During a May 20 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing held to discuss the State Department budget for Fiscal Year 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the opportunity to announce that the U.S. intends to boycott the G20 Leaders’ Summit to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa Nov. 22-23, and had also refused to attend the G20 at the foreign ministry level last February. He made these remarks while South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was in Washington, scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump on May 21.
According to RT, Rubio complained that the agenda of the G20 meeting “fails to reflect the priorities of this administration,” adding that Pretoria broadly aligns itself with the U.S.’s “strategic rivals,” Iran and China. “When one country is consistently unaligned with the United States on issue after issue after issue after issue,” he said, “now you have to make conclusions about it. On both a global and a multinational level, he charged, South Africa has consistently “a vote against America’s interests time and time again.”
Rubio also attacked South Africa’s position on Israel, referring to the case it brought against it at the UN International Court of Justice on the issue of genocide being committed against Palestinians in Gaza. This case was “not just off balance,” Rubio charged, “but completely geared towards one side.”
