Yes, he used the American war machine to seize Venezuelan President Nicola's Maduro, with a naval armada off that country's coast and special operations forces flown into its capital to capture its leader. And once Maduro was in a prison in Brooklyn, New York, he turned his attention passingly to Greenland and then began placing American forces, including not one but two aircraft carrier task forces (one of which, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, had played a key role in the Venezuelan operation), in position around Iran, along with all sorts of other ships and planes. And the next thing the world knew -- hard to believe as it might have been -- with only a single ally, Israel, he was at war with Iran.
What fun! Right? Donald Trump gets to make war or threaten war or fake war on anyone he pleases on this planet of ours. I mean, why else would you want to be president of the United States? Oh, except that it gives you the right to carry on for nearly two hours on national television with half your audience rising to "clap like seals" after more or less every sentence.
Two aircraft carrier task forces going anywhere in the world that you want, endless applause, being capable of launching wars wherever you please, and being able to speak deep into the night on just about any major channel around, while saying more or less anything that crosses your mind -- what more could you ask for? What a wonderful world, don't you think (even if foreign leaders, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently, "have completely lost faith in America")? Hey, maybe the president could decide to send those aircraft carriers to the waters off Vietnam next, just for an old-times-sake (and bone-spur) encore to his life.
And Donald Trump is lucky indeed, because he has at his command what TomDispatch regular William Hartung and new TomDispatch writer Janet Abou-Elias term a "brave new war machine" that is indeed something of a techno-wonder. Or at least given all the techno-figures now increasingly involved in American war production and war-making, a techno-profiteer that may leave Americans and the rest of the world in a truly dangerous situation. Tom
The Brave New War Machine
How a Clique of Unhinged Techno-Optimists Is Putting Humanity at Risk
By Janet Abou-Elias and William D. Hartung
"I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us," said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley's military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped ICE accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company's products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, "if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections." (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from "unreasonable searches and seizures.") Yet Karp's speculation hasn't led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that "our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue."
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: "I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers -- I'm trying to be nice here -- out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don't wake up scared, they don't go to bed scared, they don't fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere."
Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir's technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren't even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.
There should be no question that Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.
So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.
Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok
This is not your father's military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC -- executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman -- are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among U.S. allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.
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