For the second time this year, the world’s most powerful finance ministers gather in South Africa without the presence of the US Treasury Secretary.

Scott Bessent will skip the Group of 20 again this week, continuing a boycott of South Africa by top US officials begun by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who stayed away out of scorn over his hosts’ theme for its G20 presidency of “Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability.”

South Africa is the first nation from the continent to host the G20. But its ambition to use that to advance issues vital for developing nations is likely to be further sidelined as the club confronts the latest salvo in US President Donald Trump’s trade war.

“The challenge around the G20 is that you just don’t know what is going to come out of the White House,” said Sanusha Naidu, senior research fellow at the Pretoria-based Institute for Global Dialogue. “There is an actor in the international system who is playing such a disruptive role for the order of global international governance.”

The preeminent forum for multilateral cooperation has been under assault since Trump returned to the White House, hampering progress on issues including climate change and debt relief that South Africa hoped to promote.

This meeting, held at the Indian Ocean resort of Zimbali near the port city of Durban on the country’s southeast coast, faces the same fate.

In addition to Trump’s threat of crippling levies on key trading partners from August 1, the US president has taken aim at the Brics bloc of emerging economies — which includes South Africa — threatening an extra 10% tariff for “anti-American” policies.

He’s also singled out Brazil, a member of both Brics and the G20, promising a 50% tariff on the nation as he criticised its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to overturn the results of an election he lost.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was the first Brics leader to take on Trump after a meeting in Rio de Janeiro last week, saying the American president needed a “greater appreciation of the emergence of various centers of power in the world.”

That came several weeks after he endured Trump berating him in a televised Oval Office meeting over false claims that his government was ignoring a genocide of the nation’s White farmers.

Ramaphosa is also still trying to convince Trump to attend a G20 leaders summit in Johannesburg in November, where he is due to hand over the presidency of the group to the US. The prospects that Trump would help advance South Africa’s G20 priorities look slim.

“For a lot of the agenda that has been built up over the last four or five years, it’s not fertile ground next year,” said Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, chief executive officer of the South African Institute of International Affairs, referring to climate finance and sustainability.

Despite Washington’s indifference, South Africa is sticking to its guns and will try to salvage what it can from the meeting, which runs all week and will be headlined by finance chiefs and central bank governors on Thursday and Friday.

“Africa’s development must remain front and center this year and into the future,” Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s international relations minister, told a United Nations conference in Spain this month. “The world cannot stand by and watch as rising debt-service costs crowd out development for a generation.”

One consequence of the US skipping the meetings is that it’s pushed some members of the so-called Global South and the US’s traditional allies closer together.

Shortly after Rubio’s snub the European Union said it supported South Africa’s G20 aims. Two weeks later, the economic bloc, which had been bickering with Pretoria over a range of issues, held its first summit with the nation since 2018.

Trump “will not render the G20 irrelevant,” said Louw Nel, a senior political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa. “Countries are already starting to look beyond the Trump presidency and know these multilateral institutions will outlive this administration.”