Alex Karp is a multi-billionaire who serves as the CEO of Palantir, a controversial software company that has been much more willing than some others in Silicon Valley to provide technology to Western governments for military and policing applications. The company has been described as “the West’s AI arms dealer” and criticized for its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israel Defense Forces. Unlike his more famous Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a reactionary MAGA supporter, Karp describes himself as a socialist (he, like Elon Musk, seems to have some idiosyncratic personal definition in mind that has nothing in common with the socialist tradition). 

Some comments that Karp recently made at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute about why Democrats lost were widely recirculated online. Elon Musk described the clip of Karp speaking as “based” and it racked up millions of views. It’s framed as a critique of woke ideology, but it is in fact mostly an argument about U.S. foreign policy and as such is a very useful way to examine some common American myths that are used to justify what I consider to be an incredibly dangerous set of policies. 

Karp argues, essentially, for a philosophy that is often called (by its advocates) peace through strength. He says that America needs to frighten its enemies, and that while the “Berkeley faculty” do not understand this, the Real Americans do, and thus an agenda that wins popular support will focus on keeping people safe against external threats. 

Here is what he says: 

Americans are the most loving, God fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved. And you know, when Americans are spending a trillion dollars on defense, what I know, what I want, and what I think my peers want is: Why are these people keeping our citizens hostage, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations—basically a discriminatory institution against anything good. 

We need to stand up, and those people need to be scared. And that's why this conference is so important, because we have the best products in the world, and we cannot have parity. Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction. If it's even they will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. And if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say… and honestly, probably shouldn't say, this is why I thought the Democrats are going to lose the election. […] Because people want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they're safe, and safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe. And the average American person understands this. Unfortunately, many of the intellectually captured institutions funneled and intellectually owned by the Berkeley faculty do not. And that's what they want, it’s sure as hell what I want, and that's what Palantir and all the people in this room, I hope we're here to serve the American people, and my version of service is the soldiers are happier, the enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the fact that we're the only one with a real tech scene in this country, and we're going to win everything.

Karp often repeats variations on this foreign policy philosophy, that safety and security come from making other people “scared.” “You scare the crap out of your adversaries,” Karp told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times earlier this year. Scare the enemy shitless seems to be Point 1 of Karp’s thinking about foreign policy, Point 2 (the only other point) being, We In The West Are Better Than Other People, Who Are Bad And Want To Destroy Us. “We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Karp said. This is how he justifies his company’s firm support of Israel, a stance that has caused some Palantir employees to quit as Israel has wiped out more and more of Gaza over the last year: “From my perspective, 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?’”

I haven’t found Karp saying anything more sophisticated about foreign policy than these two talking points,* namely that the West is good and must be protected from the bad people, and that the way to do that is through threatening violence against not just those who hurt us, but also everyone from their “friends” to their “mistress.” Taken together, I think these add up to a highly irrational worldview that, if it is held by powerful people who may shape the future of U.S. foreign policy, endangers the entire future of human civilization. 

Let’s consider first how obviously wrong Karp is about the simplistic idea that you are safer when people are scared of you. “Safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe.” On a micro level, this is plainly false. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were dangerous to the civilian population in part because they were so scared. They thought that any Vietnamese villager, from a child to an elderly lady, was a potential threat (they could be hiding a grenade!). Fear made them dangerous. Or think about police killings. One of the things that makes the police so dangerous is that they are trained to be more afraid of the policed population than they should be. As Rosa Brooks, who served as a police officer and wrote a book about it, told me: “If you are primed to see everybody as a potential lethal threat to you, it affects what situations you will see as dangerous.” 

What Karp doesn’t consider, then, is how making someone afraid can actually make them more likely to act aggressively. In foreign relations there is a phenomenon called the “security dilemma,” which people with views like Karp rarely stop to consider, whereby the steps that a country takes to make itself feel secure against external threats appear to others as being threats themselves, and cause other countries to take steps that seem like threats. Consider Iran’s nuclear program, for instance. Successive U.S. presidents have consistently used language that Iran interprets as a threat to invade it. (Not an unreasonable fear, because they saw what happened to their neighbor.) The possession of nuclear weapons would act as a deterrent to such an invasion, which is likely the main reason Iran would pursue acquiring them. (The Pentagon has assessed that Iran’s “military strategy is designed to defend against external or ‘hard’ threats from the United States and Israel” and “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”) As Iran takes steps that get it closer to possessing a nuclear weapon, however, the dominant U.S. reaction is to portray Iran as aggressive and a threat (thereby necessitating new threats of military action by the U.S. and Israel). An action seen as defensive by one party is seen as aggressive by the other. 

Scaring your “enemies” into thinking you might attack them is not, then, the ideal way to achieve security. For example, It was partly because the U.S. threatened to invade Cuba that the Soviet Union decided to put nuclear missiles there as a deterrent, which the U.S. interpreted as a threat, which sparked a tense confrontation that nearly led to global nuclear war. Ultimately, we are better off when we work together, trying to build trust, lower tensions, and keep arms races from getting out of control. An institution like the United Nations (which Karp claims, without providing any examples, is “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good”) has a crucial function in bringing countries together to ease the kinds of mutual suspicion that can spiral into a violent confrontation that nobody wants. Ultimately, Karp is in error to believe that the more heavily armed and capable of inspiring fear you are, the safer you are. In fact, while sometimes violence is unavoidable, the use of threats can have unpredictable consequences, and poisons your ability to work with others.

Let’s turn to the other of Karp’s two beliefs, namely the belief that the West “has created a superior way of living” and must be protected, i.e., that we and our allies are better than other people. Noam Chomsky has said that in U.S. foreign relations, “the fundamental principle is that ‘we are good’ … ‘We’ are benevolent, seeking peace and justice… ‘We’ are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.” Karp is displaying this ideology at its most childlike. Americans are just so nice and kind that we are vulnerable, our boundless goodness is our weakness, and thus we must suppress this urge and be brutal, to be willing to threaten even people who have not directly hurt us. 

What is interesting about this fable of We The Good Guys and They The Baddies is that it does not require examining the facts of what the U.S. has actually done in the world. It is a self-righteous and arrogant story, but it doesn’t come with actual proof. In fact, the actual record of historical action is excluded from discussion. Consider what Karp’s colleague Peter Thiel said when asked what he thought about Israel using AI software to select targets in Gaza, a choice that has resulted in horrific civilian deaths and injuries: 

Look again....I'm not ....I'm not...you know, you know...with... without, without going into all the... you know I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It's not for us to to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they're broadly in the right and that's, that's sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I, if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I'm actually going to, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that's just simply absurd. And so I'm not, I'm not going to concede that point.

Now, this passage strikes me as further proof that Peter Thiel is one of the most inarticulate people I’ve ever seen speak in public, and is further proof that you do not have to be intelligent to be a billionaire. But what most fascinates me about this response is that Karp and Thiel think the West (including Israel) deserve to prevail because of their moral superiority, but when presented with evidence that Israel may not be morally superior, Thiel says that he doesn’t look into the facts, because he defers to Israel! But this is a confession that Karp and Thiel are bullshitters who do not mean what they say. If they were on Israel’s side because it is more moral, they would have to consider evidence that weighs on the question of Israel’s morality. They would have to read, for example, the Mordechai Report, a carefully-sourced analysis by an Israeli historian that documents the many war crimes Israel has committed in Gaza and ultimately comes to the conclusion that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. But I have not seen Karp or Thiel refute any of the allegations in the Mordechai Report. Instead, I have seen Karp denouncing pro-Palestine protesters as “pagan” and saying he wants to send them to visit North Korea. 

There is a strong element of self-interest in Karp’s stated views. Note that in his framework, our security just so happens to be enhanced to the degree the U.S. government pays Palantir. Of course the CEO selling weapons software to the U.S. government thinks America needs to buy expensive weapons software in order to be safe, just as a vacuum cleaner salesman thinks a new vacuum is precisely what you need in order to ensure your house is tidy, attractive, and sanitary. It would be odd to hear the CEO of a company selling weapons to the United States government saying something like “Although actually, a lot of this arms race could be averted through skilful diplomatic leadership, and we’d end up even safer and without wasting so much money on military spending.” 

But that doesn’t mean that Karp is being dishonest. A vacuum cleaner salesman may go into the business of selling vacuum cleaners because he sincerely believes that the world would be better off if people had more vacuum cleaners. Karp might claim, and I would believe him, that his ideology arose prior to his occupation, that he sells weapons because he believes in it. (Likewise, when I tell people magazines are the future, it is not because I am trying to sell magazines—although I am—rather I got a position selling magazines because I believe in them.) I am sure he is sincere, but also he holds the beliefs that a person in his position must hold in order to continue in it, and as we know, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. So I don’t expect Karp to read the Mordechai Report—or The Myth of American Idealism—because if he did, he might be unable to muster the same level of confidence that the world’s morality is black-and-white. He might have to become an adult, and without the mythology that justifies his work, it might be difficult to continue his role in stoking an arms race in order to get rich. 

The rest of us, however, do not need to fall for this. We should be capable of understanding that an AI weapons arms race with China is a horrendous idea that is likely to end in calamity on an unprecedented scale, and that what the world needs right now is not for America to be “scary” but for it to take the lead in renewing global diplomacy, so that the people of the world can solve their most pressing problems together. We must not let rich, belligerent, self-righteous fools like Karp and Thiel drive us toward civilizational catastrophe. 

*In a New York Times op-ed last year, he advocated the U.S. take the lead in an AI arms race, but merely repeated the same basic view that we are locked in a geopolitical struggle against ruthless adversaries and must prevail by striking fear into them. 

Somebody should give Alex Karp a copy of: