South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa’s priority as Group of 20 president is overhauling the global institutions he sees as skewed in favour of the West.

Donald Trump might just have beaten him to it — by swinging a wrecking ball at the G20.

What should have been South Africa’s moment as the continent’s first ever host of the forum has been overshadowed by the US president’s public spat with Ramaphosa over domestic land laws, equality policies and Israel’s war on Gaza.

The upshot is that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio won’t be joining his fellow foreign ministers from the world’s leading economies when they meet in Johannesburg on Thursday.

As his counterparts try and decipher Trump’s hit-and-run approach to diplomacy, the question is whether Rubio’s absence is a one-time snub or if it paves the way for Trump’s withdrawal from the G20 altogether as he sets about creating his own world order.

It’s a possibility to which the South African host is very much alive, according to people familiar with the government’s strategy. South Africa is planning for a reduced participation of the US during its G20 presidency, including the chance that Trump opts out of the leaders’ summit in November to embarrass Ramaphosa, the people said, asking not to be named discussing private diplomacy.

The host plans to press ahead with a campaign to get G20 nations to reach consensus before November, according to the people. It’s seeking buy-in to its developmental agenda and the importance of reforming multilateral institutions. That includes the G20 itself but also the International Criminal Court of Justice where it is facing off with Trump’s ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after bringing a case against Israel alleging genocide.

“It is imperative that these post-World War II institutions evolve to represent a new global order where the voice of the Global South is not a footnote but central to world affairs,” South African foreign affairs spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “We believe a significant number of nations in the Global South will not allow the global system to regress.”

The US standoff has been brewing for a while but burst into the open last month when Ramaphosa announced that he’d signed off on a land-expropriation law, prompting Trump and his South Africa-born adviser, Elon Musk, to falsely accuse the country of seizing land from White farmers. Trump cancelled US aid to South Africa and offered refugee status to the country’s relatively privileged Afrikaans minority.

Trump has already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council and the Paris climate accord, amid an assault on the world order governed by multilateral institutions that the US benefited from and helped create.

Yet his stance also presents a chance for South Africa and its allies to ramp up their case for multilateralism, according to Lukhona Mnguni, executive director at Johannesburg-based think tank Rivonia Circle. “This is an opportunity for the world to demonstrate whether it can live without the US,” Mnguni said.

Brazil — the B in the Brics grouping that includes Russia, India, China and South Africa — sees an attempt to demolish the multilateral order by the US though Trump’s tariff protectionism and his “unilateral intimidation measures,” according to Foreign Affairs minister Mauro Vieira, who warned against “the law of the strongest.”

It’s a position channelled by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who called for a stronger United Nations this week after a meeting of the UN Security Council convened by China to discuss multilateralism. “No country can go it alone,” he said.

India is watching whether the US further distances itself from the G20, since without US backing and participation the forum could lose its significance, according to an Indian official who asked not to be named as the discussions are private. At the same time, weakening the G20 will boost the importance of organisations such as Brics and indirectly work in favour of Russia and China, according to Indian officials.

In a February 6 post on X announcing he was “NOT” attending the meeting, Rubio said that South Africa was “doing very bad things,” citing the land laws and using the G20 as a platform to promote “DEI and climate change” efforts. South Africa’s government refutes accusations that land has been confiscated, saying the law is similar to eminent domain legislation in other countries.

The US will be represented by the charge d’affaires, the current highest ranking official in its South African embassy. Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, minister in the South African presidency, said the government was relaxed about US engagement, and the leaders’ summit is a long way off.

“In politics, lots of dynamics change,” she said. “As South Africa, we continue to engage with our strategic partner, trade partner, which is the US government.”

A crunch is coming either way, since the US is scheduled to assume the G20 presidency from South Africa at the conclusion of the November summit.

If Trump decides to sabotage the G20, he risks ceding power to emerging powers, most notably China, said Sanusha Naidu, a foreign policy analyst at the Institute for Global Dialogue in Pretoria.

“Yes, the US is powerful, but it’s not what it was,” she said. “We’re in a polycrisis world — we’re in a world where there’s no one center of power.”

One of those crises cropped up in South Africa yesterday when the coalition government was forced to postpone the announcement of its first budget. Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana played it down, saying he didn’t expect any spillover to the G20.

“These people that are going to be here, they’ve got their own problems,” he said.