The Uncomfortable Truth About War

The most fascinating and at the same time most unsettling book I’ve read this year is The Technological Republic by Alex Karp, founder and CEO of Palantir, an American AI company specializing in data analysis and closely collaborating with police, intelligence and defense agencies.

Karp is not your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He’s a philosopher who read Plato before building Palantir. He also happens to be the closest friend of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal alongside Elon Musk, and today the loudest and most right-wing venture capitalist in the Valley. Thiel, once an intellectual rebel, has now become the court supplier of techno-nationalism.

Together, they advance a notion that sounds both provocative and disquieting: since 1969, there has been no real technological progress. Since the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, we’ve mainly become better at delivering pizzas faster, targeting ads more precisely, and scrolling endlessly on our screens.

The bright minds of this generation have squandered their talent on an economy of convenience and dopamine. Instead of building new worlds, we build algorithms that keep us confined within the old ones. When I see people using OpenAI’s new Sora app to create endless reels of Stephen Hawking gliding through a skate park, it’s hard to prove Karp wrong.

But Karp goes even further. In his view, technology has lost its original purpose. True progress, he argues, has always needed an enemy and today, that role is once again being played by the new Cold War.

The parallel with the previous Cold War is no coincidence. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space in 1957, America felt humiliated. For the first time since World War II, there was a technological front on which the United States was not first. The response was simple but radical: never again.

Out of that humiliation came DARPA, a government program granted virtually unlimited resources to secure technological supremacy. DARPA funded the Internet, GPS, the microprocessor, and artificial intelligence avant la lettre. Thanks to DARPA, Silicon Valley evolved into the nerve center of global innovation. The Soviets may have been the first to conquer space, but the Americans won the future.

More than sixty years later, that pattern feels familiar once again. China is no longer merely the world’s factory but a technological empire poised to surpass America. The race for chips, quantum computers, and AI models is no longer an economic competition — it’s a geopolitical arms race.

Once again, there’s a call for mobilization. Karp puts it bluntly: “The West must re-arm its technological soul.” And that is exactly what’s happening. Palantir now works for the U.S. military, NATO, and Ukraine, and if Belgium’s Defense Minister Theo Francken has his way, soon for Belgium as well. Its software determines where troops move, where drones strike, and where war becomes digital. The CIA was its first shareholder.

But Palantir is far from alone. Consider Anduril, the company founded by Palmer Luckey, the flip-flop-wearing surfer who sold Oculus to Zuckerberg and is now hailed as the “King of AI Weapons.” His new firm builds autonomous drones, AI torpedoes, and weapons that make decisions independently. They’re produced in California and deployed worldwide.

Karp calls these developments the birth of a Technological Republic: a system in which democracy and technology are inextricably intertwined. Whoever controls the algorithms controls power and whoever holds power defines morality. That idea resonates deeply with a new generation of American entrepreneurs.

Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and now Silicon Valley’s most influential investor, published his own manifesto last year: It’s Time to Build — for America. Beneath his words lies the same undercurrent found in Karp and Thiel’s thinking: the military acts as a catalyst for ambition and innovation.

The uncomfortable truth is that the history of progress is steeped in war. Radar, the jet engine, the computer, nuclear energy, the Internet: all were born out of military necessity. They were vital for advancement, yet each carried a shadow.

The Manhattan Project ended the war but opened the door to nuclear threat. DARPA gave us the Internet but also the surveillance economy. And now AI brings the promise of infinite knowledge but also the spectre of permanent control.

We stand at the dawn of a new era of technological acceleration. AI, quantum technology, biotechnology: the next ten years are likely to transform the world more than the past fifty have.

The Draghi Report, now a year old, was unequivocal: Europe is weak. We invest too little, too slowly, and too fragmented. We have the talent, the knowledge, and the values but not the courage. In this new Cold War, Europe’s choice becomes starker than ever:
Do we want to remain a continent that guards the moral boundaries of technology or become, once again, a continent that pushes them?