotiations on potential joint statements into disarray, people briefed on the discussions told the FT, and further undermined already fragile points of possible convergence on issues such as climate change and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“We knew Trump hates this kind of thing but it’s one thing to be difficult, and another to completely blow it up,” said a second senior diplomat. “We have to go and try to salvage some kind of relationship.”

Trump’s withdrawal of the entire US delegation comes alongside decisions by the heads of state of Argentina, China, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey not to attend the summit, severely denting Ramaphosa’s ambition to use the forum to promote Africa’s global standing.

Trump said this week the G20 had “become basically the G100,” and has vowed that the meetings under the US presidency next year will be more “concentrated”.

Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s foreign minister, said the summit could not be “bogged down” by the US’s absence. He said a declaration might still be released.

“It is important that a declaration must be adopted by the countries that are present, because the institution cannot be bogged down by someone’s [absence],” Lamola said this week.

“In all multilateral platform events, it does happen for whatever reasons that heads of state are not able to attend, and they will delegate.”

Chris Hattingh, executive director of the Johannesburg-based Centre For Risk Analysis, an economics and policy think-tank, maintained that “if South Africa can get most of the attendees, if not all, to sign off on at least some of the points of the agenda, it can still be a success for South Africa’s G20 presidency”.

Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Washington