Critical State: Militarism in Munich
If you read just one thing this week … read about the security conference in Munich.
US Vice President JD Vance’s bizarre attack on Washington’s European allies in Munich last month generated headlines in every major newspaper in the world. But at The Dial and the New York Review of Books, Caitlin L. Chandler took a different tack while reporting on the international security conference where it all went down.
The Munich Security Conference, Chandler pointed out, was launched in 1963 by Germany, the US, and NATO to come together and brainstorm how to counter the Soviet Union. Nowadays, however, the conference is known to many goers as “Davos with guns,” and on top of bringing out military brass and politicians, it attracts hundreds of CEOs.
When Vance did speak, he focused much of his attention on what he described as Europe’s threat from “within.” For their part, Chandler wrote, “German politicians were especially horrified by Vance’s speech.”
Although that speech and others like it from Trump administration officials have led to a slate of calls for Europe to beef up its own military spending, Chandler noted that this “push for European militarization started long before Donald Trump’s second term.”
The conference plodded forward, and in Chandler’s words, she “heard more European defense leaders remark that they hoped they had finally gotten the push from the Americans they needed to militarize.”
But of interest wasn’t just what happened inside the conference. Outside on the second day, the Greek leftist politician and leader of the pan-European DiEM25 movement, Yanis Varoufakis, was addressing an anti-war rally.
“By allowing international law to die in Palestine, they’ve killed international law everywhere, in Germany as well,” Varoufakis told the crowd. “For international law to mean anything, it must be applied to everyone, because if it doesn’t apply to everyone, it doesn’t apply to anyone.”
If You Read One More Thing: Chirping Back
At Hyphen Online, Stefania D’Ignoti reported on a small coastal town Italy where a cricket team of mostly Bangladeshi migrants is defying a ban on the sport.
In April 2023, Monfalcone’s far-right mayor, Anna Maria Cisint, ushered in a ban on cricket, a sport popular among South Asians. Cisint has enjoyed the backing of other far-right bigwigs — including Matteo Salvini’s League and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. She campaigned on a message of fighting Muslim immigration and won 72% of the vote.
Masum Ahmed, a Bangladeshi migrant who received Italian citizenship in 2016, told D’Ignoti that the rise in far-right politics has led many of his friends to leave Italy altogether. “They say it’s because cricket doesn’t belong to Italian culture,” he said of the ban, “but the truth is that they believe foreigners don’t.”
Sani Bhuiyan, the captain of the cricket team, broke down the reasons behind their decision to keep playing the sport in the open: “For us, this is not just a game, it’s a tradition that allows us to keep a piece of home away from home.”
Made in the United Kingdom
In a new blog at the London Review of Books, Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh, author of Out of It, explains the history of administrative detention, a practice in which Israel jails Palestinians on “secret evidence” and without charges.
The Israelis, in fact, inherited the practice from the British Mandatory authorities in Palestine, who controlled the country from 1919 until 1948. In effect, military commanders could lock someone up in detention at their own whims. It was initially used against Palestinians and immigrants (including Jews) alike.
Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, however, it has continued to use many of the draconian practices the British Mandate introduced. “In December 2022 there were 791 Palestinians in administrative detention in Israel,” Dabbagh wrote. “By December 2024 the number had increased more than fourfold to 3327 — over a third of the nearly 10,000 Palestinians being held prisoner by Israel on security grounds.”
Deep Dive: Of Vultures and Defense
Artificial Intelligence is upending the world, and Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are raking in money hand over fist. But how are these venture capitalists transforming one of the United States’ mainstays across decades, the military industrial complex?
Venture capital (VC) has only recently staked its role as an influential player in the military industry, according to a new paper by Elke Schwarz in the Finance and Society journal. Still, Schwarz pointed out that “the VC sector exerts a significant influence not only on military procurement processes but also on the direction of military operations and practices.”
What does that mean for the “communities and stakeholders” whom military operations impact most, those who are in “the crosshairs of VC-backed AI technologies”?
First, a little bit of history. In Schwarz’s telling, Silicon Valley, VC, and modern military innovation “all share original DNA.” In other words, venture capital and Silicon Valley have played a role in military technology since as far back as the 1940s. After all, the internet was first born as a military project.
Until the 1990s, Lockheed Missiles and Space (now Lockheed Martin) was the largest employer in Silicon Valley. That decade and in the early 2000s, however, Silicon Valley shifted its focus to churning profit off civilians.
In recent years, VC has refocused on military industries, Schwarz explained, VC funding for military technology startups more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. And some of the names behind this surge in cash might sound familiar: PayPal’s Peter Thiel, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Netscape’s Marc Andreeson, to name a few.
Why does it all matter? Well, the way Schwarz put it, military technology is, if nothing else, “a matter of life and death.”
Because VC relies on a market to remain profitable, and through “lobbying, legislative tools, and mythmaking,” it also recasts the defense sector into a shape that accommodates its own needs. VC-backed startups only survive if they can achieve rapid growth, and a company’s valuation, in fact, takes precedence over its profit.
For its part, the defense industry stands out as “an attractive market” because it is “well-funded and robust,” according to the paper. For VC-backed outfits, getting a leg in the military industry requires what Schwarz described as mythmaking. In other words, they must convince the military that it needs VC startups.
The main narrative theme Schwarz identified is an increasingly common one: that the funeral pace of government bureaucracy and the current processes is the main issue plaguing the military’s ability to successfully conduct war.
Another myth — Anduril Industries, which Palmer Luckey and others founded in 2017, has promoted this one — posits that the traditional military industry companies make outdated products and that “digital innovation” will win “the wars of the future.”
In short, Schwarz argued that observers need to pay more critical attention to the VC defense technology landscape while keeping in mind how “these new actors” can influence “defense and security cultures” as well as the “global security landscape.”
One could argue that the traditional military defense industry needs a good shakeup, Schwarz admitted. “But it stands to question whether all these things can be achieved by bringing AI-based startup products into the fold with more speed and at greater scale,” he wrote, “or by hitching one’s wagon to an Uber-like platform, the smooth functioning of which will be crucial for a long time to come.”
Show Us the Receipts
At Inkstick, the Center for American Progress’s Allison McManus argued that the new Trump administration is emboldening Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s hardline far-right movement. Although the ceasefire in Gaza has (until now) held, the prospects look grim for the near future. “American political leaders at all levels have an opportunity to push back against the far-right plans,” McManus wrote, “by demonstrating solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians fighting for the space to build power and advance democracy.”
In an essay jointly published with The Border Chronicle, Inkstick managing editor Patrick Strickland examined JD Vance’s repeated claims that Europe has failed to prevent migration by taking a hard look at the deterrence strategies both the European Union and the US use to push refugees and migrants into more dangerous (and more lethal) migratory routes. Displaced people know the risks, Strickland argued, but no deportation schemes or border deterrence policies will stop migration.
At The World, Guy de Launey reported on the recent sentencing of a far-right Bosnian Serb leader. Milorad Dodik defied a ruling from the highest court in Bosnia-Herzegovina — and is now facing a year in lockup. The sentencing underscores, according to de Launey, “the long-standing tensions within Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.