AOC Says Corporate Power Poses Major National Security Threats. She's Not Alone.
On both sides of the aisle – and both sides of the Atlantic – alarm bells are ringing: Allowing private monopolies to amass unchecked power is not just an economic issue, but a national security one.
“Under Destruction” was the official title of this year’s Munich Security Conference – a nod to the wrecking-ball politics of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping.
But as commentators fixated on the return of great-power rivalry, America’s most well-known congresswoman stepped onto the global stage with a different warning – one that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to grapple with.
For weeks now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Munich appearance has been intensely picked over by critics. Less closely examined has been her warning about an increasingly powerful force in international security: Private corporate empires with the power to undermine democratic decision-making, fuel inequality and unrest, and reshape core national security calculations – led by figures increasingly willing and able to impose their will on elected officials.
“Antitrust in the United States has historically been a foundational democratic principle – not only because monopolies abuse consumers and workers, but because excessive market concentration creates private power that can rival the power of nation-states,” Ocasio-Cortez warned.
“We’re already seeing members of the billionaire class throw their weight around in domestic and global politics,” she said. “When economic power becomes this concentrated, it inevitably spills into political power.”
Describing it as an “under-discussed” national security issue, the New York Democrat also warned that around the world, the extreme wealth inequality “fuels social unrest, authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and increasingly dangerous domestic politics.”
Matt Duss, Executive Vice President of the Center for International Policy, has been regularly briefing Ocasio-Cortez on foreign policy. “I think rightly, she sees this as a major national security threat – to our country, to fellow democracies, and to the world,” he said.
Duss said her concerns echo those of John Maynard Keynes who, in 1926, warned that unregulated capitalism would generate inequality faster than democratic institutions could absorb it. Watching the political upheaval in Germany’s Weimar Republic, Keynes worried that austerity, mass unemployment, and working-class humiliation were the political kindling for fascism.
Senator Chris Murphy, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee and is seen as a potential Democratic nominee or future Secretary of State, describes the concentration of economic power as a “crisis” that US foreign policy must come to terms with.
Economic power has become dangerously concentrated in the hands of a small group of corporate oligarchs on the one hand, and state-run economies in China and Russia on the other, he says.
The most recent example of this undermining national security: The Trump administration’s decision to bow to Big Tech lobbying and greenlight the sale of advanced AI chips to developers in China – a move Murphy says was purchased rather than reasoned.
“Trump has put the fate of our national security in the hands of profit-hungry billionaires and mega-corporations,” he told Liberty and Power. “His administration won’t hesitate to put America’s security at risk if it helps the billionaires in charge get richer.”
Corporate Battlefields
The entanglement of corporate power and national security is something both sides of the Atlantic are grappling with, fueled by a series of flashing warning signs. The most prominent in Europe: The ongoing tussle for access to SpaceX’s Starlink internet service in Ukraine.
The satellite service has become a lifeline for Kyiv’s military and civilian communications, and a flashpoint over who ultimately controls battlefield connectivity. SpaceX founder Elon Musk, never shy about inserting himself into political debates, has been at the center of repeated, heated disputes over coverage, costs, and access.
The specter of superpowers courting Musk like a de facto head of state is “absurd,” said Duss. “No one voted for Musk.”
This year, following pressure from Ukraine, the company instituted a whitelisting policy to ensure that unregistered Russian terminals were blocked from the service, halting Russia’s ability to use it for drone piloting and instant messaging.
They “lost their ability to control the field,” one Ukrainian drone operator told the BBC, estimating that they lost 50% of their offensive capacity. “Fewer assaults, fewer enemy drones, fewer everything.” The move has contributed to Ukraine’s fastest battlefield advances in years, after months of grinding retreats.
The episode shines a light on how Musk’s enforcement decisions first allowed Russia to access significant grey market capabilities, and then suddenly shifted momentum in the other direction. “It’s a very uncomfortable situation for a private individual to have power like that,” one NATO official who declined to be identified told Liberty and Power.
National security strategists fluent in the language of treaties, alliances and foreign influence are far less well versed in the dynamics of corporate influence.
Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a security analyst with over 35 years of service in US and NATO defense, has described the new Big Tech goliaths as ‘empires of technology.’ “The Big Tech companies with their very unique capabilities, it’s almost like an ally you must have,” he said.
“You don’t negotiate with them the way you negotiate with a company in your country, you negotiate with them as though they’re a foreign power,” he said, comparing their dominance to that of the British East India Company and the United Fruit Company in previous centuries. “We’ve seen it before, only now it’s much more insidious.”
It’s a blind-spot that will only grow as the AI industry, and the handful of mercurial CEOs who lead it, push deeper into the national security apparatus. “I think it’s not being taken seriously enough at the Pentagon yet,” Duss said.
In the more traditional sense, however, the impacts of competition and market concentration in the defense sector have long been a concern for the Pentagon.
In 1993, a year and a half after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Les Aspin invited defense industry executives to a dinner that later became known as “the last supper.” There, Pentagon leadership explicitly advised contractors that, given reduced demand for their services, they should merge and consolidate to strengthen their positions.
The warning set off what the Washington Post later described as “one of the fastest transformations of any modern US industry.”
Over the next few years, more than 50 aerospace and defense prime contractors consolidated into just five. The wave only hit a roadblock in 1998, when the administration blocked a merger between two of the biggest behemoths – Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman – fearing it would concentrate too much power. At the time, it was the single largest merger ever challenged by federal officials.
Kremidas-Courtney recalls being at the Department of Defense when decision-makers were – in parallel – embracing a wave of outsourcing, privatization and restructuring following the end of the Cold War. “We privatized a lot of key infrastructure,” he said. “We’ve given corporations control of a lot of things vital to national security.”
Late in the Obama Administration, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall warned that market concentration had the potential to affect innovation, limit the supply base, and reduce competition. By the Biden administration, the Pentagon was warning that it had become overly “reliant on a small number of contractors for critical defense capabilities.”
The fear has become more acute since the COVID pandemic exposed supply chain vulnerabilities, and since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the challenges in getting monopolistic corporations to ramp up production of munitions and other weapons.
“Decades of corporate consolidation and globalization has left us with some really far-flung defense supply chains with concentrations in places that our geopolitical rivals dominate,” said Beth Baltzan, a Senior Advisor for Trade and Investment under President Biden. “It makes our whole ability to get things done sluggish and lacking in innovation, with cost overruns – the things you expect when you have a highly concentrated industry.”
A Biden-era report recommended the Pentagon block anti-competitive mergers aggressively, assert intellectual property rights more robustly, incentivize tenders from small businesses and new entrants, and diversify concentrated supply chains.
As the primary purchaser of US military equipment, the Department of Defense wields extraordinary leverage in shaping how corporate mergers are evaluated by traditional antitrust enforcers like the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. It should use that leverage far more proactively – and preference small, medium and independent contractors where possible – Open Markets Institute Senior Legal Analyst Daniel Hanley has argued.
Aiding the effort to bring new competitors online has been the improvisational innovation continuing to play out in Ukraine. With limited access to prestige “exquisite assets” like stealth bombers, Kyiv has turned to smaller, cheaper, autonomous technology – almost munitions-like in its disposability – reducing reliance on the major western defense contractors
A bipartisan group in Congress is also hoping to prevent a repeat of extreme concentration in markets for new technology. Led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Eric Schmitt, the Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act would mandate competitive procurement processes, prevent single vendor lock-in, and ensure government data remains under government control.
Beyond the Battlefield
Progressives have long warned that moneyed interests have sought to capture and drive foreign policy for their own ends. In recent years, however, those warnings have been echoed by establishment national security officials on both sides of the aisle.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Advisor, warned that decades of corporate-driven trade liberalization have hollowed out America’s military industrial capacity – leaving the US with the dangers of overdependence after being sold the benefits of interdependence.
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s first-term National Security Advisor, argued that Silicon Valley and Wall Street made themselves willing vehicles for the transfer of US technology, data and know-how directly to China’s military and intelligence apparatus.
Jamieson Greer, Trump’s current US Trade Representative, has accused giant multinationals of sacrificing American workers and national security for profits.
Baltzan, who served as a counselor to Biden Trade Representative Katherine Tai, says both government officials and corporations too often confuse corporate interests for the national interest. She recalls shocked responses when she made a similar point on an industry call, noting the administration would prioritize the latter. “People freaked out,” she said.
The backlash intensified when the administration put principle into practice.
When Biden’s team withdrew from trade negotiations that may have made it harder for the US government to regulate US tech giants and restrict cross-border data transfers – particularly to China and Russia – the industry response was explosive.
“The companies had a meltdown. The Chamber of Commerce had a meltdown. This ended up getting us investigated by Congress,” Baltzan said. “The fact that it involved China and Russia put a really fine point on how this is a national security issue.”
A similar battle played out over access to COVID vaccines. The US and other Western democracies had a clear national security interest in lowering the global viral load and reducing the emergence of dangerous variants. But when low-income nations proposed suspending WTO patent rules to allow generic production of vaccines, tests, and treatments, Big Pharma mobilized massive lobbying teams in the US, UK, and Europe to frustrate negotiations.
When a deal finally came through in June 2022 – after two years, an estimated 15 million deaths and the emergence of Delta in India and Omicron in southern Africa – the agreement covered only vaccines and was so limited that not a single country invoked it. “But the pharmaceutical companies were still furious,” Baltzan said.
“These mega corporations play a role in designing trade agreements, essentially as forms of corporate protectionism,” Duss said. Indeed, massive multinationals loom so large over negotiations that they’re often a shadow force behind multiple negotiating partners around the table. Baltzan recalls negotiations where it became clear that a majority of her interlocutors were reading from the same corporate talking points.
“You drill three questions in and it’s clear they can’t think beyond the talking points,” she said. “To me, that was really disturbing.”
It’s not a new dynamic. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned that corporate monopolists had “begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.” A concentrated economy was a sign of strategic vulnerability, he argued, and allowing CEOs to have more power than democratic leaders was, “in essence, fascism.”
Liberté. Autonomie. Souveraineté.
In Europe too, leaders are looking to reduce their reliance on foreign multinationals.
The Starlink saga has sharpened concerns, voiced most forcefully by French President Emmanuel Macron, that Europe remains dangerously dependent on a handful of highly concentrated Chinese and US multinationals – including Google, Microsoft, Visa, and Amazon – for critical cloud, communications and payments infrastructure.
France has led efforts to duplicate US systems and services for use in Ukraine. Macron has characterized dependence on Silicon Valley as an issue of digital sovereignty. European officials warn of the danger of their data being subject to ‘kill switches’ hosted in foreign countries.
As if to drive the point home, the Trump administration has not only wielded tariff threats against Europe to curb its digital regulations, but has imposed travel bans directly on European advocates for Big Tech oversight. Officials at the International Criminal Court have endured more substantial sanctions in response to investigations the US opposes, losing access to email, cloud and financial services.
The aggressive approach has accelerated French-led efforts to fund and build competing, EU-based digital services companies – and to integrate national security and resilience imperatives more deeply into antitrust and regulatory decisionmaking at the European Commission
“Leaders here are waking up to the fact that this goes far beyond traditional antitrust concerns of competition, privacy and online safety, but actually constitutes a direct threat to freedom, sovereignty and European security,” said Max von Thun, Director of Open Markets Institute in Europe. “They’re threading a needle in trying not to antagonize Washington as they accelerate efforts to develop local alternatives. Most people recognize this is a problem that will outlast Trump. The dependency is the problem, and that’s what they’ve got to fix.”
In the 1930s and 40s, FDR confronted runaway corporate power by breaking up dangerous monopolies, imposing more robust regulations, and calling out the corrosive influence of private power on democratic governance.
Pressure is now building for a 21st Century reckoning.
With Musk and others inserting themselves into battlefield decisions and diplomatic affairs, European governments racing to build their own digital infrastructure, and more and more bipartisan voices in Washington sounding the alarm, AOC’s warning about the dangers of corporate power is fast-emerging as a defining fault line in 21st-century geopolitics.
“These companies are so big and powerful, they function essentially as states – states that operate outside of any meaningful democratic control. They make decisions that have enormous consequences on the lives of everyday people. They need to be brought under control,” Duss said. “And we need politicians to have the courage to do that.”
Dive Deeper:
Open Markets Institute has continued to warn that Trump administration policies have enabled Elon Musk to establish a risky and growing monopoly over low earth orbit communications. “The Trump administration’s aggressive advocacy for Starlink illustrates the need for more urgency from lawmakers and regulators wary of Musk’s growing power over the world’s communications networks,” writes Austin Ahlman.
In The New China Syndrome, Executive Director of Open Markets Institute Barry Lynn traces America’s trading entanglement with China back to the Clinton era for Harper’s Magazine: “We, along with our allies, are now caught in the grasp of one of the most sophisticated, resilient, and forward-looking autocracies in the history of the world,” he writes.
For more on the Department of Defense’s history on antitrust engagement, dive into OMI’s 2022 report on administrative policy: “The department has a unique level of importance in providing information to other more traditional antitrust enforcers,” writes Daniel Hanley.
Hell has frozen over because I’m agreeing with AOC. Now do commie NGO’s.
People in positions of power who have done so little homework that, for example, they think Venezuela is below the Equator, also pose a major national security threat.