Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is U.S. South Africa Relations.

With me to discuss ties between Washington and Pretoria in the wake of last week's meeting between President Donald Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa is Rubin Brigadie.

Rubin is President of Busara Advisors and former U.S. ambassador to South Africa.

From 2013 to 2015, he was the U.S. representative to the African Union.

Before that, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

In between his stints working for President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, Rubin was

dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he founded

the Institute for African Studies. Rubin, thank you for joining me on the president's inbox.

It's my pleasure to be with you.

Rubin, let's begin with the Oval Office meeting last week

between Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa. The discussion between the two presidents got heated at times.

What do you make of it? Well, I think that what you saw on display there was several things. The first

is sort of an epic clash of both ideologies and instincts.

Ideologies in the sense that what contemporary South Africa stands for, at least as they articulate themselves, as having not only overcome the challenge of apartheid, but actively trying to redress those

challenges of the past, is almost 180 degrees opposite from where President Trump is.

And in the sense of, one of the whole ideas behind Make America Great Again is restoring a sense of American greatness

and taking a different view of what the nature of that history is.

And so when President Trump made clear to President Rapoposa that his first interest was not

talking about trade or in golf, which is what President

Repoosa wanted to talk about.

President Trump was very clear that what was of interest to him was claims of white

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