G20 multilateralism: Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ vs Ubuntu diplomacy

South Africa’s G20 multilateralism could not be further removed from the worldview Donald Trump articulated during his 2026 State of the Union address.

On the same late-February night US President Donald Trump stood before the United States Congress declaring a “golden age of America is now upon us,” the embers of a very different kind of summit were still cooling in Johannesburg. The contrast runs deeper than mere rhetoric.

And not to get all Henny Penny about it, but the disconnect feels structural and even civilizational. It is an alarming moment for anyone who still believes the world’s multilateral institutions are worth preserving. What South Africa G20 multilateralism proposed in Johannesburg stands in direct opposition to what Washington performed on Capitol Hill.

The grievance podium

Trump’s 2026 State of the Union speech was a record-breaking 108 minutes of self-congratulation and grievance. It was also the definitive text of America First 2.0. 

The speech hinged on a particular view of the world: that the nation-state is the only legitimate unit of moral concern. And strength is the only language adversaries understand. Oh, and the global order is a racket run by others at America’s expense. 

South Africa’s G20 presidency, which concluded its historic Johannesburg summit in November under the banner of “Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability,” rested on a precise opposite theory. That individual nations cannot thrive in isolation, and that the challenges of climate, debt, and inequality are indivisible. 

To say the least, these two visions stand as incompatible accounts of what the world is. And who it’s for.

The speech the world was not invited to

Trump’s address was, in many respects, a domestic rant disguised as foreign policy. He touted 70,000 new construction jobs, a figure that independent fact-checkers found inflated relative to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which showed approximately 44,000 construction jobs added in his first year. 

He called a Supreme Court ruling striking down his emergency tariffs “unfortunate” and “disappointing.” That may be the most presidential understatement of the year. 

He spoke of Iran with carefully calibrated menace: “I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror… to have a nuclear weapon.” He nevertheless insisted his preference remains diplomacy, a preference that costs nothing to state but everything to demonstrate.

What stood largely absent from the speech was the world itself. For a country that holds the G20 presidency this year and is due to host world leaders at Doral in Florida, the silence on multilateral commitments was striking. 

The international order, the architecture of institutions, treaties, and shared norms built since 1945, went unmentioned except as an implicit foil: a system that made deals “unfair” to Americans. That Trump alone had the will to correct this course. 

It’s a posture that’s been building for years. What changed on Tuesday night was its confidence. Its volume, and the sheer absence of any concession to the world waiting outside.

A historic event

South Africa’s G20 presidency was the first ever held on African soil, and for the continent’s 1.4 billion people, it carried the weight of a long-awaited recognition. President Cyril Ramaphosa framed the presidency explicitly in terms of Ubuntu, the Southern African philosophical tradition holding that a person is a person through other people. 

“In the spirit of Ubuntu,” the official presidency document declared, “we recognise that individual nations cannot thrive in isolation. Countries that attempt to prosper alone amid widespread poverty and underdevelopment contradict the essence of Ubuntu and our collective humanity.”

Reading that statement now, the Trump speech still fresh, it functions less like a philosophical statement and more as a direct address to Washington.

The summit America declined

The Trump administration declined to send an official delegation to the Johannesburg summit. They cited, among other things, Trump’s widely debunked claims that white South Africans were being “killed and slaughtered.” 

South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, with characteristic diplomatic restraint, joked that the G20 presidency would be handed over to an “empty chair.” 

Trump, in turn, suggested “South Africa shouldn’t even be in the Gs anymore.” 

The South African government, in a post-summit address, noted with gingerly precision that the disinformation campaign was driven by “groups and individuals within our country, in the US and elsewhere.” It stood as an über-diplomatic way of naming an obvious smear.

But the summit pressed forward regardless of no-shows and zingers. It produced a 122-point declaration focused on debt relief, climate finance, and food security. 

The United States declined to endorse the outcome document. It was, as the Observer Research Foundation coolly noted, “solidarity, equality, and sustainability in an era of discord.” That phrase might also serve as the clearest summary of South Africa G20 multilateralism itself.

 The “Great Divergence” of 2026

Framing disconnect as a culture-war clash between two irreconcilable visions carries a real cost. It obscures the material stakes lurking underneath rhetoric. 

Sitting out debt sustainability reform has real consequences. It leaves dozens of countries with no path to relief on loans they can never repay in a currency they do not control. There is growing consensus among global economists and diplomats. They feel the current international financial architecture is increasingly out of sync with the needs of the Global South.

When Washington withdraws from climate finance commitments, it closes the door on the just energy transitions that countries like South Africa, whose economy remains tethered to coal, desperately need to fund.

It takes two, though

The impasse draws from both sides, though. As Chatham House analysts pointed out ahead of Johannesburg, South Africa’s own domestic fragilities, high unemployment, persistent corruption, and the precarious Government of National Unity, complicate its claim to global moral leadership. 

Then there’s this. South Africa’s GDP grew at just 0.7% in 2024. Official unemployment hovers above 33% while nearly 40% of the population lives below the national poverty line. It’s a heavy burden, projecting Ubuntu abroad when your own citizens are consumed by the daily arithmetic of survival.

None of this undoes Ramaphosa’s multilateral vision. But it sure complicates it. The Council on Foreign Relations noted that South Africa’s Johannesburg summit “may have laid the groundwork” for the G20 that Trump will host in Florida. 

The Florida conversation, however, is expected to pivot sharply toward deregulation, fossil fuel abundance, and an America First framing of trade. 

The return of Realpolitik

History permits a certain comfort here. Two governments with irreconcilable priorities have managed before through formal channels, polite communiqués, and the durable inertia of institutions too large to fail quickly. The G20 has weathered American ambivalence. It may weather this too.

Some push back against that sense of comfort, though. Only 12% of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are currently on track. The decade’s remaining years will determine whether the global development project is merely delayed or definitively abandoned. 

A G20 in which the world’s largest economy uses its presidency to champion fossil fuels and bilateral deal-making, while declining to endorse multilateral debt relief, amounts to a defection from the common project, whatever diplomatic language surrounds it.

Trump’s “golden age” is, in the end, a zero-sum proposition. It assumes American prosperity is achieved by outcompeting the world, rather than by building the conditions, stable institutions, shared rules, and sustainable development, in which broader prosperity becomes possible. 

South Africa’s Ubuntu diplomacy, whatever its domestic contradictions, at least begins from a more defensible premise: that world crises do not respect borders. And that a rules-based order is preferable to one where, to paraphrase The Melian Dialogue, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

The stillness of determination Ramaphosa invoked in Johannesburg is up against something more bombastic. More nakedly potent. Whether it survives may depend less on the quality of the argument than on whether enough countries decide that the world Ramaphosa is describing is the one worth fighting for.

It is. And they should.