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diplomacy
Rubio Slammed for Expelling South African Ambassador Over Trump Criticism
"It underscores that his critiques of white supremacy in the Age of Trump are perceived as threatening for one simple reason: He's right."
Mar 15, 2025
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has faced a flood of condemnation since announcing on social media Friday that "South Africa's ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country."
"Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates President Donald Trump," the secretary claimed. "We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA."
In the post on X—the social media site owned by Elon Musk, Trump's South Africa-born billionaire adviser—Rubio linked to an article by the right-wing news site Breitbart about Rasool saying during a Friday webinar that the U.S. president is leading global a white supremacist movement.
As examples of Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement exporting its "supremacist assault," Rasool pointed to Musk elevating Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform U.K. party, and Vice President JD Vance meeting with the leader of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party.
Responding to Rubio on X, North Carolina State University assistant teaching professor Nathan Lean said: "Ebrahim Rasool is a man of genuine decency, moral courage, and is a friend. This makes me absolutely embarrassed to be an American. And it underscores that his critiques of white supremacy in the Age of Trump are perceived as threatening for one simple reason: He's right."
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) similarly responded: "Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool is a principled leader who fought alongside Nelson Mandela against apartheid and has dedicated his career to democracy, interfaith cooperation, and justice. Baseless attacks like this only serve to divide. We stand by him and his lifelong commitment to building a more just and inclusive world."
Laila Al-Arian, executive producer of Al Jazeera's "Fault Lines," declared that "this administration is virulently and unabashedly Islamophobic, not even trying to hide how unhinged they are as they go after people for speech."
Rasool previously served as ambassador during the Obama administration and returned to the role shortly before Trump began his second term. Earlier this week, Semafor reported on his difficulties dealing with the current administration:
He has failed to secure routine meetings with State Department officials and key Republican figures since Trump took office in January, Washington and South African government insiders told Semafor, drawing frustration in Pretoria.
Rasool is likely to have been frozen out for his prior vocal criticism of Israel, a South African diplomat, based in Washington, told Semafor. "A man named Ebrahim, who is Muslim, with a history of pro-Palestine politics, is not likely to do well in that job right now," said one of them. While South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in December 2023, accusing it of genocide in Gaza, Rasool is nevertheless widely considered to be among the government's most ardent pro-Palestine voices.
South African political analyst Sandile Swana told Al Jazeera on Friday that the "core of the dispute" with the diplomatic was the genocide case against U.S.-armed Israel. In the fight against apartheid, the U.S. "supported the apartheid regime," said Swana. "Rasool continues to point out the behaviour of the United States, even now is to support apartheid and genocide."
Other critics also pointed to the ongoing court battle over Israel's utter destruction of Gaza and mass slaughter of Palestinians.
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad told Rubio: "Your declaration of Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool as persona non grata is a racist, Islamophobic, transparent act of retaliation for South Africa's opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza."
Imraan Siddiqi, a former congressional candidate in Washington who now leads the state's branch of CAIR, said that "he stood up firmly against apartheid, so it's no coincidence you're punishing him in favor of an openly apartheid state."
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's office said in a statement Saturday that "the presidency has noted the regrettable expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to the United States of America, Mr. Ebrahim Rasool.
"The presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter," the office added. "South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America."
The diplomat's expulsion follows Trump signing an executive order last month that frames South Africa's land law as "blatant discrimination" against the country's white minority. Writing about the order for Foreign Policy in Focus, Zeb Larson and William Minter noted that "his actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa."
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In the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the US Has Not Been a Force for Peace
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force.
Dec 12, 2024
The retiring United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process has insightfully identified a major reason the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to boil and to entail widespread death and destruction.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland criticized the international community for relying on short-term fixes such as improving quality of life in occupied territory or diversions such as seeking peace deals between Israel and other Arab states. The crescendo of bloodshed during the past year underscores the ineffectiveness of such approaches.
Needed but not employed was a concerted and sustained diplomatic effort to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state. “What we have seen,” said Wennesland, “is the failure of dealing with the real conflict, the failure of politics and diplomacy.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Much of Wennesland’s criticism was directed at the international community as a whole, but his points would apply especially to the United States, the patron of the party to the conflict that controls the land in question and resists Palestinian sovereignty.
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force. This was true with the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war after Israel conquered in 1967 what is now the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
The central feature of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy was a huge airlift of military supplies to Israel. Nixon and Kissinger, viewing the conflict in Cold War terms, considered their policy a success by enabling Israel to turn the tide of battle while shutting the Soviet Union out of a meaningful regional role.
Fast forward to today, and the emphasis is still on military escalation. Israel, in its vain effort to “destroy Hamas” and strike down adversaries on its northern border, is more committed than ever to increasing death and destruction as its default approach toward any security problem. The United States has abetted this approach by gifting $18 billion in munitions to Israel since October 2023.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria does nothing to discourage these tendencies and may instead encourage them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the events in Syria with celebration and self-congratulations, claiming that Assad’s fall was due to earlier Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and Iran. The change of regime was an occasion for Israel increasing rather than decreasing its offensive military activity in Syria, including seizure of a previously demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan frontier and airstrikes in and around Damascus on the very weekend that rebels were entering the capital.
During the intervening years since the 1973 war, a couple of U.S. presidents did make genuine efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the necessary follow-up—largely the responsibility of subsequent administrations—did not occur.
After former President Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin pocketed the resulting peace treaty with Egypt while ignoring the part of the accords dealing with the Palestinians. After former President Bill Clinton in 2000 laid on the table his "parameters" for a deal, the two sides came closer than ever to a peace agreement, but an Israeli election ended the negotiations and the new Israeli government did not return to the table.
The current impending change in U.S. administrations offers little or no hope for positive change on this subject. After social media posts by President-elect Donald Trump that said nothing about diplomacy and instead talked about “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages were not released by his inauguration on January 20, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his “strong statement.”
Ignoring that Israel has both the power and the land and is inflicting many times more suffering on innocent civilians than anything Hamas has done, Netanyahu said that Trump’s statement “clarifies that there is one party responsible for this situation and that is Hamas.”
Echoes of a 1973-style Cold War mentality can be heard today in much discussion of U.S. policy toward the Middle East and overwhelmingly in Israeli rhetoric. The main bête noire this time is Iran, reducing the influence of which is a constantly invoked rationale for hawkish and military-heavy policies.
The Middle East is not the only region that has demonstrated the fallacy of the notion of deescalating a conflict through military escalation. As Wennesland puts it, “Politics is what ends war, and diplomacy is what ends war.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Nor does it mean seeking agreements for the sake of agreements, motivated in large part by a desire to wave supposed accomplishments before a domestic constituency. This was true of the so-called "Abraham Accords," which were not peace agreements at all but instead were largely about Israel not having to make peace to enjoy formal relations with other regional states, with which Israel was not at war anyway.
It was true as well of the enormous priority that the Biden administration put on seeking a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia, which, even if it had materialized in the form the administration envisioned, would not have served either U.S. interests or the cause of Middle East peace. The administration’s effort along this line was counterproductive not only in further reducing any Israeli incentive to make peace with the Palestinians but also, as President Joe Biden himself admitted, in probably being an additional motivation for Hamas to attack Israel last October.
As for what diplomacy does mean, it includes the concerted and sustained use of diplomatic energy, policymaking bandwidth, and political capital to address directly the core issues underlying a conflict and bring about a result that makes a difference. In the Middle East context, that result needs to include Palestinian self-determination and an end to occupation.
Correct understanding of diplomacy also speaks to what a foreign policy of restraint means. It does not mean isolationism. In areas such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can mean an increase in diplomatic involvement and in the priority that policymakers give to the goal being sought. As the restraint-minded Quincy Institute puts it in its statement of principles, the United States “should engage with the world” and pursue peace “through the vigorous practice of diplomacy.”
Much damage from the policies that Wennesland laments has been done and cannot easily be reversed. The Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, which tsk-tsks from the United States have done nothing to stop, have led many observers—though not Wennesland—to believe that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
But even if the requirement of Palestinian self-determination could be achieved only through a one-state solution that provides equal rights for all, the same principle—that peace can be achieved only through vigorous diplomacy and not military escalation—applies.
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A Call for Peaceful Multilateralism
The paralysis of the United Nations Security Council in the face of the ongoing carnage worldwide is proof that we must rethink the existing structures of global governance.
May 30, 2024
The world is in turmoil, and there is a stark absence of strategic and moral leadership on the global stage. Indeed, there are three types of wars going on simultaneously in the world today.
The first is the proxy war between Russia and the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with Ukraine as the battlefield. The second is the trade war between the United States of America and China—with punitive tariffs, unilateral trade restrictions, covert operations in the Taiwan Straits, and protectionist maneuvers used as the tools of war.
The third, of course, is the hot war in the Middle East between Israel, Palestine, Iran, and other regional actors.
In Africa, beneath the gloss of "liberal democracy," we have seen the resurgence of totalitarian regimes and tribal demagogues, riding to political power on the coat tails of identity politics and electoral fraud.
In Sudan, to take one example, the tussle for illicit power between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has displaced millions of people.
A world where “might is right,” and diplomacy is seen as a flag of surrender, results in a chaotic, barbarous, and an incredibly unhappy place to live in—for everyone.
The question asked around the world is: for how long will the United Nations—the global body formed to foster diplomacy between nations and prevent war—watch in helpless horror as cluster bombs and other deadly munitions rain down on innocent men, women, and children in these theaters of war?
The paralysis of the United Nations Security Council in the face of the ongoing carnage worldwide is proof that we must rethink the existing structures of global governance.
Everywhere in the world—in university classrooms, foreign policy think-tank sessions, media editorials and podcasts, even on the floor of the UN General Assembly—there are animated conversations about the need for a new paradigm in international relations, and what the features of the new epoch might be.
The ongoing protests in college campuses in the United States against the carnage in the Gaza Strip, in Palestine, are part of a growing global argument for a new global order. I joined this debate at Harvard Kennedy School in the fall of 2022, during our Senior Executive Fellows dinner sessions on the state of global governance in the 21st Century. The conversations were led by Secretary Ash Carter, former Defence Secretary of the United States, and Joseph Nye, a Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. Joseph Nye is often rated as the most influential scholar in American foreign policy. My suggestions on the re-framing of international relations are along the lines of what I might call "Peaceful multilateralism.”
Simply put, peaceful multilateralism refers to the ability and willingness of sovereign nations to work together to solve the toughest challenges facing humanity, such as global hunger, pandemics, nuclear non-proliferation, global child trafficking and war.
Rather than the vicious zero-sum rivalry between nations, peaceful multilateralism challenges countries of the world to collaborate and work towards extending the frontiers of peace, security, and the creation of a more just world.
The notion of collaboration or cooperation between nations of the world is hardly new. After the first and second world wars, the nations of the world came together to form the United Nations Organization in 1945.
Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations upholds the need for collaboration between nations. The Article states that one of the founding principles of the United Nations was “To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion...”
However, 79 years after its founding, the United Nations appears to be at a crossroads, with nuclear-armed countries locked in a proxy war in the heart of Europe.
Below are three ways to achieve peaceful multilateralism through structural reform of the United Nations and respect for international law by all nations of the world.
1. Democratize Decision-Making at the United Nations:
For decades, questions have been raised about the ‘tyranny’ of the United Nations Security Council, where five permanent members—namely, the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and China—wield veto powers that override the views of the rest of the 185 member states of the global body.
This arrangement is not only seen to be undemocratic, but it is believed to be a major impediment to multilateral consensus building for global problem solving by the United Nations.
The latest iteration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine have shown how the conflicting interests of veto-wielding security council members in regional wars could paralyze the Security Council and impede the conflict resolution efforts by the members of the United Nations General Assembly.
Therefore, in reforming the decision-making mechanism of the United Nations, it may be critical to roll back the veto powers of the Security Council and vest the final decision-making authority on the United Nations General Assembly. The UN General Assembly should be the bastion of peaceful multilateralism and the center of decision-making on global affairs.
2. Respect for International Law: Relations between nations may be fraught with disagreements or a clash of interests. But a resort to war or unilateral actions may degrade relations further and create a climate of lawlessness and impunity on the global scene. Peaceful multilateralism can only thrive when nations engage in dialogue, diplomacy, and respect the adjudicatory supremacy of international law.
3. Commitment to Diplomacy: Finally, in an era dominated by the rhetoric of war and a “show of force” in international relations, it may seem naive to restate the importance of diplomacy in resolving conflicts between nations.
But it is the ability to disagree, engage, re-engage, and resolve conflicts diplomatically that sets us apart as humans.
A world where “might is right,” and diplomacy is seen as a flag of surrender, results in a chaotic, barbarous, and an incredibly unhappy place to live in—for everyone.
Nations that prioritize diplomacy in their relations with other nations are more likely to collaborate to solve the most pressing problems that confront humanity.
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