Peter Thiel’s New Model Army
The Palantirisation of the UK military is a national security disaster
A note on who I am and what I’m doing: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I coined a word to describe the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.
This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today:
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How Britain’s national security is hopelessly compromised. We’ve sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you’re American, this affects you too.)
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The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act.
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How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn’t know you needed.
I’ve never started with a bulleted list before but then I can’t remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2).
1) The UK’s national security is hopelessly compromised
Mandelson’s firm, Global Counsel, also represents Palantir, the US surveillance defence company founded by Trump ally, Peter Thiel. When Keir Starmer visited Washington, a trip arranged by Mandelson, he had only two meetings: one with Trump and one with Palantir.
If we never heard from Peter Mandelson again, it would be too soon. And yet here he is, all over the national broadcaster refusing to apologise to Epstein’s victims and praising Trump’s “graciousness”.
But this was not all. Because also on the BBC this morning was his client, Louis Mosley, the CEO of Palantir UK and the grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
I’m not linking to either of these videos because they were both absolutely abject failures of journalism. This is the second time Mosley has been invited onto this same Sunday morning show as some sort of legitimate political pundit.
He is no such thing. His company is an integral part of the US defence and homeland security apparatus and the illegal data gathering operation carried out by Elon Musk’s DOGE to say nothing of its involvement in profiling kill targets for the IDF in Gaza. The only circumstance he should be on the BBC is to be subjected to a journalistic grilling, not asked a couple of softball questions on his views on global politics.
The UK Ministry of Defence has just signed a new £240 million contract with Palantir. Actually, it’s not a contract, it’s more than that. The UK government describes it as “a strategic partnership”. A “partnership” entered into without any sort of competitive tender that was announced during Trump’s visit to the UK and which disastrously compromises our entire national security infrastructure.
We have embedded a notorious US military surveillance company whose founder is a close ally of President Trump into the heart of our military at a moment in which the US is threatening to invade our NATO ally, Greenland.
If you’re British and reading this, please send it to your MP. The level of understanding in UK politics and media about Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump and the geopolitical and security consequences of this appears to be non-existent.
If our national security rests on US technology, we have no national security.
It sounds like writerly hyperbole to describe the UK as a vassal state, but I mean it in its most literal sense. It’s explicitly stated in the ur-text of Trump’s White House’s foreign policy, the National Security Strategy document, that US companies will be used as instruments of state power. There is no hidden agenda here: Trump has set it all out. (For a breakdown of this document and what it all means, see this week’s piece in the Nerve by former British diplomat, Arthur Snell.)
What will it mean to embed American software into the UK military? Well consider, Tesla. You don’t really buy a car when you buy a Tesla, you rent the software that remains the property of Elon Musk industries who can choose to immobilise your car or any feature of it at any time.
Palantir is the most terrifying of the US companies but it’s also just one of a whole raft of compromising, self-sabotaging deals that the UK government has entered into. The UK ‘Sovereign Cloud’ has been contracted out to Oracle, owned by another key Trump ally, Larry Ellison, the man whose son is behind the disastrous buyout of CBS and the upcoming US TikTok takeover. And then there are deals with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, BlackRock, Nvidia and Scale AI.
And this was the “win”, the brilliant triumph that Keir Starmer pulled from the jaws of defeat in the trade tariff negotiations. It is the opposite of that: it’s surrender, the cost of which won’t just be measured in pounds or dollars. I fear the cost could be much, much higher, paid in blood and pain.
It barely even registered this week that Trump announced he was increasing the US military’s budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
I wrote this in last week’s newsletter, on Saturday morning, hours after the US attacked Venezuela and before America woke up:
“This should precipitate a whole new global crisis. It’s an unprovoked military assault on a sovereign nation in breach of international law. What should worry us more is if it doesn’t…
Trump isn’t just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in.”
Trump’s actions should provoke a global crisis, I said. And it should worry us more if it doesn’t. A week later, the news is in: prepare to be more worried.
