Delivering a public lecture at Nelson Mandela University on Thursday (25 September 2025), titled Diplomacy and Statescraft in an Era of Populism, Rasool wove together personal experience, historical anecdotes and sharp critique of global power politics to illustrate the challenges facing South Africa and the international community.
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Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool
“[This lecture comes at] a poignant moment because it coincides with six months – almost to the day – that I left the United States of America under what I call a badge of honour, and what they call persona non grata, or ‘unwelcome person’.
In the six months that I have been back, I spent a month or two writing an exit report for the President [Cyril Ramaphosa],” he said in his opening of the lecture organised by the Faculty of Humanities.
“For six months, I’ve not been sure how the President has responded to it, but I thought, why not come home and begin to share some of those insights?”
To illustrate the uncertainty of navigating global power dynamics, Rasool narrated a story he often told as Premier of the Western Cape, about a US warship, stripped of its radar and communications, encountering a light directly ahead and orders it to divert its course.
Despite invoking nationality, rank and military capacity, the replies remain firm: “you divert 30°”. The exchange ends with the revelation that the light ahead does not belong to another vessel, but to a lighthouse.
This story effectively captures the current tension between the United States and the rest of the world under the incumbent US administration, raising the questions of who is who in this scenario.
“In the story between the world and the USA at this moment, who is the warship and who is the lighthouse? Who is going to divert 30°?” he asked a captivated audience.
From left, Nangamso Teyise, Dr Lynn Biggs, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law, Professor Pamela Maseko, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, Dr Amina Jakoet-Salie, Dr Jacqui Luck, and Prof Nomalanga Mkhize
Rasool was speaking at the University’s Council Chambers, on South Campus, addressing an audience of students, staff, collaborators and members of the public.
He said the puzzle of global leadership remained unresolved even as President Ramaphosa led South Africa’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly that opened on 9 September.
Reflecting on his abrupt exit from the US capital Washington DC, Rasool said: “I always find it useful to take a vow of silence before speaking because it’s a moment of deep introspection that you have to do in order to orient your life.”
The former ambassador contrasted Trump’s “transactional” approach to international relations with South Africa’s historic tradition of value-driven diplomacy.
He recalled former President Nelson Mandela’s stand against former Nigerian president and known dictator, Sani Abacha, in 1995 as a moment of moral clarity.
“That is the diplomacy of Ubuntu that we have been used to,” he said, adding that Mandela “believed that the truth was more powerful than the oil of Nigeria, and that the truth needed to be spoken”.
Rasool warned of the erosion of “rules-based diplomacy” and the rise of what he called “mainstream extremism”, also cautioning against confusing popularity with populism.
“Sometimes we confuse popular and populist. [The Eastern Cape has] produced leaders who made unpopular things popular through persuasion, engagement, dialogue, discussions, and umrabulo. We could take unpopular negotiations with the apartheid regime and make it a popular prospect for our people because had we chosen a populist way, we would have heard the anger of the people,” he said.
“What we instead did was use the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, who said you don’t destroy what you want to inherit. We turned what was a populist instinct and, through persuasion and debate, we came to a popular position that was accepted.”
Rasool that these days, the populist instinct for the US administration is mainstream extremism.
“You see, with those same tendencies, hiding in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan or in the deserts of Raqqa in Syria, we call them extremists. When they sit in the White House, we call them populists. And so, the idea of mainstream extremism is a very important one to understand what we are dealing with,” he said, describing the Republican Party as having been “cannibalised by a phenomenon called MAGA ([Make America Great Again]”.
Professor Nomalanga Mkhize
Turning to South Africa’s own challenges, Rasool highlighted the difficulty of balancing values and interests in relations with the United States.
With tensions over BRICS, Gaza, and accusations of supplying arms to Russia, he cautioned that “we are now sitting with so many of our eggs in the US basket”.
He said the Eastern Cape has historically been a well of principled leadership that placed values above expediency.
“This province produced probably the most humble, courageous leadership that this country has ever seen. It produced people who never used the word I… and that’s unfortunately the burden, which some would call a legacy, that [we] need to grapple with,” he told the audience.
For Rasool, the lecture was as much about sharing the lessons of diplomacy as it was about grappling with the world’s current turbulence.
“We’ve never had a world so complex, so fragmented, so tense, and so on edge… But again, we must look to the Eastern Cape to give the kind of leadership because you’ve always given it,” he said.
The lecture ended off with robust engagement during the Q&A session, during which the audience raised questions that sought to delve deeper into the current geopolitical dynamics that are currently unfolding.