A serious African policymaker reads grand strategy the way an economist reads a balance sheet: not for poetry, but for what it reveals about incentives, constraints, and future behaviour. On that test, the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) is unusually candid. It is not a manifesto of global stewardship; it is a clear blueprint for America First transactional bargaining, deploying trade, technology, and capital markets as tools of leverage for U.S. commercial advantage.

Start with the economic core. The NSS argues that America First diplomacy must “rebalance global trade relationships,” calls the U.S. current account deficit “unsustainable,” and urges allies to adopt policies that help absorb China’s “enormous excess capacity.” In the same breath it makes a striking admission: “China’s state-led and state-backed companies excel in building physical and digital infrastructure,” and China has recycled “perhaps $1.3 trillion” of trade surpluses into loans to trading partners. More …

South Africans, let me be blunt from the start: Donald Trump has just handed you an unexpected blessing – a golden, flashing invitation to reclaim your land with the same unapologetic clarity that Zimbabwe showed the world two decades ago. If sanctions are already being imposed on you for crimes you did not commit, why continue tiptoeing around the core historical injustice that birthed this entire controversy: land stolen at the barrel of a colonial gun?

Trump’s message is a crude attempt to resurrect the old racist script that Africans are incapable of governing themselves or managing their own affairs. And instead of engaging the South African government with diplomacy and fact, he has chosen outright fabrication – the grotesque myth of a “white genocide.” More …