There is more to diplomacy than this
US ambassador L Brent Bozell III’s article, published a day before the Sixth South Africa Investment Conference, was a welcome reminder that the South Africa-US relationship is far more layered than the political disputes of the past year might suggest (“The art of the possible”, March 30).
His emphasis on practical economic partnership, investment flows and mutual opportunity reflects a diplomatic instinct that deserves broader appreciation.
Conventional commentary on South Africa-US relations tend to fixate on the headline frictions rooted in the ideological distance between the White House and Luthuli House. As much as the political impasse between the two is real and consequential, it represents only one layer of a multidimensional nature of statecraft.
Modern diplomacy does not operate solely through the channel of heads of state and party headquarters. It is simultaneously conducted through business-to-business partnerships and people-to-people ties. Bozell’s mention of the more than 500 American companies in South Africa and the over $23bn in bilateral trade is not an incidental statistic; it’s a representation of a web of mutual economic dependency that has its own diplomatic logic. One that is independent of the relationship between presidents Cyril Ramaphosa and Donald Trump.
South African businesses and decision-makers would do well to internalise that the state-to-state relationship is only one register of a far broader set of diplomatic interactions, and the political noise at the top does not foreclose the possibilities at every other level.
The art of the possible, as ambassador Bozell rightly invokes it, is practised not only in embassies and summit rooms, but in boardrooms, community partnerships and investment commitments made despite political uncertainty. The task is to ensure that the multilayered nature of the relationship is actively cultivated, not left to chance or hostage to the next diplomatic incident.
