Eisenhower warned that US policy could be captured by a military-industrial and scientific-technological elite. Ukraine is now paying the price.

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite explains why Washington sustains the war in Ukraine as a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale.

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations.

What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximise elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points.

The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarise as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States.

The instruments used for regime control include:

the imposition or removal of trade barriers;

the access to or denial of technologies;

the introduction or removal of economic sanctions;

the ownership and manipulation of foreign media;

electoral interference of varying extent;

political assassinations, colour revolutions, CIA-backed coups;

the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit;

the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets;

the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping;

and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war.

The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical pivots & American primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candour.

Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power.

Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine........

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