"American Caesar?" More Like "Prince Of LARP."

The first rule of politics is: don’t trust a mercenary.

Erik Prince. Source

Erik Prince is becoming a popular figure on the Right.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Prince is known most notoriously as the founder of Blackwater, the private military company (PMC) which came under fire for its activities during the 2003 to 2011 Iraq War. It’s a loaded term, one which may not be accurate with respect to the activities of Prince and Blackwater, but mercenaries have had a mostly negative reputation in the age of modernity. There’s something morally repellent about the notion of participating in warfare motivated exclusively by financial gain. I’m not going to get into that debate, but my point is Prince was always going to be a controversial figure by virtue of his chosen profession.

Much of that controversy is fair. Look at what he tried to do in 2021, amid the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of fruitless war:

Amid a massive evacuation effort out of Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover and before the U.S. left, controversial billionaire security contractor Erik Prince was offering his own flight from the turmoil — at a steep price — The Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the paper, Prince, 52, was selling tickets for a chartered plane out of Afghanistan at a base rate of $6,500. The cost was higher if people were in their homes and needed help getting to the airport in Kabul. The Journal reported it was unclear whether Prince had the resources to carry out the plan.

What nice guy. What a patriot, too! He apparently couldn’t even be bothered to give his fellow Americans a free ride out of there. And remember this?

Blackwater founder Erik Prince thinks the time is right to try a new approach in Afghanistan, one that he says will reduce war spending to a sliver of its current levels, get most troops home and eliminate Pakistan’s influence on U.S. policy there: Let him run it.

In an exclusive interview with Military Times, Prince shared new details about his proposed force and why he believes a small footprint of private military contractors and even smaller footprint of U.S. special operators may be able to accomplish what hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and NATO forces over the last 17 years could not.

Prince first presented the idea as President Donald Trump took office last year, hoping that the president’s long-stated opposition to keeping U.S. forces in Afghanistan would open the door to a privatized presence.

But Trump listened to his national security team instead, including critics of the plan like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

Note that Prince’s plan didn’t even address what ought to have been the real objective: end the war in Afghanistan. Prince was willing to take on the duty of waging war while still keeping the U.S. tangentially involved. Some call it business; whatever it is, it’s bad for the country. I think Prince’s questionable reputation is well-deserved.

In what can only be described as an attempt to both rehabilitate his image and to become relevant once again, Prince has become a commentator in addition to running his PMC, sharing his views on the hot political topics of the day. At a time when demand is high, at least on the Right, for “based” commentary, Prince has been providing an abundance of it. It’s got much, though not all, of the Right head over heels for the man.

Here’s something one of my followers on X said recently about Prince:

Doubtful. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds on this, but Prince is an outsider and a businessman. Chiang Kai-shek was an insider and a military officer. I’ve explained in depth previously, but “American Caesar” is going to fit the same sort of profile Kai-shek fit. Note that among those he warred against were mercenaries. Prince is the type of guy who either support a revolutionary movement or fight one. Either way, he’s not running the program, nor should he ever.

But the wishful thinking persists, thanks to his based takes. Now, Prince is courting both admiration and derision for stating that we need to re-colonize Africa in order to bring stability to the continent, making ourselves safer in the process. It’s an even more radical spin on the “fight them over there so we don’t need to fight them over here” mantra. He made the remarks a few weeks ago on his YouTube channel in a 17-and-a-half-minute interview, but you can watch the relevant segment here. If you don’t watch the entire video, then watch the 37-second X clip I hyperlinked to before reading on:

As I often say, “where to even begin with this?” Colonize Africa? I’m reticent to bother refuting Prince’s argument. He comes off as a middle-aged man who never quite grew up and put away childish things. I have a strong feeling I’m on-target when I say that. But with so many, including some of this blog’s readers, enamored by Prince as of late, I feel compelled to do so.

“Colonization” is itself a loaded term, rife with all sorts of connotations. It’s worth noting, right off the bat, that any decision to re-colonize Africa would cause an uproar. It’s also the sort of thing which could be implemented only under an autocratic system of governance. Maybe Prince sees the U.S. headed in such a direction. So do I, to a degree.

But as the saying goes, amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics. None of us are professionals in this field, but we are professionally-minded and live in the real world. So ask yourself: do we even have what’s necessary to implement colonialism? Better yet, a real empire, as opposed to the mere ideological variant which exists today? The one point Prince does raise by implication is that as globalization fails (and with it, the American superpower), seemingly outdated grand strategies like colonialism or imperialism will suddenly be under consideration again.

That’s not his assessment, either, not alone. It also belongs to geopolitical specialist Peter Zeihan, another controversial figure. In his 2022 book The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, Zeihan argues that the global economic model we’ve lived off since the end of World War II is currently on its way out and will be replaced by an entirely different model. The book is a must-read, but let me summarize his stance on the viability of imperialism in the future.

First, Zeihan concedes that yes, empire does seem like an attractive option due to changing world conditions that make today’s economic models untenable, then explains what’s required of imperialism:

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history.

At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school:

The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction.

However, Zeihan immediately saps the enthusiasm any reader may have for a “retvrn” to the glory days of conquest:

The only countries in a post-2022 world that might be able to maintain an overseas empire are those that can have three things going for them: a serious cultural superiority complex, a military capable of reliably projecting power onto locations that cannot effectively resist, and lots and lots and lots and LOTS of disposable young people.

Does the U.S. have those three things? Zeihan argues we once did - following World War II - but no longer. For one, we absolutely don’t have lots and lots and lots and LOTS of disposable young people. America has a healthy demographic structure, as I’ve argued on more than one occasion, but this doesn’t translate to lots of young people (primarily men) to send overseas to fight wars and occupy vast stretches of real estate in a wide range of geographic environments.

Demographically, the imperialism argument makes even less sense when you remember many of Prince’s admirers also lament the fact Americans aren’t having children. Without a higher birth rate, where are the boots on the ground going to come from? None of this makes sense. Without giving Prince’s call for empire too much credence, I can’t think of a greater waste of human capital then to send them forth to die and suffer in hopes of conquering someone else’s land. It made sense once upon a time, but not anymore.

But wait - doesn’t Prince run a PMC? Couldn’t he just hire a lot of guns to do this dirty work? If our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq was any example, it’s going to take a whole lot of PMCs and a lot of money (mercenaries get paid, above all) to go forth and conquer the world. Again, where are all the bodies coming from? Is Prince going to recruit veterans from all over the world? Hire local fighters? How sustainable is this? Who’s going to be footing the bill? On that last question, it’s obviously the American taxpayer, but will we see any return on investment? Isn’t a big reason for the backlash against U.S. foreign policy due to the lack of a return despite the tremendous expense in capital, human and monetary?

Even more serious minds, like Dr. Sumantra Maitra, are jumping on the colonialism bandwagon. He wrote in response to Prince’s comments:

This isn’t idle philosophical pondering. It is well established that a significant (if not the chief) cause behind mass migration is social disorder caused by a lack of good governance. Parts of both Latin America and Africa have shown that they are incapable of rule of law and civilized order, or even simple civilized subsistence. Let’s call it the Haiti or the South Africa syndrome. Once the competent people are driven out, social order reverts back to pre-modernity, which in turn leads to mass-migration outward, where people maintain their old tribal loyalties, and transform their new place to their old.

And:

New technologies that are being developed in the West will result in a technology gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, which is not dissimilar to the power difference between a Zulu assegai and a British Martini-Henry gun, resulting in an offense-dominated world with conditions favorable to colonialism. The Western male-female gender gap, as well as the declining job standards in the West, are leading to conditions in which single men will increasingly seek fortunes and adventure across the globe. Some Western private companies are big enough to simply have their own empires. Some private companies—see Wagner's rebranding as a new Africa Korps—are already working to provide security and stability in the third world, as Westphalian states recede rendering society ungovernable and disorderly, as in the time prior to the establishment of the East India Company. 

There are now enough—more than enough—managerial-class graduates from Western universities who are capable of providing leadership and governing roles in various parts of Africa and Latin America. They incidentally do not have any jobs or prospects in their own countries. Mass-migration’s main Western liberal supporters claim that migrants address unfilled menial labor and production jobs that are beneficial to the West. Company rule solves both the problems in one go: It provides order and good governance, stopping migration at the root, and gives elites something to do. It is a free-market solution that divides the imperial core with the periphery and fosters the development of commerce.

Maitra is a supremely intelligent person, so I’m surprised to read him speak so casually about imperialism, as though it’s simply a matter of sufficient resources and will. But not only is imperialism extremely messy business, we’re talking about Africa. To this day, it remains the most violent, war-torn continent on the planet. I think there’s a good reason why the world doesn’t send bodies and capital to Africa anywhere near as liberally as it once did. As we speak, the Maghreb region of North Africa, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan are all embroiled in armed conflict, with annual casualties in the several, sometimes tens of thousands per conflict.

What is it like trying to bring order to such places? I posed the question to a friend of mine, a former U.S. Army Ranger. He deployed as a 19-year-old to Somalia in 1993 as part of the task force that participated in the Battle of Mogadishu, immortalized in the book and movie Black Hawk Down.

He says:

When you are an American and you see a real Third World country for the first time, it is a shock. Not just the poverty, but the open and in your face corruption. You think to yourself, “thank goodness our system isn't like this.” The citizenry knew it was corrupt, the war lords and elite kind of reveled in the corruption, and yet no one did anything. Of course, when you get a little older and wiser you realize this is not confined to the Third World at all, corruption in the First World is just a bit more sophisticated and has a better PR campaign. Hell, the First World may be more corrupt and the whole thing is a bit offset by the fact that we are wealthier. If you can eat and have power and running water, you tend to overlook a lot of that stuff. On the [converse], you also see how strong familial and tribal bonds are in such a place compared to America where those things were, at the time, in a state of collapse.

There’s a lot there, but the point I want readers to take away from my friend’s commentary is that places like Somalia are literally “Mad Max.” You don’t just march in there with overwhelming firepower, intimidate everyone, and establish order. Sure, folks like Erik Prince think we should do a lot more than keep the peace - conquer the place, overthrow leadership, and kill as many people, including innocents, as necessary to do so. Mind you, they can shoot back too, as my friend will attest - 18 Americans were killed in that infamous battle of October 3, 1993, with many more killed before that day. 30 years later, Somalia is still an unlivable place, and so is the totality of Africa. There’s a reason why even dangerous Latin America can still offer desirable locations for expatriates, but Africa doesn’t. There exists a veneer of civilization in Latin America, something difficult to find in Africa.

And yet, securing feral societies like early ‘90s Somalia is exactly what must be accomplished if the U.S. is to implement imperialism. How many 19-year-olds are we willing to sacrifice in the hope of making Africa a better place to live? Will the sacrifice even be worth it in the end? Most important, what will our home become like while we’re pursuing conquest overseas? There’s a lot of work to be done right here to make lives better for Americans; colonies will distract from that task. The more a society seeks to make the world a better place, the more resources it needs to divest from home to make that happen.

If global hegemony is something America still aspires to achieve, it’s not going to happen in the ‘20s. It’s not going to happen in the ‘30s. More to the point, Erik Prince may not even live to see it happen again. None of us here may. Even when we reach the end of this crisis phase and we manage to recover, the decline we’ll have suffered will have totally stripped the U.S. the capacity for being anything close to the world power it’s been for most of our lifetimes. No amount of money is going to successfully force the issue and the warm bodies aren’t there. If the U.S. achieves global supremacy, it’ll be likely towards the end of the century, if that. Either way, most, if not all of us, aren’t going to be around to see it.

Imperialism is a fantasy, something grown men like Erik Prince ought to know better than to peddle. But again, there’s a market for this stuff and Prince is ever the shrewd businessman. Unfortunately, he’s a bit more than that, too.

Beware The Charlatan

The more concerning matter to me is how easily the Right seems to be taken in by these “entertaining,” for a lack of a better term, businessmen. All it takes is some funny remarks and “based” statements and boom, you have much of the Right going, “That’s the guy! Hail Caesar!”

Why is this? Why are so many on the Right suckers for people like Erik Prince and Donald Trump? There are many reasons, but I think the biggest reason is this: politics hasn’t become that serious yet.

I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say, given everything I’ve said on this blog thus far. But politics has always had a performative aspect. It’s required, for without it, politics devolves into its rawest manifestation: war. Remember this video?

You don’t need to watch it now, though I strongly recommend you watch it eventually. The lesson is that politics is actually quite boring. It’s the reason why most people prefer not to indulge in it. To get people politically engaged, it needs to be made entertaining. The same thing happened with pro wrestling: it was actually boring in its early iterations. Over time, it evolved into a more performative, more spectacular venture, which made it less real, but more fun to spectate.

Both Trump and Prince are manifestations of the “kayfabrication” of politics. We’re in a transitional space where politics are, in fact, becoming more existential, but things are stable enough where performance is still required to get people engaged. Trump awakened millions of Americans in 2016 not because he spoke the truth, but because he spoke it in a way that made it impossible to ignore. People like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, who aren’t household names like Trump, were saying what he was saying decades before the 2016 election. Unfortunately, Trump lacked substance, but again, substance, the serious side of politics, is boring.

Prince is attempting to seize upon the ground opened up by Trump. Unlike Trump, he’s less of a showman, attempting to take a more serious, intellectual tack on politics. But that’s part of the show. By coming off as smart and serious, Prince is able to sell outrageous ideas like colonizing Africa more credibly, whereas if Trump were to say the same, it’d be regarded as a crazy man talking out of his backside. When it comes to politics, it’s always better to be judged a snake than a barking dog.

The problem is, when it comes to both Prince and Trump, the bite is lacking. As businessmen, both are selling something other than their politics: Prince is selling his mercenary services, Trump is selling his name at this chapter of his life story. In the end, neither have much of anything to offer because they’re selling something other than what national leaders are ultimately supposed to offer to their people: a vision.

Prince and Trump may get it right here and there on specific issues, but that’s as far as it goes. You can go looking for it if you’d like - I always recommend making up your own mind about people - but Prince’s political commentary is boilerplate, right-wing libertarian stuff you’ve been hearing most of your life. Nothing about who we are or what kind of country we ought to be. Nor does he have opinions on much of anything beyond war. That’s not a bad thing - that’s his business - but it shows how limited his interests ultimately are.

When it comes to his interests, this exchange between Prince and Patrick Bet-David, I think, most succinctly reveals what Prince is all about. It’s only 10 minutes long, so I hope you’ll watch it:

It’s all very fascinating and I happen to share his view of the UN, but it exposes Prince as an interventionist who’d probably like to see the U.S. become even more kinetically involved in conflicts all over the world, using his revolutionary, cost-effective (something he’s always pointing out) PMC services, and make some money off it. A guy like this is probably going to be disturbed by peace and his focus on dollars and cents might make him a great economist, but not a national leader. It’s strangely ironic that so many who see in Prince a potential Caesar are also the same people who stand opposed to the neoconservatives whom they accuse, rightfully, of always looking for a new war for America to wage. Yet Prince probably has more in common with the neoconservatives than his fans are willing to admit.

Contrast Prince with someone like Nayib Bukele. Re-elected to serve another term last month, Bukele is also a businessman, but what you hear is someone who speaks in civilizational terms, with an understanding of what it’s all really about. I hope you’ll watch this speech he recently delivered; it’s exactly what one would want to hear from a national leader, someone who represents a people, not an economic zone or a war machine:

The question of where America’s own Nayib Bukele might be is a separate matter. For now, in his absence, it seems many are filling that void with Trump and Prince. People who tell you what you want to hear might be great salesmen and salesmanship is a part of leadership. But what you’re selling matters too. For Prince, the only vision he’s selling is where war is waged on the cheap, supposedly to our benefit. Sometimes, war is necessary, but the problem for Prince is this: when one’s business is war, supply will never meet the demand. The same way supply cannot meet the demand for racism in the U.S., wars will need to be fabricated in order to keep the money coming in.

No wonder our mercenary wants to go LARPing as a crusader in Africa.

Never Trust A Merc

While I’d hope nobody takes Erik Prince seriously, there’s no denying he has the money, the personality, and the platform necessary top continue capturing everyone’s attention. At 54 years of age, his “ceiling” is still quite high, especially in an age when people like Joe Biden are running for re-election. It’s going to be interesting to see what becomes of America’s most famous soldier-of-fortune, especially if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election. Prince isn’t only a Trump supporter, he also shares ties with the 45th president going back to that one term. One has to wonder if Prince’s star will rise even higher and burn brighter if Trump returns to the White House. What then? Are we going into Africa?

Probably not, for reasons explained previously. Whatever comes to pass, we can only hope future leaders don’t take Prince or someone like him seriously, either. The first rule of politics is: don’t trust a mercenary. Okay, maybe that’s not the first rule, but someone who makes money off bloodshed will take you down a dangerous path and force you to foot the bill for it. Prince might have something to offer in certain situations during the tumult to come, but he should never be anywhere close to the halls of power, nor placed in a position to make consequential decisions.

My faith has been tested and will continue to be tested in the years to come, but I retain the hope that, when it’s all on the line, we’ll all have the better sense not to get taken for a ride by flim-flam men and instead choose our leaders wisely.

What are your thoughts on Prince? Do you think he’s a charlatan, merely promoting his private military services? Or is he the real deal, someone to take deadly seriously? If you think he’s a charlatan, why do you think the Right is so easily suckered in by such figures, while having nowhere near the same reaction to more serious leaders?

Let’s see some psychoanalysis from everyone!

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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