How Cyril Ramaphosa Started a Cold War with America

South Africa is in a “Cold War” with the United States (US).

This is according to Fikile Mbalula, the secretary general of the African National Congress (ANC), who was addressing reporters at Luthuli House, the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg, after a meeting of the party’s national executive committee earlier this week.

“There is what is called, in a lack of better words, a quote unquote ‘Cold War’ between the United States of America and our country,” he said. He went further. “Our country is under attack.”

These remarks were not delivered off the cuff, nor did they come from a marginal figure seeking attention. They were made by the secretary general of the biggest party in the country and the biggest in the current governing coalition, in a formal setting, immediately after the party’s top leadership had convened. When Mbalula speaks in this context, he articulates the settled position of the party’s dominant leadership faction.

The Cold War framing was therefore not accidental. It reflected the worldview of the faction that currently sets the ANC’s direction, the faction led by Cyril Ramaphosa.

South Africa did not drift into a Cold War with the United States. It arrived there under Ramaphosa’s leadership.

The language the governing party now uses to describe Washington did not emerge from the margins. It has hardened steadily over time and has been normalised under Ramaphosa’s watch. Mbalula’s remarks were not a deviation from that trajectory. They were its clearest public expression.

South Africa’s relationship with the United States has deteriorated more sharply during Ramaphosa’s presidency than at any point since 1994.

Under Thabo Mbeki, who was president of the country from 1999 to 2008, South Africa often disagreed with the US, sometimes openly and sharply. Yet the relationship remained anchored in diplomatic engagement, institutional respect, and strategic realism. Disputes were managed within a framework that recognised mutual interests and the costs of open antagonism.

Even under Jacob Zuma (who was president from 2009 to 2018), amid corruption scandals and deep mistrust, the tone toward Washington remained recognisably diplomatic. In February 2017, following a telephonic discussion with recently elected Donald Trump, the South African government said that “the two presidents reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening the already strong bilateral relations between the two countries”.

Speaking later that year to the US Chamber of Commerce’s African Business Initiative, Zuma told American business leaders, “South Africa is open for business, open for tourism and open for partnerships in many sectors”, describing the US as “an important partner”.

What has changed under Ramaphosa is not that relations have become difficult, but that they have been allowed to slide into open antagonism.

The deterioration has occurred under his watch, guided by his faction, and defended by his senior lieutenants.

Contrary to a persistent media narrative, Ramaphosa is not a passive president presiding over an undisciplined movement. He is firmly in control of his faction, and the major foreign policy decisions of recent years have occurred with his knowledge and consent.

The attempt to portray the inclusion of Iran in the recent Simonstown naval exercises as an act of military insubordination illustrates this point. The suggestion that South Africa’s armed forces somehow went rogue and conducted exercises involving Iran without presidential awareness strains credulity.

Ramaphosa knew.

What makes this approach striking is its futility. It is difficult to identify which global audience the ANC believes will be persuaded by public denunciations of the US. No major power is waiting to rally behind a fiscally constrained, diplomatically isolated middle-income country engaged in crude ideological posturing. South Africa’s clumsy attempts at performative nonalignment do not impress Washington, and they quietly embarrass supposed partners in Beijing and Moscow, who practise hard-nosed realism rather than theatrical defiance.

All of this unfolds at a moment when the ANC is at its weakest electorally, when South Africa’s public finances are under strain, and the economy is struggling to grow. Escalating confrontation with one of the country’s most important trading partners under these conditions reflects not moral courage, but foolishness and recklessness.

It is therefore no surprise that, on both sides of the Atlantic, a growing body of opinion has begun to converge on a previously unthinkable conclusion. The normalisation of relations between South Africa and the US may depend not on better messaging or tactical resets, but on a change in leadership. Increasingly, the view being quietly expressed in diplomatic and policy circles is that the removal of Cyril Ramaphosa from the presidency may be a necessary condition for the relationship to recover.