This week, President Trump sat in a press conference and berated President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, a democratic state, with false claims about a genocide being committed against white Afrikaner farmers. On the other hand, just a week ago President Trump had traveled to three Middle East countries ruled by repressive and non-democratic regimes and told them he would not lecture them about how they treat their own people. The above meeting was subsequent to the administration’s fast tracking of the refugee status of dozens of white Afrikaans to the U.S. from South Africa, claiming that they were being persecuted by the government of that country and their lives and livelihood had been threatened. No proof of the accusations was provided.
In contrast, one of Trump’s first actions on taking office in January 2025 was to issue an executive order suspending the Afghan resettlement program and leaving those eligible in legal limbo. Approximately 180,000 Afghans had been admitted to the United States after August 2021. Some were given special immigration visas (SIVs) that provided a path to permanent residency, while others were given humanitarian parole and granted temporary protected status (TPS) that allowed them to stay and to work in the U.S. On April 11th, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced its decision to end TPS for more than 9,000 Afghans because Afghanistan “no longer continues to meet the statutory requirement for TPS.” Those targeted were given the option to self-deport before May 20, 2025. Some of these Afghans had served with the American forces as interpreters and in other capacities, and any return to Afghanistan would most likely prove to be fatal to them and their families.
The encounter with President Ramaphosa in some ways echoed the previous February visit to the Oval Office by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelensky in front of TV cameras, cutting short a visit meant to coordinate a plan for peace. At one point, Trump even suggested that the Ukraine was responsible for starting the war with Russia which is completely false. Since then, Trump has subsequently met with Zelensky and had a telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin in seeking to begin discussions for a permanent cease fire and resolution of the dispute. However, most experts believe that Putin is simply stringing Trump along and has no intention of committing to fair and equitable negotiations with Zelensky. Having failed to get both parties to the table, Trump now appears to have decided to concentrate only on economic talks with Ukraine, including those over that country’s rare minerals, and to forgo his intermediary status in the talks.
On May 6th, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Trump met at the White House and held a brief news event that focused on tariffs, trade and Trump’s repeated assertion that Canada should be the 51st state — a notion that Carney again clearly rejected. While this meeting was somewhat more cordial in tone, the primary discussion of the existing Canada-U.S.-Mexico (CUSMA) didn’t really get addressed. Instead, Trump simply restated that there wasn’t anything Carney could say to convince him to lift the existing tariffs. However, Carney has called the CUSMA as “the basis for a broader negotiation.” Remember, that it was under the previous Trump administration that the current trade agreement was signed, which has now been violated with Trump’s recent tariffs on both Canadian and Mexican imports to the U.S.
What we have to date is a weird collage of approaches to foreign policies under the Trump administration. Where Trump believes there are positive economic returns to the U.S., such as in the Middle East, he is quite willing to enter into bilateral trade arrangements, despite having to deal with non-democratic and repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. His administration has even alluded to possibly reducing or eliminating existing economic sanctions on Russia imposed after Putin’s past invasion of Crimea and the current armed invasion of Eastern Ukraine. All of this contributes to the evident hypocrisy of Trump’s foreign policy stance.
FROLITICKS 
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