When Palantir Technologies published a 22-point text summarising the recently published book of its chief executive, Alex Karp, a storm was created in the media worldwide. The points, which some suggested were a kind of manifesto for big tech firms to participate in the defence of the nation, were characterised by Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat as “the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.”
What the company’s manifesto implies with its advocacy for Silicon Valley to play an active role in addressing things like crime and to participate in the defence of the nation, is that private actors involved in security are motivated by politics just as much they are by financial incentives. As geopolitics is becoming an ever-increasingly privatized space, the motivation for governments to offer contracts to companies to execute security policy or for private actors to act in the service of a government reflects a new reality with which we must become accustomed: Public-private partnerships extending to the use of kinetic force is now seen as a vital aspect of security policy.
That politics of technocracy, depending on one’s view, will either centralise power to such a degree that power moves beyond democratic accountability or fuse state power with private firms to revitalise civilization by making the state more robust and efficient in providing for the defence and security of the nation.
The Trump administration certainly sees Palantir as an invaluable partner for its domestic and foreign policy agenda. Not only has the administration expanded the company’s work across the federal government and received—as of mid-2025—more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office to help it on matters of surveillance and data analysis, but the company has also secured contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. While Palantir has proven an effective private partner for the administration, its ever-increasing role in assisting the administration in its efforts to streamline government bureaucracy, as well as remove illegal immigrants from the United States, illustrates how dependent the state is becoming on non-state, private actors to execute state policy.
In particular, Trump’s security agenda has been informed by a strong privatization theme. According to Open Secrets, federal data showed that private prison operators, charter airlines, and security contractors dominated the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts in 2025.
For example, Akima Infrastructure Protection received over $300 million in ICE contracts in 2025 to safeguard federal assets. García Hernández, an Ohio State University professor told Open Secrets that, “What we see when it comes to ICE is that everything from transportation to the ownership and operation of prison facilities themselves is typically done by a private company under contract with ICE.” As one analyst noted, “By privatizing security and the use of violence, removing it from the domain of the state and giving it to private interest, the state in these instances is both being strengthened and disassembled.” What implications this will have for how the U.S., and other states, engage in security policy going forward is another matter.
Nonetheless, this is not the only area of policy Trump has privatized. For example, just as Trump turned to the private sector to help him deport illegal, the administration has turned to Blackrock to help rebuild Ukraine through the company helping to identify funding sources and investment opportunities. The influence of this company on geopolitical decisions is not solely witnessable in the fact it is being asked to partake in the reconstruction of Ukraine after the current conflict ends, but also by the fact that its CEO, and the CEO of other financial behemoths, now engage in their own diplomacy with other foreign leaders.
In 2025, it was Larry Fink, Blackrock’s CEO, convinced a Hong Kong tycoon and President Trump to let him buy two ports on the opposite ends of the Panama Canal. After which Fink helped Trump “save face with China and allowed Trump to ‘take back’ the canal without a shot being fired.”
During President Trump’s most recent visit to China in May 2026, he brought with him the executives of the biggest corporations in the United States, including Fink and the former DOGE head Elon Musk. While the fruits of their discussions have remained relatively secretive, the fact he brought them along not only shows how integrated the United States’ and Chinese economies are, but how central these private actors have now become to American diplomacy. In other words, U.S. policy has become increasingly intertwined with the strategic interests and global engagement of major private corporations.
After Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela where U.S. special forces attacked in the dead of night and extracted Nicholas Maduro from his residence and flew him back to the United States on narcotrafficking charges, Donald Trump sought to get Venezuelan oil pumped and sold on the market. Trump turned to mercenaries, otherwise known as private military contractors, to protect oil and energy assets in Venezuela rather than deploying U.S. troops to do the job. In fact, a year earlier at the beginning of Trump’s second term in January 2025, Erik Prince—the former CEO of Blackwater—and other executives met and discussed ways that their private security firms could help the new administration deport millions of migrants from the United States.
Outsourcing the monopoly on violence
What this dependence on private contractors in volatile and dangerous theatres speaks to, however, is perhaps a more controversial political point which stems from the fact that, throughout the west there has been an armed forces recruitment crisis. In short, not many young people in the west want to fight and die for their countries anymore. While the reasons why this may be the case are beyond the scope of this piece, the point is that despite the new calls and efforts for conscription to reverse this worrying trend, which itself will probably not necessarily produce the most competent or effective fighters, states will have to increasingly draw upon military and security expertise from elsewhere—many of which are now doing so. And it is here where mercenaries will come into play.
The politically correct term in the modern era is that of a “private military company/contractor” (PMC). There are many definitions of what these constitute. Broadly speaking, PMCs are private business entities “that provide force and force related services, such as military or security consultancy, training to local security or armed forces, intelligence, or security work.” They are profit-driven, corporate bodies that specialise in the provision of military skills, operational support, troop training, and other professional services intimately linked to warfare. A Mercenary, on the other hand, is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a soldier who will fight for any country or group that offers payment.” Collins Dictionary defines a mercenary as “a soldier who is paid to fight by a country or group that they do not belong to.”
However, as the national security analyst and former private military contractor Sean McFate once said, the distinction between a PMC and mercenary is irrelevant. The reason being is that if you can be one, then you can be another. It all depends on market conditions and the will of a contractor. Mercenaries, like PMCs, are motivated by profit. They sell security in an insecure world. While academics offer typologies to clarify the myriad of labels they think helps distinguish between “private security companies” (those who offer consulting services), PMCs (those who conduct defensive operations), or “mercenaries (those who perform offensive operations), they wrongly presuppose that there are exclusive divisions between these services.
France, for example, recently formalised the role of so-called “trusted operators” within its defence framework. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces has been permitted to seek private organizations and companies for “international military cooperation, training, support missions and foreign operations. Although Paris avoids the explicit term private military companies, the substance of the policy suggests precisely that.”
By outsourcing the monopoly on violence to private entities, the state effectively creates a buffer of plausible deniability if things go wrong. In an era of shadow warfare, the greatest weapon a modern state can possess is a lack of fingerprints. Private actors and especially mercenaries provide a zero-footprint option in the grey areas of international relations. If a Special Ops team is captured or compromised, the home capital faces a diplomatic catastrophe. If a contractor is caught, the government can simply deny any official connection and leave the fallout to be managed as a private-corporate matter.
In the case of the current conflict in Iran, Gulf countries have been reportedly turning to private military personnel capable of providing protection during active operations. Having had infrastructure struck by Iranian drone and missile strikes, the Gulf countries have been re-evaluating their defence capabilities and the use of private contractors is seen, according to one official from the region, as part of more “forward-looking move rather than a response to the current situation.”
Given the efficacy of the American security umbrella has been thrown into question, Gulf countries are looking at secondary systems compatible with U.S. systems, such as a kill-web system which combines intelligence and warfare capabilities across different domains. Now, there is a need for experienced personnel capable of managing and acting within such systems and training someone from scratch is time-consuming and expensive. Thus, “research has already begun into personnel who have previously worked on or are currently working with such systems.”
Michael Cohen and Maria Kupcu wrote some twenty-one years ago in their piece “Privatizing Foreign Policy” that one of the most important, yet misunderstood, political and social developments of the post-Cold War era has been the growing importance of non-state actors in global affairs. Privatization is no longer a mere auxiliary tool for statecraft. Rather, it is becoming the central nervous system of modern security policy. It will be interesting to see how it plays out for contemporary security governance as the trend continues, which it surely will.
Author: Bailey Schwab, PhD – Foreign policy researcher specialising in U.S. strategy, presidential doctrines, and the evolution of Western statecraft from the late Cold War to the present. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, Budapest.
(The opinions expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).