The irony here is that Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, comes from what would appear to be an impeccably liberal background. He describes himself as a “progressive” who voted for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris — something which, in light of the midterms, he has reiterated. “I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir — all our products, are essentially progressive.” His black mother and Jewish father would take him on civil rights marches as a child. Karp studied his philosophy PhD in Germany, and with unkempt gray hair, his aesthetic is every bit that of the charming, eccentric philosopher. In 2023, he declared “if fascism comes, I will be the first or second up against the wall”.

How is it that a thoughtful, idiosyncratic, liberal academic, leads a company which has enabled unlawful detainment, illegal warfare, and what has been described as a genocide in Gaza? More existentially, if someone with Alex Karp’s beliefs can end up leading a company like Palantir — what does that say about the nature of American liberalism itself?

Certainly, death and destruction in the Middle East have given the company plenty to do since Trump became President. (Only yesterday, Trump nominated Palantir executive Michael LoSapio to become director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)). The data that Palantir uses to generate its “kill lists” has been used by both the IDF in Gaza and the US in Iran. In this way, the convenience of Deliveroo is brought to the terrain of modern warfare: Palantir’s software operates at such speed that it enabled the US to hit 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of the assault on Iran.

Unsurprisingly, targets generated at this pace are not always accurate. On the opening day of the Iran war, the US launched an airstrike against a girls’ primary school, killing up to 180 people — mostly children under 12. Given the extensive use of AI targeting in this war, the strike may have been conducted using Palantir’s AI-powered software, the “Maven Smart System”. Information about the school, including the address, was publicly available online. Preliminary reports suggest the US military relied on outdated intelligence, which labeled the school a military target, despite the fact a wall was built to separate it from an IRGC medical and cultural facilities over a decade ago.

Palantir says that it is “not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies”. But, due diligence could have avoided this horror — and the pace of AI target selection is the enemy of due diligence. Palantir took over the contract to build the Maven Smart System from Google in 2019, which withdrew its participation owing to massive internal backlash. Other clients of Palantir include ICE, which uses its databases to identify and track down migrants for deportation. Synthesizing photo albums, phone records and live locations into one single all-seeing database, Palantir then puts this information at the fingertips of ICE, one that frequently breaks the law.

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In a strange way, it would be comforting if Karp’s hypocrisy could simply be put down to an abdication of principles for the sake of profit. The truth is far more complex. Karp has a systematic philosophy for maintaining America’s global dominance in the 21st century — and Palantir’s role in guaranteeing it. This is outlined in The Technological Republic, a book he published last year. To examine where America’s warmaking establishment has been and where it’s going, it is useful for us to see the world through Alex Karp’s eyes.

The ideological engine which keeps Palantir running consists of several propositions. First, Karp claims America has a duty to dominate the global order, with the deadliest AI tools that Palantir can supply. Second, this global dominance is justified because America is the embodiment of Western civilization’s virtues. Third, these truths are ignored by a complacent, “woke” and ungrateful elite, one that dominates both Silicon Valley and elite university campuses. Therefore, Karp argues, war-readiness abroad requires an unrelenting commitment to fighting the culture war at home. This is one intellectual bridge between Karp’s “progressive” foreign policy views and that of MAGA Republicanism.

It is worth examining these beliefs and their contradictions. Karp believes the road to utopia is paved with fear. “You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabbers… out of our adversaries,” he has said. “If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared… they will attack us”. In another interview, he remarked that “the chance of world survival goes up as America becomes stronger and more dominant”. In Karp’s framing, then, America’s security, the protection of its values and its drive for world dominance become synonymous — justified under the fuzzy rubric of “patriotism”.

What Karp fails to acknowledge is that America’s overwhelming power has encouraged war rather than removed the need for it. Trump’s reckless conflict in Iran, waged with ever-more convenience due precisely to Palantir, is merely the latest iteration of how an unconstrained global power behaves. Karp fails to examine this irony. For him, protecting “the West” can only ever mean uncritically supplying tech to whoever occupies the White House. In an interview proclaiming his support for the Iran war, he triumphantly remarks that “our adversaries and enemies are witnessing an ability to fight that they don’t have”. Karp has embraced Palantir’s role in waging destabilizing wars, whilst claiming his company’s tech would help create the conditions for peace.  Perhaps the extraordinary wealth which he has accrued helps resolve this paradox.

Karp’s thinking has deep roots within America’s foreign policy establishment. The anti-détente hawks of the Seventies sought to combat the notion that defeat in Vietnam signaled American decline was inevitable — and that the US therefore needed to accommodate the Soviet Union. Instead, a blend of Reagan Republicans and hawkish Democrats claimed that the US should strive for military supremacy to defend its values. They believed their moment of vindication came when the Berlin Wall fell and America’s geopolitical rival crumbled, an event which took place when Karp was in his early twenties.

This ambition was encapsulated in the 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) — the policy document guiding US grand strategy. “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” its authors wrote, outlining their goal of a “world order… ultimately backed by the US”.

In 2003, a little over a decade later, Palantir was founded in the crucible of the War on Terror. The company received almost $2 million from the CIA to kickstart its growth, with its tech deployed to track anti-US rebels and the roadside bombs they planted in Afghanistan and Iraq. Through these Bush-era conflicts, Palantir won over a group of special-forces officers who soon became its advocates within the military-industrial complex.

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Its technology was soon imported from Afghanistan to American cities like New Orleans where, in 2012, it was used for “predictive policing”. This system claimed to predict which people and places would be drivers of crime, based on disparate pieces of personal data, collated via Palantir’s software. Six years later, with Palantir accused of enabling racial profiling and eroding civil liberties, its New Orleans contract was suspended.

But in post-9/11 America, where concerns about privacy became subordinated to the promise of a secure nation, Palantir was on an upward trajectory. The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, of which Palantir would be a beneficiary, was rushed through Congress just after the September 11 attacks. This landmark new law allowed the state to monitor Americans without “probable cause”, and gave the government sweeping new powers to sift through reams of citizens’ data held by third parties, including doctors, libraries and universities. For a company predicated on hoovering up personal data and synthesizing it for the authorities, this was the perfect environment in which to grow. Palantir expanded military tech into domestic policing, and embraced a 21st-century culture of mass surveillance. In part, the creation of Trump’s ICE was predicated on these developments. This helps explain Karp’s support of ICE — despite his self-proclaimed liberalism.

Yet this only partially explains why Karp has backed the darkest American policies on Gaza and ICE. After all, if America’s embodiment of liberal and “Western values” is what gives it the moral authority to dominate the world order, then why does Palantir help to undermine these values so demonstrably?

This is best explained by focusing on Karp’s justification for the places Palantir’s tech is now being used. “From my perspective,” he remarked when asked about Gaza, “it’s not just about Israel… It’s like, ‘Do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has created a superior way of living?’” Karp’s identification of Israel as part of “the West” thus absolves it of guilt almost by definition.

This worldview means that when Palantir technology is alleged to be involved in bombing a girls’ school in Iran, Karp simply insists that the company’s systems are “very precise, very controlled”. Palantir’s relationship with ICE is based on a parallel set of contradictions. Some might see ICE as the handmaiden of American fascism, but Karp argues that Trump’s crackdown on immigration — whatever the cost — is necessary to prevent the rise of the real “far Right”. Today, Karp claims Palantir’s AI technology is the 21st century’s answer to the atomic bomb, advocating “a new Manhattan project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield”.

Indeed, Karp even framed the AI technological revolution as a boon to President Trump’s base, claiming it “disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic voters and makes them economically powerless, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working class, often male, working-class voters”.

Karp wants to fight the culture war at home to win support for an aggressive foreign policy abroad, but Palantir is no force for egalitarianism. And nor is the company simply servicing a war-making establishment. Instead, Palantir is reshaping warfare itself, just as it is creating a new authoritarianism at home. Karp himself is a zealot trapped by a series of paradoxes, but enabled by his growing wealth and power. Palantir’s skyrocketing profit margins will only encourage Karp to keep playing the role of philosopher king. Still he presents himself as a guarantor of the liberal West, even as Palantir erodes those values from within. And the Democrats would be wise to steer well-clear of him.

At its very beginning, capitalism was underpinned by faith in competitive markets. In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers labored within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running. This in turn provided us with our daily bread, ale and meat.

Then came the second industrial revolution and the conglomerates whose market power would make Smith weep with joy. This was the era of Big Business and the “robber barons”. And so another — neoliberal — fantasy was created, to justify the new big beasts that were now monopolizing almost every market that mattered. Joseph Schumpeter, a former Austrian finance minister who made America his home, was the new creed’s most effective advocate. Progress, he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development, for new machines, new product lines and all the paraphernalia that helps innovation take root? To monopolize markets, conglomerates need to dazzle us with remarkable new products that kill off the competition, like Henry Ford’s Model-T or Apple’s iPhone. Should we worry about all that concentrated power? No, Schumpeter reassured us. Once they reach their pinnacle, these monopolies get flabby and complacent and, eventually, they’re brought down by some upstart: one example being Toyota’s toppling of General Motors.

More recently, Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, said something that many thought was a restatement of Schumpeter’s dictum: “Competition is for losers!” While the pioneers of Big Business like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford would have agreed wholeheartedly, what Thiel was implying went beyond their wildest imagination. It went much further even than Schumpeter’s pseudo-Darwinian idea that progress comes through the rise and fall of monopolists in an endless struggle for existence.

What Thiel was saying is that today, winners do not just kill off the competition to monopolize a market. No, they keep going until they kill the market itself and replace it with something quite different: a kind of cloud fief that lacks all of the ingredients of a proper market — indeed that lacks all of the advantages that liberals and neoliberals alike recognize in the machinery of decentralized markets. In fact, today’s winners —the Magnificent Seven, plus Thiel’s own Palantir — are reviving an economic model that all of us thought dead and buried after the fall of the Soviet Union: economic planning systems that match buyers and sellers outside anything that can be usefully described as a market. 

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Gosplan was the Soviet Union’s State Planning Committee, the engine room of its command economy. Its remit was to match the supply and demand of critical resources (oil, steel, cement) but also consumption goods (food, clothes, appliances), without using market prices. Once buyers and sellers were matched, prices were assigned with a view to achieving political and social objectives (such as to ensure basic affordability, or subsidize certain industries) — not to balance markets. 

Gosplan was disbanded immediately after the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin on Boxing Day of 1991, but it is now back. Where? In the algorithms powering Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and the rest of Big Tech’s digital platforms that pretend to be, but are not, markets.

Before you protest the audacity of my claim, think of what happens when you visit Amazon. Unlike when you visit a shopping mall, either with friends or mingling with strangers, the moment you follow the link to amazon.com, you exit the marketplace and enter a space of pristine isolation. It’s just you and Jeff Bezos’s algorithm. You type, say, “espresso machines” into the search box and the algorithm matches you with a number of vendors. However, to achieve what it was coded for, the algorithm had started working months, even years, earlier. 

Over that period, you will have revealed to it many of your whims and desires through your searches, purchases, clicks and reviews. Using these cues, as well as data from other sources, the algorithm has trained you to train it to know you even better, enabling it to advise you on what books, music and films to buy. It has already won your trust. So, now that you are in a hurry to replace your broken espresso machine, the chances are that you will choose one of the top search results it has given you. 

The algorithm knows your spending pattern. It knows how to guide you to the espresso machine with the highest price you are prepared to pay, all in order that Amazon can collect up to 40% of it the moment you click the purchase button. It is an extortionate cut, but the espresso machine’s makers tolerate it, because they know that if they don’t, their company will never appear in the top search results of anyone prepared to pay for their product. As AI improves, this power to manipulate your behavior increases — and this is why Big Tech’s valuations are going through the roof.

This is nothing less than a capitalist, privately-owned, super high-tech reincarnation of the USSR’s Gosplan. Amazon’s software matches you with particular vendors and bans you from talking to any seller or even from observing what other buyers are doing — unless of course it calculates that it serves its own purposes to let you see a small selection of them. As for the price you pay, this follows (rather than precipitates) your being matched with a seller. Rather than being the variable that equilibrates demand with supply, prices in Amazon fulfill another role: that of maximizing Jeff Bezos’s cloud rents.

In this sense, prices in Amazon and other Big Tech platforms function in a manner far closer to Gosplan than to any farmers’ market, money market or shopping mall you have ever experienced. In fact, had the Soviet leaders lived to witness the workings of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech, they would be kicking themselves, lamenting that it was American capitalists who perfected their Gosplan model, complete with a surveillance system that would make their KGB henchmen green with envy. 

Gosplan failed to turn into a success story as it lacked Big Tech’s greatest weapon: cloud capital, that is, the algorithms, data centers and optic fiber cables working as an integrated network to train you to train it. As you impart your data, cloud capital learns how to input desires into your mind and then satiate these desires by selling you stuff within its privately owned version of Gosplan. 

But, is there really a difference — I hear many of you ask loudly — between Thomas Edison and Jeff Bezos? Are they not cut from the same cloth of megalomaniac monopolists seeking to dominate markets and our imagination? Yes, despite their similarities, there is a difference — and it is gigantic. Edison’s and Ford’s capital was productive. It produced cars, electricity, turbines. Bezos’s cloud capital produces nothing, except the enormous power to encase us in his cloud fief where traditional capitalist producers are squeezed for cloud rents and we, the users, provide our free labor. With every click, like and review, we enhance the power of cloud capital. 

Once upon a time, an old Trotskyite told me that the Soviet Union, in the name of socialism, had created a form of industrial feudalism. Independent of whether he was right or not, his comment is pertinent today in relation to Big Tech. Come to think of it, while the trading process on platforms like Amazon is reminiscent of the USSR’s Gosplan mechanism, it is also the case that the enormous sums that Amazon, Uber, Airbnb etc, charge the actual producers of the goods and services peddled on their sites are akin to the ground rents that the landed gentry used to charge their vassals — except that, here, they are cloud rents that accrue to the owners of cloud capital. So, just as the Soviet Union generated one kind of feudalism in the name of socialism and human emancipation, today, Silicon Valley is generating another kind of feudalism — technofeudalism, I have called it — in the name of capitalism and free markets. 

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The parallel extends to the state. The USSR was meant to be a workers’ paradise in contrast to the USA whose raison d’être was to be a haven for capitalist producers. It turns out that both promises were false. As Big Tech’s cloud capital accumulates and concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, states are becoming dependent on corporate techlords. By outsourcing core functions — archives, health data, even military software — to rented cloud infrastructure, governments lease back their own operational capacity from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google. This dependency enables a new dimension of technofeudal power.

From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state, with repercussions that extend to every realm of state activity, including health services, education, the tax office, our borders and faraway battlefields. 

In Ukraine and Gaza, and along our militarized borders, cloud capital is trained to extend its reach. Amazon’s AI tool Rekognition is used by law enforcement, including ICE, while Palantir’s vast surveillance software runs on Amazon’s cloud. Through Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google provide the Israeli military with advanced cloud and AI capabilities, reportedly enabling rapid, AI-driven targeting in Gaza with minimal human oversight. 

Let us briefly return to the comparison with the early 20th century’s original monopolist capitalists. Whether we admire or abhor the Magnificent Seven’s stock market valuations, it is helpful to keep this in mind: the old capitalist giants, the “robber barons”, actually produced things. The new technofeudal lords produce a new social order. They have replaced the invisible hand of the market with the visible, algorithmic fist of the cloudalist. 

Free-market enthusiasts have nothing to celebrate and much to regret. But it will take a brave soul amongst them to stare reality in the face. Just like pro-Soviet Marxists remained in denial that the Soviet experiment had failed for many years after 1991, so  free-market ideologues refuse to see that capitalism begat a form of capital — cloud capital — that replaced markets with something out of the Soviet past. In the process, it has killed capitalism. 

The Washington Post had just published a story in which migrants processed through Gitmo alleged mistreatment. The media, Hegseth told the service members, don’t appreciate what the joint task force is up to, and their coverage “frankly is, you know, full of a lot of bullshit”.

Between his salty language, camo hoodie, and the “We the People” tattooed across a forearm, the former Fox News anchor is unlike any previous Pentagon chief. To spend time with Hegseth is to remember that feeling of crashing parties on Greek Row as an undergrad.

His bro-y-ness — which gave rise to serious allegations of womanizing and hard drinking, some false or exaggerated, others harder to sidestep — made him Trump’s toughest confirmation battle. In the end, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance to get him through. Tapping Hegseth to run the Department of Defense attested to the President’s utter disregard for DC convention, doubly so the second time around.

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Yet the bro vibes can also be deceiving. The Ivy-educated Hegseth has a sophisticated grasp of the challenges facing the United States this century. He represents a generation of officers embittered by what used to be called the War on Terror, and is bent on ditching the bipartisan consensus that led America to take up regime change and nation-building. As one senior defense official in his inner circle told me: “Pete believes he was lied to, and he believes he has to shake up the [national-security] complex”.

The visit to Gitmo was a strange homecoming of sorts for Hegseth, who served as a National Guard lieutenant on the prison facility before volunteering to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he earned the Bronze Star. “A lot of guys and gals of my generation started out just proud to be serving, proud to be contributing,” he tells me. “‘Hey, we were attacked, and we wanna be part of that collective response, and no questions asked, let’s go do it.’”

In Hegseth’s case, this meant not only personally fighting in George W. Bush’s wars, but making the case for expanding and escalating them. In 2007, in between military stints, Hegseth became executive director of Vets for Freedom, a Bill Kristol-advised group that advocated for the Iraq “surge” and assailed politicians of both parties — but especially Democrats, and one Barack Obama, for insufficient hawkishness.

Looking back on the post-9/11 wars now, Hegseth tells me “we would be foolish not to” notice that “they cost our country dearly: in blood, in treasure, in reputation. And the more you look at them, the more you realize the depth of the folly around what we thought we were gonna create in Iraq and Afghanistan”. The results: “Iran effectively controls Iraq, the Taliban effectively controls Afghanistan”.

Against that backdrop, you can see why the Trumpians’ repurposing of Gitmo — from a retirement home for aging al-Qaeda masterminds into a deportee-processing center — would be popular. “We’ve spent 20 years defending other people’s borders,” Hegseth told US troops. “It’s time to lock down ours on behalf of the American people. We deserve to know who’s coming into our country, what their intentions are, and where they’re coming from.”

Since 31 January, the migrant operation, drawing from every branch of the military except the Space Force, has constructed 195 tents to house deportees while they’re processed. Once the administration’s plans are fully realized, capacity will ramp up to as many as 30,000. I wasn’t permitted to view the high-security area used for 9/11-era detainees and the particularly bad hombres. The still-unoccupied tents in the non-classified area lack air conditioning, and even in late February, the Cuban climate was sweltering.

“I was like this for four months in Baghdad — no AC,” I overheard Hegseth telling an officer while inspecting the tents. “But fact is, you are safe, you are fed, you are not in the rain.” Fair enough. And then, too, the newcomers face much harsher conditions on the trek to the southern border, during which they are frequently preyed upon by smugglers, with women and girls routinely raped.

The question is whether all this is worth the expense. So far, Gitmo has processed a grand total of 177 deportees, according to one Department of Defense adviser I spoke to. Most have been “high-priority” cases, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) based on gang affiliation and criminal histories. The day I visited, a massive C-17 aircraft delivered nine more for processing. “The C-17 costs $25,000 an hour to operate,” I overheard one service member. “So those nine that came in, you could’ve given each of them a first-class ticket.”

Isn’t this all typical Trump showiness?

Hegseth disagrees. The Department of Defense “has sheer capacity that DHS and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] don’t have. . .  If I don’t have a border wall, and I don’t have [barbed] wire everywhere, and I don’t have eyes everywhere. . . then how do you secure the border? Well, that becomes a pretty manpower-intensive effort at the beginning. Because you’ve got to flood the zone and interdict”. The armed forces can certainly do manpower. Border crossings are down 94% from the same period last year, according to the Border Patrol, “stupidly effective numbers” that Hegseth in big part credits to the military’s assistance to DHS and ICE.

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The fear associated with the very name “Gitmo” is part of it, too, something Hegseth didn’t shy from underscoring: “If you’re [a migrant] looking around going, ‘Hey, if I cross the border, I’m going to get immediately arrested, and instead of being facilitated and processed into the country, I’m going to be held temporarily, put on a C-17, and flown home — or flown to Gitmo?’ A lot of people start to say, ‘Meh, not gonna do it.’”

***

The US military is a miracle of state capacity, a fact showcased by the migrant-housing buildup on Gitmo. It should have taken 21 days on paper but was accomplished in a little more than a week. Such capacity doesn’t come cheap, however. The armed forces take up the largest non-entitlement share of the federal budget, $824 billion last year. And with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) squeezing the federal budget, is Hegseth worried about weakening capacity?

“Other than contingencies and our troops in the field . . . that’s the thing that occupies my mind the most,” he says. “We’re refocusing our priorities, we’re looking for efficiencies, we’re gonna pass an audit.” Still, “when I look at the budget, I’m always going to make recommendations to the president” — the emphasis here seemed to signal: not to Musk — “that we fund it in a way that ensures that we are always the biggest, the baddest, and most prepared for the next conflict. And I don’t care what the dollar amount is.”

Notably, Hegseth has directed the Pentagon not to comply with Musk’s recent ukase requiring all federal employees to write an email summarizing five things they achieved the previous week. Did he make that call on his own? Yes. “We made the call to say, ‘We’re going to do this process internally,’ because of the sensitivities of the Defense Department. But also respecting Elon and DOGE and what they’re doing. If there are people that can’t answer their email and reply with what they’re working on, then what are we doing here?”

One big driver of budgetary bloat is the Pentagon’s dependence on a handful of defense contractors: Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, the so-called primes which have earned a lousy reputation for delivering late and typically billions of dollars over-budget. During his confirmation, Hegseth touted his independence from these mega-firms and vowed to shake up the procurement process.

“Get creative, disrupt the process, bring in people who are not part of the revolving door,” he says of his approach to procurement. “I don’t know how you can do this job properly, on behalf of the American people and under the guidance of the commander in chief, if you’re invested in one contractor or another.”

He adds: “I think we’ve had plenty of clouded judgment over the years: stacking the deck in favor of a company or [weapons] system instead of saying, ‘Clean plate, here’s what we’ve got, here’s what’s working, here’s what isn’t, here’s contractors that are bloated and out of control, and we’re going to use the Defense Production Act and emergency powers to renegotiate, because we’ve been bent over a barrel on this.’”

Under the existing procurement model, smaller firms have a hard time getting a foot through the door. “Your classic examples are your Palantirs and your Andurils,” a reference to defense-technology startups that integrate artificial intelligence into warfighting. Palantir and the like, says Hegseth, are “investing their own money in R&D, [and] have far more commercial business, so they’re not fully dependent on the DoD, but they’re patriots who want to invest.”

Hegseth is committed to making room for such innovators, yet it’s hard to pin him down on what, concretely, the procurement shakeup might entail: “We’re gonna do the same competitive processes, but we’re not going to play by the same bureaucratic rules that we have in the past. Obviously abiding by the law, but there’s a lot of things the president can do when you recognize the urgency of the moment.”

All this is unfolding amid a long-term shift toward the Asia-Pacific region as Washington’s primary zone of geo-economic rivalry in the 21st century, over and against an ascendant China. The change in emphasis was conceived in President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, which remained largely unfulfilled. Hegseth credits Trump’s first-term national defense strategy for “operationalizing” the concept, and promised more of it for the second term.

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“I also think we’ll see this keyword — in a world of finite resources, you have to prioritize,” Hegseth adds. Under ideal conditions, “the Department of Defense has a $2 trillion budget, and we can do everything, everywhere. That’s not what exists, so you have to look to allies and partners for burden-sharing.”

That message, delivered by Hegseth at a Nato gabfest and reiterated by Vance at the Munich Security Conference, has rankled America’s European allies. Yet Hegseth remains unsparing. “If your alliance is only flags, you don’t have an alliance,” he says. “You need armies. And if you have armies, that’s good for us and good for you in your backyard. And we’re having those same conversations with our allies and partners in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific” who are alarmed by Beijing’s widening ambitions.

The reprioritization also involves curbing Chinese influence in America’s own backyard: “We’re also looking at areas where we’re under-resourced like South America, like Panama, where we’ve allowed the Chinese to move their way in, and that shit’s gonna stop under President Trump…America First means things that we’ve paid for and fought and resourced,” like the Panama Canal, “better be neutral in navigation, and if they’re not, we’re gonna make sure that they are.”

Still, can Hegseth put himself in the shoes of nervous traditional allies? “Look, if you talk to Israel, we’re not abandoning that fight. We’re right there with them. You talk to our allies that are investing in Europe, they get it. I just talked to Saudi Arabia — they get it.” There is no doubt, though, that everyone from Latin America to Kyiv to Beijing has to reckon with the realities of Trump 2.0: “There’s a new sheriff.”

Yet even with Trump’s electoral mandate and iron resolve, it remains to be seen if the new administration can break Washington’s addiction to unipolar hegemony. The avatars of the older consensus — those committed to fighting for “democracy” everywhere, all the time — are down. But they aren’t out.

During its bitter fight against the militants, the Afghan government must have received thousands of such reports. What made this one so special was its provenance: not the drones and informants of its friends in the world’s greatest superpower, but rather Raven Sentry, an AI-enabled warning model designed to predict insurgent activity. 

Developed in 2019, while US negotiations with the Taliban were still underway, Raven Sentry was built to maintain situational awareness in Afghanistan after the final withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. “We were looking for ways to become more efficient and to maintain situational awareness”, says Colonel Thomas Spahr, a professor at the US Army War College, adding that Raven Sentry would “enable” the Afghans to continue the fight after Nato had flown home.

The details are classified, but Raven Sentry apparently proved successful in Jalalabad, even as it stymied several other attacks as well. In the end, though, the programme was terminated abruptly, about the same time as democratic rule in Afghanistan, amid the chaos, fear and bloodshed of Kabul International Airport. Yet what Raven Sentry achieved that day in July 2020 could yet transform warfare — if, that is, the technical and ethical hurdles don’t prove too high.

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Militaries have experimented with AI intelligence for a while. As far back as 2017, the US launched something called Project Maven to help analysts process large amounts of data. Yet if Maven relied on sophisticated object-recognition software, Spahr equally stresses that human officers remained “central” to the process. 

Raven Sentry was different. Gathering together a range of data — social media messages, news stories, significant anniversaries and even weather reports — it could then predict places at risk of insurgent attack. “Neutral, friendly, and enemy activity anomalies triggered a warning,” Spahr explains. “For example, reports of political or Afghan military gatherings that might be terrorist targets would focus the system’s attention.”

Despite America’s eventual failure in Central Asia, meanwhile, Afghanistan proved an ideal testing ground. That’s essentially down to what Rafael Moiseev calls Afghanistan’s data-rich environment. “AI is only ever as good as the data that trains it,” explains the AI expert. As Moiseev continues, Nato’s 20-year odyssey in Afghanistan meant there was plenty to go on, from historical attack data to anecdotal evidence from Spahr and his colleagues. The graveyard of empires even offered lessons from the Cold War, with Raven scooping up content from the Soviet occupation in the Eighties.

Just as important, Raven sharpened its predictions over time. Like other algorithms, it could first scour unclassified databases, before honing in on what mattered — useful when so-called “OSINT” data is now a global market worth $8 billion.

All told, this comprehensive approach proved successful. As Spahr says, Raven spotted some 41 insurgent attacks across five Afghan provinces before they actually happened, usually offering warnings of about 48 hours. And by October 2020, less than a year before Raven would abruptly be wrapped up, analysts had determined it was firing out predictions with 70% accuracy, even if humans were crucial to its success too.

Raven Sentry is only one example of how AI has transformed war this century. Aside from being a predictive analytical tool, after all, AI technologies also boast what Polly Scully calls effective and ethical applications elsewhere. “In the broadest sense,” explains Scully, who heads Palantir’s defence and national security work in the UK, “it has the power to dramatically lower the technical proficiency required for personnel to engage with large amounts of data in sophisticated ways, in order to make better decisions.” 

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To explain what she means in practice, Scully refers to the use of AI in improving battlefield awareness, something Palantir’s been working on. She notes that algorithms can analyse how appropriate particular aircraft — and their bombs — are for striking targets. “AI,” she adds, “has the potential to transform logistics too.” Among other things, it can keep artillerymen informed about how quickly gun barrels are wearing out. From there, Scully adds, the computers can tell manufacturers to build spare parts. 

Examined from the other end of the barrel, Moiseev says that AI can cut casualties by enabling the deployment of autonomous machines on the frontline, with actual troops safely orchestrating the battle from the rear. This isn’t some Terminator fantasy either. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian military deployed about 30 “robot dogs” against its Russian foe. Though not totally autonomous, the so-called Brit Alliance Dog (BAD2) can explore trenches, ruined buildings and other areas drones struggle to access. 

The Ukrainians have also experimented with autonomous machine guns, as well as drones that use AI to identify and attack enemy targets. In the Middle East, meanwhile, and in an echo of Raven, it was recently revealed that Israel used an AI programme called Lavender to designate close to 37,000 Palestinians as Hamas targets.

Yet as the catastrophic civilian casualties wrought by systems like Lavender imply, battlefield efficiency and wartime morality are two very different things. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI” and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, warned about the “possible bad consequences” of the technology — noting especially that robotic killers may one day move beyond our control.  

It hardly helps, of course, that some of AI’s most ardent enthusiasts are arguably less than perfect. Though Scully unsurprisingly emphasises the ethics of Palantir’s platforms, her company has faced scrutiny over how it collects and uses data, while also apparently inviting young children to an AI warfare conference. That’s before you consider its murky relationship with the US government, with Palantir also causing controversy over its work for the NHS here in Britain. 

Yet these challenges aside, Moiseev is ultimately confident that few people want to see society torn apart in a future ruled by killer robots. “Rather,” he suggests, “we should be developing AI to prevent and resolve disagreements.” In a broader sense, meanwhile, predictive AI can be used to not only foil attacks, but also respond to conflict and help civilians. Whatever the question marks around Palantir, it is currently using AI to help de-mine over 150,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian fields.

And what about that future hinted at Jalalabad? Could AI predict some future conflict? Moiseev thinks so. As he says, though the invasion of Ukraine came as a shock to most, a team of scientists and engineers based in Silicon Valley had already predicted Russia’s move almost to the day — even months before the war actually began. “There is often a wealth of signs that a conflict is on the horizon,” Moiseev adds, “whether unusual movement at missile sites or a sudden stockpiling of critical materials. The problem is that humans aren’t very good at spotting subtle clues. But for AI, that is one of its greatest strengths.”

No wonder US decision makers are hoping to use AI to analyse data to spot any future Chinese actions around Taiwan. Certainly, Admiral Samuel Paparo, a US Pacific Fleet commander, has implied as much. As he recently told a defence innovation conference, the Pentagon is looking for ways to “find those indications” of an imminent assault by the People’s LIberation Army. Given, moreover, that any eruption in the Pacific could occur without warning, experts have argued that AI could equally improve overall the general readiness of US forces year round.

Then there’s the question of whether the computers could be outwitted, by some enemy eager to retain a modicum of surprise. Tellingly, this may happen via even smarter machines, potentially millions of times more powerful than regular supercomputers. Quantum machines could analyse enemy movements in a second, smashing through their encryption.

It would be reckless, though, to let computers take complete control. As Spahr says, war is ultimately fought by men and women, meaning we can never allow an “automation bias” to cloud our strategic judgement. Given how his country’s adventure in Kabul ultimately ended, that’s surely sound advice. 

That a private American company should gain such a foothold in the NHS would normally cause concern among privacy and health service advocates. And that it could be Palantir — part-funded in its early days by the CIA and with Western armies among its clients — is causing high anxiety. “Is Palantir really the kind of company we want at the very heart of the National Health Service?” asks Cori Crider, director of Foxglove, a campaign group dedicated to challenging the excesses of tech giants. “This is a company who, at the start of the pandemic, had no track record of working with healthcare staff. They’re not a healthcare company. They weren’t a health data company. They were essentially a tech company who supported spies, police, the military and border forces.”

Palantir, in partnership with Accenture, is in the running with Quantexa, a British company partnered with IBM, and Oracle Cerner to build the “Federated Data Platform” (FDP), described by the NHS as a system “which will enable NHS organisations to bring together operational data – currently stored in separate systems – to support staff to access the information they need in one safe and secure environment”. NHS England says there are currently no plans to include GP records in the FDP, but privacy campaigners fear that that could change with mission creep, and if it did, Palantir could gain access to them. The winner of the FDP contract was supposed to have been named in September, an announcement then delayed to the middle of this month, and now said to be imminent — but few in the NHS believe it will be anyone but Palantir.

The NHS — budget this year £182 billion — has the largest repository of health data in the world. It services around a million GP appointments a day, and over a quarter of a million hospital appointments. According to consultants Ernst and Young, the information gleaned from NHS activities could be worth £9.6 billion a year. With the advent of AI, mining this treasure trove of data could mean the discovery of better medicines and treatments, improved patient care and vast savings. But in the wrong hands, it could see the NHS being used as a cash-cow, and it could mean a loss of privacy, the end of patient trust, and the slow death of the NHS as we know it.

So, how did Palantir get in the running — and why are they being hotly tipped as a shoo-in for the FDP contract, worth £480m over seven years? The company, named after the crystal “seeing stones” in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, was founded by Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, in 2003 with the intention in his words of adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud software in order to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties” (he had sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002). Before the 9/11 attack on New York, the US intelligence agencies had been blind-sided; Thiel was convinced his seeing stones would give them better vision in the future.

An early investor in Palantir was the CIA, through a venture capital arm named In-Q-Tel. The first of four iterations of Thiel’s data systems — Palantir Gotham — is used by the US National Security Agency, the FBI, the Western military, police, US immigration services and fraud investigators. It is capable of pulling together vast amounts of data and making connections that could solve problems insoluble to mere humans. It is currently being used by the Ukrainian army in its war with Russia.

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There have been reports — neither confirmed nor denied by Palantir — that its software helped to locate Osama bin Laden. Former CIA director George Tenet once said he wished the agency had had Gotham before 9/11, the suggestion being that it might have pulled together disparate dots into one large picture of terror plot planning. Another iteration, called Metropolis, is a finance analytics platform widely used by hedge funds and banks. In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, executives from major tech companies, including Palantir, Google, Meta and Amazon, were asked by the UK government whether they could help with the planning and implementation of its responses to Covid-19. Palantir immediately stepped in, offering the use of another of its systems, Foundry… for just £1. Its offer was accepted by beleaguered health officials.

Palantir advisers were embedded in the NHS while Foundry was used in planning to effectively distribute medicines, ventilators and vaccines, monitor staff levels and intensive care bed availability — creating the kind of joined-up health response that would not have been previously possible with the UK’s fragmented network of trusts and care providers. Once a vaccine became available, it was involved in its rollout. By the end of the pandemic, Palantir’s £1 punt had paid off.

“A £1 contract seemed odd at the time, but it obviously gave them a foot in the door,” says Dr David Wrigley, digital lead on the BMA’s GP Committee, which has expressed concerns over the use of patients’ data on the FDP. “They will have learned about NHS systems and contracts, seen how the system operates and how best to bid for other contracts going forward.” Palantir’s next move to curry favour with the UK government was to offer its services again, for six months, to help with the logistics of housing Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion. But this time it charged nothing whatsoever. The company says it is proud of the role that it played at a time of great suffering for Ukrainian families. But this move did its relationship with the UK, and its long-term income, no harm at all.

Since then, Palantir has been awarded several other NHS contracts worth £60 million, with none going out to tender. Last month, it was awarded £5.5million to continue running Homes for Ukraine over the next 12 months for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) — again with no tendering process. The probity of this deal was questioned by the National Audit Office (NAO) in a report published last week. It pointed out that: “In February 2023, the Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, wrote to Palantir noting his concern about the practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition.” Asked about this criticism, Palantir said there was: “nothing unusual in a business offering a prospective customer the opportunity to trial before purchase. Indeed the Government’s own guidance states that ‘where a service is being outsourced for the first time, a pilot should be run’ and that ‘if you’re buying a product, consider asking for a demonstration or trial on a smaller scale’.”

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But a more polemical vision of how Thiel sees British people’s relationship with the NHS was revealed in January when he made some unguarded comments during a Q&A session at the Oxford Union debating society. He said they were suffering from “Stockholm syndrome”, held ideologically captive by their healthcare system, and that the NHS needed “market mechanisms” to improve, adding that: “In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over… In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” He said British people needed to stop thinking the NHS was “the most wonderful thing in the world” and accept that it is an “iatrogenic” institution. An iatrogenic illness is a malady caused by the treatment itself. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,” he said.

Palantir quickly distanced itself from his comments. Joanna Peller, the company’s UK health lead, said: “Peter Thiel made these comments as a private individual and our CEO [Alex Karp, at Palantir since 2004] has made it clear he firmly disagrees with them and that he wishes ‘we had a health care system in the US that served the poor and underserved as well as I perceive the British system does’.” Few people in the NHS would argue that its countrywide IT systems couldn’t be improved, but many billions of pounds have been wasted in previous unsuccessful attempts to merge them. At the moment, there are 42 administered by “Integrated Care Systems” comprising hospital trusts, local authorities and care providers.

The first attempt at digitising and uniting records held by GPs and hospital trusts was launched in 2002 and called the National Programme for IT. It began with a budget of £6.2 billion but was mired in technical difficulties and a lack of trust among health staff. It was scrapped in 2011 after racking up £12 billion in costs. One of the private contractors who pulled out of the scheme before it was junked was Accenture, Palantir’s current bidding partner. In 2021 the government launched the General Practice Data for Planning and Research system, designed to enable records to be used for more than simple personal care. Advances in technology meant that the data in them could be used for the same purposes envisaged for the FDP — better care, medicines and healthcare planning.

However, patients were advised that where their data was to be shared for anything beyond care — for research or planning — they had the right to withhold their data under an NHS “National Data Opt-Out”, and they did in their droves. “More than a million people opted out because there was a lack of trust in the system,” says Foxglove’s Crider. “And each time someone opts out, the data set gets smaller and so its usefulness for research is diminished.” Sam Smith, policy lead at medConfidential, which campaigns for patient privacy, says he believes even more people will want to opt-out if Palantir wins the FDP contract. But there is confusion over whether they will be able to. Smith explains:

“The NHS England website says people will not be able to opt out, but this is contradictory because we all have the right to opt out of sharing our personal data if it is to be used for anything other than patient care, for purposes such as research and planning — but that is exactly what FDP is supposed to be used for… Last month, Sir Chris Whitty [chief medical officer for England] urged people not to opt out precisely because their information could help with research and planning. So what is it to be? Can people opt out, or can’t they?”

In a letter to the Health and Social Care Committee in August, Lord Markham, under-secretary of state for health, said the government was considering reforming the National Data Opt-Out. I asked NHS England whether these reforms would make it easier or harder for patients to opt out, but it did not answer the question. On the subject of Palantir and the FDP, a spokesperson said:

“The NHS is conducting a fair and transparent procurement process for a supplier of the federated data platform, in line with public contracts regulations, and this process has not yet concluded… Better use of data brings huge benefits for patients — a federated data platform will ensure more joined-up care and better use of resources, connecting existing NHS data in one secure environment to help speed up diagnosis and reduce waiting times and hospital stays.”

Palantir’s Peller emphasises that patients’ data is safe with the company. “Unlike many other technology companies, we’re not in the business of collecting, mining or selling data,” she says. “What we do is provide tools that help customers understand and organise the information that they hold, along with training and support in using those tools. We are legally defined as the ‘data processor’ while the customer is the ‘data controller’. Customers retain full ownership of their data. Palantir is granted no rights to such data and can only carry out that processing which it is instructed to do by the customer, while UK government customer data is only hosted in the UK.” She says Palantir is “now helping to reduce the care backlog and ensure patients receive vital treatment sooner in 36 NHS Trusts across England”. These are trusts invited (some say pressured) by NHS England to run trials of Foundry, and this is the reason Palantir is considered a shoo-in for the FDP contract — it is too embedded to get out.

However, in response to a written Parliamentary question in March, health minister Will Quince said nine of these had been “paused” while two had been suspended. A variety of reasons were later given, ranging from a lack of funds to administrative delays, and assurances were made in August that some of the paused pilots were up and running again. But at least two — Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, and Milton Keynes University Hospital — have indicated that the system wasn’t right for them. I asked NHS England how many of the 36 pilots were currently operational, but received no answer. This only confuses the picture, as Palantir insists they all are.

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Whichever company is announced as the provider of the FDP, its success will not only be judged on whether the NHS is finally blessed with the joined-up digital wizardry it so badly needs, but also on whether it manages to provide that and retain the trust of patients. “If a person goes to see their GP and holds back important or embarrassing information because they’re afraid it will be shared with a private company, then that is not only dangerous for the patient, but also very sad,” says the BMA’s Wrigley. “Because that could mean the end of the doctor-patient relationship as we know it.”