To know is to do, to see is to act. There is no middle ground.
Nadine Gordimer
Introduction
I am well-advanced in the writing of my book on South Africa’s geopolitical options, risks and strategies in the new, developing multipolar world (watch out for Tightrope in January / February). The current escalation of the US-SA aspects of that position, especially with ambassador Bozell’s latest podcast attack on the government’s Starlink stance, has this morning convinced a client, who has seen parts of the draft manuscript, to suggest that I publish a revised thought-experiment memorandum of conflict analysis and advice on the Starlink dispute, seeing that it remains in the public domain as a contentious, polarising aspect of the larger conflict. I think she is right, so let’s have a look at what such a memorandum would look like, as taken from the book in draft form, and based of course on information available as at the 22nd October 2026.
A brief note on the product itself: I am not getting involved in the pros and cons of Starlink itself. It seems a perfectly capable product, with many benefits. Recent news events have also cast serious doubts as to the security concerns that may be associated with using the product and service. To get involved in all that is an unproductive distraction for our purposes. We are a sovereign country, and should be able to make our own decisions on matters of such strategic import, without being interfered with at the level we are seeing. The article explains why, at its core, this is of course not really about Starlink in any event. Let's have a look at conflict advice without all that baggage.
I. Purpose and Scope
This memorandum provides a conflict-analytical assessment of the current confrontation between the South Africa and the United States under the second Trump administration, with particular reference to the conduct of US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III and the Starlink licensing dispute as a proxy theatre of operations. It offers a structured response framework grounded in conflict resolution theory. The memorandum proceeds from a deliberate analytical point of departure: that the US engagement in this period under review in general, and this particular dispute in particular, should not always be assessed as engagement coming from a disinterested, rational actor.
Too much political and conflict assessment here in the new iterations of geopolitical realism plays by those quaint rules, skewing both assessment and practical strategy beyond practical utility.
II. Diagnostic Assessment: 2.1 The Rational-Actor Assumption and Its Limits
Conventional conflict management presumes an opponent whose hostile actions are instruments in service of negotiable interests. Under that model, escalation is a signalling device, and de-escalation is purchasable through concession or credible counter-leverage. If this then that reasoning will serve you well in that type of arena. That model does not fit the present case. The Trump administration's South Africa policy exhibits the hallmarks of expressive rather than instrumental coercion. The "white genocide" premise underlying Executive Order 14236 has been comprehensively discredited, yet it remains, in full or watered down versions, with or without the addition of revised fouc points, the operative justification for aid suspension, refugee programming skewed overwhelmingly toward white South Africans (16,287 admissions in one year against 5 Afghan admissions in the same period), and more observable, sustained rhetorical hostility.
An actor pursuing definable interests does not anchor policy to a premise that collapses under empirical scrutiny. An actor performing for a domestic audience, or for other currently hidden strategic goals, does.
2.2 Ambassador Bozell as Instrument of Performance
Using conflict frameworks and current best practices, the Ambassador's conduct warrants specific analytical attention. The diplomatic function of an ambassador is the maintenance and repair of the bilateral relationship. By the assessment of South African international relations scholars, Ambassador Bozell has failed at that function comprehensively. His public interventions, including the framing of South Africa's lawful regulatory framework as irrational hostility, and the characterization of successive démarches as insults, serve not bilateral communication but the reproduction of a domestic political narrative.
This has a critical strategic implication:
When a diplomatic channel is occupied by an actor whose primary function is theatrical rather than communicative, engagement through that channel ceases to be communication and becomes, instead, the supply of material.
Whoever is responding to these developments need to fully integrate that into all responses and strategies. Every summons, every response, every expression of official displeasure is converted into content for the Ambassador's preferred audience. The third démarche in nine months (a record tempo) was met not with diplomatic reflection but with public derision. The instrument has inverted: it now serves the counterpart's narrative rather than South Africa's interests. It concerns me that the SA government seems unaware of this, or how to respond to it.
2.3 The Starlink Dispute as Proxy Theatre
The Starlink licensing impasse must be understood in this light. It is not, at bottom, a dispute about telecommunications licensing. It is a selected proxy through which a broad ideological campaign is dramatized. The framing of South Africa's B-BBEE framework as an irrational barrier to development is designed to convert an arguably legitimate redress mechanism into a spectacle of obstruction. Again, the way that we react to the attacks, helps with the US achieving its goals. The operational consequence is that technical resolution will not produce political relief. A published and emphasized compliance pathway, including the Equity Equivalent Investment Programme route, remains advisable as a matter of legal and international self-defence.
I would suggest that it must be adopted with explicitly lowered expectations of behavioural change in the counterpart. Its function is to demonstrate regulatory rationality to third parties, not to purchase goodwill from an actor uninterested in the offer.
III. Strategic Framework: From Conflict Management to Exposure Reduction3.1 The Reframed Objective
The governing objective of South African strategy should be clearly understood. It is not to "make the counterpart's tactics fail" - a formulation that smuggles in the expectation of a return to rational calculation.
The conflict objective is:
To weather the current cycle of irrational pressure at minimum cost, without involuntary alteration of South Africa's sovereign policy framework, while preserving and where possible strengthening the country's medium-term strategic position.
I deal with SA’s position as middle-power (or as I redefine it “constrained power” in Tightrope). This reframing has consequences throughout. Where the rational-actor model counsels engagement to alter incentives, the present model counsels reduction of the surface area exposed to an unpredictable counterpart. Where the former counsels persuasion, the latter counsels endurance, deniability, and the patient accumulation of multilateral legitimacy.
3.2 Operational Principles
A minimum of four principles follow:
Non-supply
Deny the counterpart the performative material his strategy requires. Every official reaction is a resource; ration it deliberately. Blunders such as threats to the citizenship of specific actors must be avoided.
Exhibit discipline
Distinguish between the theatrical channel (the Ambassador's public conduct) and the structural channel (state-to-state relations). Protect the latter by refusing to dignify the former.
Temporal asymmetry
The counterpart's political horizon is finite; the South African state's is not. Stretch the conflict's timeline. Refuse decisive engagement on the counterpart's chosen ground and schedule (see my recent detailed article on time as conflict asset). Legitimacy accumulation
Convert the bilateral confrontation into a multilateral narrative of unilateral coercion against sovereign policy. The objective is not American goodwill, which is unavailable, but the consolidation of third-party understanding and sympathy.
IV. Specific Recommendations
4.1 Diplomatic Posture: Downgrade Without Expulsion
The temptation to declare Ambassador Bozell persona non grata (currently advocated in some domestic political quarters) should be resisted. Expulsion would supply the administration with a precisely tailored escalation pretext and invite unpredictable retaliation in adjacent domains, including visa regimes and trade measures. The recommended alternative is structural downgrading. All contact between the Ambassador's office and cabinet-level officials should cease. Engagement should be confined to directorate-level technical channels, in writing where possible. The Ambassador should remain accredited, present, and isolated, ignored, and rendered transparent within South Africa's formal diplomatic architecture.
This posture communicates non-recognition of his credibility as an interlocutor without furnishing the headline the counterpart's strategy requires. Trust and engagement can be rebuilt over time, in line with clear, established diplomatic protocol.
4.2 The Starlink Matter: Publish, Do Not Persuade
DCDT and ICASA should publish, formally and publicly, a technical "Pathway to Compliance" document setting out the EEIP route and the availability of non-equity contributions satisfying the statutory threshold. The document should be framed as a statement of regulatory rationality addressed to the international community and the domestic legal order, not as a concession to pressure. The strategic purpose is burden-shifting.
If SpaceX declines to apply under a published, lawful pathway, the impasse is revealed as a commercial choice by the company rather than an act of state hostility. This deprives the counterpart of his principal exhibit. It should be expected, however, to produce no moderation in Ambassador Bozell's rhetoric, and planning should not assume otherwise.
4.3 Economic Contingency: From Diversification to Emergency Buffering
The threat environment requires temporal compression. President Ramaphosa's public acknowledgment (19 October) that South Africa must "prepare" for possible AGOA exclusion, with an estimated 86,000 direct jobs in the automotive sector alone, rising to 125,000 including subcontractors, establishes the stakes. An exclusion announced by 2 November could take effect on 1 January.
The advisory emphasis must therefore shift from medium-term diversification to immediate contingency preparation: emergency market-access engagement with the European Union, China, and Gulf partners targeting automotive export displacement; and domestic fiscal support planning for affected industries and workers. This is not strategic preference but preparatory insurance against an irrational strike.
4.4 Multilateral Escalation: Reframe the Conflict
South Africa should elevate the conflict's framing from bilateral dispute to a systemic question. Chancellor Merz's 21 October call for South African participation in the G20, on the grounds that "Africa belongs at the table", is a signal to be amplified, not merely welcomed. Within the African Union, G20, and United Nations forums, the Ambassador's conduct and the administration's trade threats should be presented as a case study in unilateral coercion against a sovereign state's lawful domestic policy.
The purpose is not persuasion of Washington but the consolidation of international legitimacy. A coercive campaign that is denied international legitimacy becomes more costly to sustain and more difficult to escalate (also easier to walk away from for a new political leadership in the US, should that occur).
4.5 Domestic Cohesion: Sovereign Framing
The administration's strategy appears designed to exploit domestic fault lines around land, race, and transformation policy. The countermeasure is framing discipline: the confrontation should be presented domestically not as a dispute over Starlink or B-BBEE, but as a constitutional defence of the right to self-determination. This framing is broadly resonant across coalition lines and denies the counterpart local proxies.
4.6 Endurance as Strategy
Finally, the advisory endorses the position advanced by domestic scholars: that South Africa should stand firm on its policy positions and wait out the counterpart's political cycle. Governments are transient; the state is not. In conflict terms, against an opponent whose method is the manufacture of instability, non-reaction is itself a form of power. The conflict should be deliberately stretched in time, and decisive engagement on the counterpart's chosen issues and schedule should be declined. This is “non- reaction” in a structured way, not the same as “doing nothing”. Strategically, it seems paradoxical, but it is not.
V. Conclusion on external dispute
The confrontation with the current US administration is best understood not as a negotiable dispute but as a coercive performance directed at a domestic audience abroad, with South African sovereignty as its stage. The appropriate response is neither capitulation nor symmetrical escalation, but a disciplined strategy of institutional endurance: denying the performer his material, protecting the structural relationship through channel separation, insuring against sudden economic strike, accumulating multilateral legitimacy, and outlasting the cycle. The measure of success is not the counterpart's conversion to rationality. It is the preservation of South Africa's policy autonomy, institutional coherence, and medium-term strategic position through a period of deliberately manufactured turbulence.
VI. Internal Front: Managing the Domestic Instrumentalization of the Starlink Dispute6.1 The Dual Front Character of the Conflict The preceding analysis has treated the confrontation as an external asymmetric conflict. We can of course notice rather easily that this is not the only front to the conflict. The Starlink dispute functions simultaneously as a domestic political instrument, wielded by internal actors whose interests converge with (though are not identical to) those of the external counterpart.
The Government of National Unity must therefore prosecute two campaigns at once: an external campaign of endurance against coercive performance, and an internal campaign of containment against the instrumentalization of that same dispute by domestic critics. The analytical distinction matters because the conflict response architectures differ. I often point out that an incorrect analysis of the question leads to incomplete or inaccurate answers, and here we have a very clear example of that conflict aphorism. External strategy operates through diplomatic channel discipline, multilateral legitimacy accumulation, and temporal endurance.
Internal strategy must operate through narrative pre-emption, selective engagement, and the deliberate exposure of instrumentalization's costs. The two campaigns share a common principle - non-supply of performative material - but apply it to different audiences through different mechanisms.
6.2 Mapping the Domestic Instrumentalization Architecture
The Starlink issue has been converted into a domestic weapon through a discernible architecture. Its components need our attention:
First, Solidarity and AfriForum have positioned the licensing impasse as evidence of ideological rigidity rather than lawful regulation. Dr Dirk Hermann of Solidarity has framed the dispute as one in which "the government refuses to allow this solution purely because it is clinging to its race-based ideology," and has explicitly linked domestic resistance to international pressure, stating that "domestic and international pressure are beginning to converge, and this is changing the playing field". This is not incidental commentary. It is a strategic framing that converts a regulatory question into a moral indictment.
Second, Elon Musk's public interventions supply the external narrative with a personalized, high-visibility protagonist. Musk's April 2026 claim that Starlink was denied licensing "simply because I am not Black," coupled with the allegation of bribery offers he refused on principle, was designed not for South African regulators but for an international audience susceptible to narratives of racial victimization. The domestic organizations' amplify this framing precisely because it serves their parallel objective of delegitimizing race-based policy frameworks.
Third, the GNU's internal composition provides the instrumentalization with a constitutional vector. The Communications Minister, Solly Malatsi, is a senior Democratic Alliance member whose policy direction on equity equivalent investment programmes has been publicly endorsed by the Presidency as an "innovative alternative," yet condemned by ANC, EFF, and MK Party figures as executive overreach and capitulation to foreign pressure. This means the Starlink dispute is not merely an external confrontation pressing upon a unified state; it is a fault line running through the executive itself.
This shows up the systemic conflict incompetence so often found in our government’s responses to significant conflicts, own goals of serious weight and consequence, and completely avoidable. The external counterpart need not create domestic division. The division already exists, and the external pressure merely amplifies it.
6.3 Strategic Recommendations for Internal Containment
6.3.1. Sever the Link Between Regulatory Flexibility and External Coercion
The most dangerous domestic vulnerability is the perception, whether accurate or not, that regulatory adaptation is being undertaken because of American pressure rather than despite it. The Presidency and DCDT must therefore establish, publicly and repeatedly, a chronological and institutional firewall. The policy direction on equity equivalent investment programmes was developed through a consultative process beginning in 2024, with extensive public participation and broad industry support, long before the current escalation. This chronology must be foregrounded in every official communication on the matter.
The message is not "we are accommodating Starlink." The message is: "South Africa's regulatory framework is being modernised on its own schedule, according to its own law, and no external actor's displeasure will accelerate or retard that process." This framing denies domestic critics their most potent argument: that the GNU is capitulating under duress. It also denies the external counterpart his preferred narrative: that South African policy is reactive rather than sovereign. Take control of the narrative and stop having to react to everything.
6.3.2. Expose the Instrumentalization Without Criminalizing or Limiting the Instrumentalists
An expressed temptation exists within the GNU to escalate rhetorically against AfriForum and Solidarity, to characterize their international engagements as unpatriotic or even treasonable, as some within the governing alliance have urged. President Ramaphosa has come close to this position, stating that he takes "a dim view" of organizations that "run around the world bad-mouthing their country". This temptation should be resisted. Criminalization or moral escalation against domestic critics converts them into martyrs and confirms their narrative of a government intolerant of dissent.
The more effective strategy is forensic exposure. The government should publish, through official channels, a factual accounting of the divergence between the domestic organisations' public claims and the actual regulatory position. When Solidarity asserts that South Africa "refuses" to license Starlink, the government should respond with the published compliance pathway and a simple factual statement: the pathway exists; the applicant has not applied. The objective is not to win the argument with AfriForum and Solidarity. Their constituencies are not persuadable on this issue. The objective is to ensure that the persuadable middle - domestic moderates, international observers, and GNU coalition partners - sees clearly who is refusing what. The instrumentalization strategy depends on ambiguity. The government's counter-strategy should be the ruthless production of clarity.
6.3.3. Manage the GNU Fault Line Through Cabinet Discipline This is where conflict best practice and political reality run into some stark divergence. The internal GNU dimension requires a distinct instrument: cabinet-level conflict management. Our politicians, by and large, remain troublingly inept at effective coalition conflict management.
The Communications Minister's policy direction enjoys Presidential backing, yet faces public opposition from senior ANC figures and portfolio committee chairs. This is unsustainable as a permanent condition. The recommended approach is not to suppress the disagreement but to contain and steer its expression.
The Presidency should convene a structured GNU consultation on the Starlink matter, with a clear agenda:
(a) confirmation that the equity equivalent pathway is lawful and within existing statutory authority;
(b) agreement that public commentary on the matter will distinguish between policy disagreement and accusations of capitulation; and
(c) explicit acknowledgment that the external counterpart's pressure campaign does not alter the government's constitutional obligation to maintain a coherent regulatory framework.
The objective is not unanimity. It is the establishment of a minimum shared position: that whatever the internal disagreements about B-BBEE and transformation policy, the government will not allow an external actor to exploit those disagreements as leverage. The message to the GNU partners is direct: your disagreement with the ANC on empowerment policy is legitimate and will be fought out in the proper forums; your amplification of the external narrative is not.
6.3.4. Address the Material Grievance Beneath the Instrumentalization
Finally, the government must recognize that the instrumentalization of Starlink is effective not because the framing is honest, but because (among other things) it touches a real grievance: connectivity inequality. Solidarity's claim that rural communities, predominantly Black, remain excluded from affordable high-speed internet is not fabricated. It is a genuine policy deficit that the instrumentalization exploits. The counter-strategy must therefore include a visible, adequately resourced alternative connectivity programme that does not depend on Starlink's licensing, significantly more than current musings and mumblings.
Whether through expedited spectrum allocation for rural mobile operators, subsidized fibre extension, or alternative satellite providers willing to comply with the existing framework, the government must demonstrate that its commitment to connectivity is not contingent on one American company's terms. This deprives the instrumentalization of its most sympathetic constituency—those who care less about B-BBEE ideology than about whether their children can access the internet.
6.4 Conclusion to the Internal Section
The Starlink dispute is, on its surface, a regulatory matter. Analytically, it is a triangular conflict: an external counterpart seeking performative dominance for its own reasons, domestic organizations seeking to leverage external pressure for internal policy change, and a GNU whose internal divisions supply the leverage. The government cannot control the first. It can manage the second. It must, above all, prevent the third from becoming the decisive vulnerability.
The strategy of internal containment is therefore not a departure from the external strategy of endurance, but its domestic complement. Both rest on the same principle: deny the counterpart the material his strategy requires.
Externally, that means denying diplomatic theatre. Internally, it means denying the domestic instruments their most potent claim—that South Africa's policy is a product of external pressure rather than sovereign deliberation. The government's task is to make that claim visibly false, through clarity, chronology, and the patient demonstration that the regulatory framework operates according to law and not according to Ambassador Bozell's preferences.
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading Our blog at www.conflict-conversations.co.za has a rich variety of articles expanding on specific aspects of the article, and conflict in general.
(Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.)
(c) Andre Vlok October 2026
* Author’s note on the use of artificial intelligence in writing this article
I learned to draft, argue and write in the hard school of litigation. I enjoy and value the very human process of creating ideas, of testing my own knowledge and thoughts. It is a process that I need, for answering some of my professional and even personal questions, it is cathartic and inspiring. Other than the most basic research assistance I do not use any AI in the creation of my written work, this article included. It is a matter of pride, of preference, and of mental health. Whether that is a wise choice or not, I will leave to the reader to decide.