There is a particular variety of pious astonishment that belongs exclusively to the Western diplomatic set, a class of persons who seem perpetually amazed that the Faustian bargains they struck over breakfast do not include a moral warranty. The latest outbreak of this affliction concerns Elon Musk, who, having been hailed only months ago as a secular saint for showering Ukraine with satellite dishes, has apparently remembered that he is an eccentric defense contractor with a balance sheet to protect, and has accordingly throttled the broadband on which Kyiv’s artillery depends.
The shrieks of betrayal from Washington to Brussels are as predictable as they are disingenuous. For nearly a year, an entire transatlantic alliance, whose own bureaucratic apparatus moves with the glacial inertia of a dying empire, congratulated itself on outsourcing the logistics of twentieth-century warfare to a private citizen whose primary pastime is dispensing adolescent nihilism to eighty million followers on the internet. That this digital condottiere—having secured the grateful applause of every foreign minister from London to Warsaw—should eventually demand to dictate terms, or simply grow bored of underwriting a grinding war of attrition in the Donbas, was an inevitability that any student of the Italian Renaissance could have diagnosed in twenty seconds.
The nation-state has developed a distaste for paying the full price of its convictions. Consider Milan, where soldiers were deployed this weekend to ring the city center against thousands of citizens marching under the grim banner of an energy crisis that European leadership swore would never come. We are told, incessantly, that democracy is on the ballot everywhere from the Brazilian rainforest, where two exhausted septuagenarians of equal and opposite venality are currently contesting the presidency, to Jerusalem, where the routine closure of the West Bank is treated as the natural cost of doing democratic business. Yet everywhere one looks, the core competencies of government—maintaining social peace, keeping the radiators warm, and securing the borders—are increasingly treated as optional extras, best deferred to the next electoral cycle.
It is precisely this exhaustion of statecraft that leaves the field open to the privateers. When governments no longer possess either the industrial capacity to produce ammunition or the political stomach to ask their populations to endure hardship, they naturally turn to the technologist on horseback. Musk did not force his satellites upon an unwilling pentagon; he was begged to supply them by statesmen who imagined that modern war could be won on a subscription model, easily cancelled without consequence at the end of the free trial.
Now, having allowed the vital nervous system of a major European conflict to be held in the capricious hands of a single, easily agitated tycoon, the West discovers to its horror that private capital comes with private opinions. Mr. Musk’s sudden desire to mediate borders and flick the off-switch on drone strikes is not an aberration; it is the natural consequence of abdicating sovereignty to the highest, or in this case the most convenient, bidder. If sovereign nations wish to pursue grand geopolitical crusades, they might begin by paying for their own infrastructure, rather than expecting a capricious automobile salesman to act as their permanent, cut-price quartermaster.