Keen On

Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 might offer an even more existential threat than Kubrick’s original cigar-chewing model played with such absurdist aplomb by the great Peter Sellers. While the first Strangelove was just dumb, today’s powers-that-be at the Pentagon are both stupid and corrupt. That, at least, is the worrying view of Ben Freeman, the director of Democratizing Foreign Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the co-author of the upcoming The Trillion Dollar War Machine. Freeman sees companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir—which just secured a historic $10 billion contract—as the new face of a military establishment that has grown exponentially more dangerous since Eisenhower's bipartisan warning. Today's war profiteers (in both political parties) wield AI, deepfakes, and automated kill chains while maintaining the same reckless nuclear thinking that nearly ended the w