Aaron Voloj Dessauer reviews Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
Aaron Voloj Dessauer is a Professor of Law at Florida State University, where he currently serves as the Director of the Institute of Law, Technology & Innovation and teaches a course on National Security Law and Emerging Technologies.
There was a time when America’s brightest minds worked hand in hand with the government to create world-changing technologies. DARPA and other agencies helped build the internet, GPS technology, search engines, and self-driving cars—the very foundation of Silicon Valley’s dominance. These innovations fueled economic prosperity and solidified the United States’ global standing.
But as we transition into an era of renewed great power competition, the government once again needs the help of our best and brightest. This time, the task is not to build atomic bombs or Minuteman ballistic missiles, but to dominate the era of AI and software-driven warfighting. The problem? The very engineers most capable of rising to this challenge are also the ones most reluctant to work with the U.S. military. Instead, they use their talents on consumer products—photo-sharing, ride-hailing, and food delivery apps—products that may improve our daily lives but do little to advance our national security.
How we got here is the focus of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, an ambitious new book by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and his longtime deputy Nicholas Zamiska. The book is more than just a Streitschrift, a German tradition of philosophical polemic, as Karp has a Ph.D. in German philosophy, and his continental, sweeping style of analysis is palpable throughout. Rather, it is a synthesis of political theory, grand strategy, intellectual history, and organizational theory, summing to a compelling call to action. Whether you’re a retail investor enthralled by the ascent of Palantir’s stock, a disillusioned liberal wondering what happened to the political left, or a policymaker grappling with the challenges of a bloated bureaucracy, this book demands your attention.
The authors’ central argument is that as we have entered the software century—by which they mean an era where global conflicts will be won or lost primarily through the power of software—our engineering elite must rebuild its relationship with the government, in particular the military, and redirect its efforts to constructing the technology that will help the U.S. retain its power in the world. The survival of American dominance hinges not just on innovation but also on a renewed sense of national cohesion. Building on the work of Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, Karp and Zamiska ask: beyond a commitment to liberalism, what unites Americans as a nation?
The book could not have arrived at a more critical moment. Recent headlines make its warnings impossible to ignore. The bipartisan push to ban TikTok over national security concerns and the emergence of DeepSeek R1—China’s latest AI model, now surpassing OpenAI as the most downloaded app on the App Store—have heightened fears of China’s surveillance and technological parity. The authors argue that with the accelerating race for AI dominance, China has the most compelling opportunity to challenge America’s global standing in decades.
To address this threat, Karp and Zamiska advocate for the establishment of a new Manhattan Project, where the best minds will help America and its allies develop and retain exclusive control over the most advanced AI-powered weaponry—targeting systems, swarms of drones, and robots—which will define this new age of geopolitical conflict.
More so than nuclear weapons, it is these systems, the authors argue, which will serve as the deterrent to great power war.
While Karp and Zamiska paint a stark picture of the geopolitical landscape, the book is best read in light of their extensive commentary in other venues on the character of great power competition. Elsewhere, Karp has predicted that the U.S. is likely to find itself in a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran, and the reader would look forward to a sequel which could expound on why or how such a conflict might unfold. In today’s media environment, China’s actions are widely reported to be undermining the West. To most outside observers, it can often be difficult to ascertain which reports are true, credible, or exaggerated out of political expediency. It would have been fascinating to learn from two of today’s leading national security technologists — with their front-seat view of global geopolitics — which of China’s actions we should be most alarmed about in the current race for global AI supremacy.
The book’s examination of the Pentagon’s byzantine procurement rules recalls current debates about government efficiency raised by the maverick Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Anyone who has ever worked with government contracts knows the process can be cumbersome, wasteful, and often downright absurd. Yet, as the authors make clear, government inefficiency can also cost lives and pose threats to our national security. Karp and Zamiska highlight one particularly damning episode: during the first Gulf War, U.S. fighter jets had no two-way radios. The obvious fix was a commercially available $20 device that was rejected due to red tape in the procurement process. A decade later, during the Iraq War, $30 million jets lacked basic GPS navigation systems—again, devices that were available commercially for cheap, but could not be purchased due to the same procurement regulations.[i] It is a miracle that such mandated technological backwardness did not cause an international incident.
Palantir’s executives have seen this dysfunction within the Department of Defense’s (DoD)’s procurement process firsthand. Its software, preferred by the U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan for detecting explosives, was repeatedly rejected by Pentagon brass in favor of an inferior system developed by a major defense contractor. It was only after lawsuits brought against the government by Palantir and SpaceX that the military finally began to consider commercial alternatives in its procurement process, opening the door to greater competition in defense tech.
Reforms have been made. In 2015, the DoD created the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a tech-focused financing and scaling outfit armed with the explicit mandate of helping the military more quickly adopt technologies from the civilian tech sector, especially start-ups. By providing a pathway through the bureaucratic procurement process, expediting the processing time of government contracts, and investing seed money, the DIU helped several tech start-ups become defense unicorns, such as Anduril, Shield AI, and Scale AI. The result: Palantir is no longer the only upstart in the burgeoning defense tech field. But in the big picture, these initiatives remain a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the Pentagon’s budget is still spent on outdated hardware and software systems from legacy players unprepared for the dawning age of software-driven warfare.
The book also raises an intriguing question: Are we already witnessing a new, productive partnership between private-sector technology and government?
The inauguration of President Trump has become a Rorschach test in this respect.
Some saw the presence of tech billionaires at the ceremony as a descent into kleptocracy; others saw it as a long-overdue collaboration between the nation’s public and private sectors. The announcement of Project Stargate—a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank—suggests that opposition to military partnerships, a sentiment endemic in the Silicon Valley of the post-Cold War decades, is fading. OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, once reluctant to engage with the Pentagon, have all in recent years announced collaborations with the U.S. military. Whether this shift is genuine or simply reflects the latest corporate idée fixe after a decade focusing on ESG and DEI remains to be seen, but the cultural shift is undeniable.
At the rank-and-file level, however, the tech workforce may still be hesitant to wholeheartedly embrace a partnership with the arms of U.S. power. Silicon Valley’s workforce has long been skeptical of defense work. For example, when then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter visited Silicon Valley in 2015 to discuss the concept of the DIU, Google would not open its doors to him. Three years later, Google withdrew from Project Maven — the Pentagon project to incorporate machine learning technology into its command-and-control systems —after sustained employee protests.
Today, however, the prospects for positive engagement between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military may be less bleak. When faced with an immediate threat, unity and patriotism may emerge in previously unexpected ways and places. Consider the case of our closest ally in the Middle East: Israel. Before the attacks of October 7th, 2023, Israel found itself mired in the biggest constitutional crisis in its history. For nine months, tens of thousands of Israelis held weekly demonstrations asserting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms would lead the country into authoritarianism. But after the attacks of October 7th, the citizens of Israel set politics aside. 360,000 reservists from all walks of life, including the tech sector, rushed into their uniforms to fight for their threatened country.
Israel – although not discussed in the book – demonstrates precisely those strengths that Karp and Zamiska would like to see implemented in the U.S.[ii]: its military and commercial tech industry are highly integrated; everyone in Israel is required to serve in the military, thereby fostering a sense of social cohesion with fellow citizens of different ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic classes; and Israeli society is known to place less importance on hierarchy and agreeability making the small nation a fertile ground for innovation. Perhaps given its sense of national solidarity and purpose, it is not surprising that Israel’s tech ecosystem is also less focused on narrow consumer products and more on ones that serve the greater good: cybersecurity, AI, biotech, agritech, and the life sciences
To create this kind of social cohesion, US must engage with what Yale political theorist Steven Smith has called “enlightened patriotism”: an expression of belonging, loyalty, and pride, which eschews blind nationalism in favor of a constantly-renewed, honest, and living commitment to improving the common weal of one’s fellow citizens. Enlightened patriotism is a pragmatic recognition that, for all its flaws, America remains the best hope for democracy, innovation, and human rights.
In their book, Karp and Zamiska ask rhetorically: whatever one may think of war, if the U.S. ever must enter a war, wouldn’t the world be better off if the U.S. won, rather than lost, that war? Likewise, would you rather live in a world order dominated by the U.S., or by China? Such questions are not only the purview of the triumphant Trumpian right. In a time when the leadership of the Democratic Party, as The New York Times reports, is “struggling to decide what it believes in,” the American left, too, would be well advised to adopt such a pragmatist case for American patriotism, instead of perpetuating false claims about how “systematic racism” and “white supremacy” are indelible, and indeed defining, parts of our national fabric.
While Karp and Zamiska hope that their book will prompt a discussion in Silicon Valley “of what, beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values…constitutes our shared vision of the community to which we belong,” it does not fully articulate such a shared vision. Had it done so, it would have also needed to address fundamental questions about the role of civil disobedience, and not just civic engagement, as a legitimate act of “enlightened patriotism” — but such an expanded scope is likely best suited to a sequel. From Henry David Thoreau’s opposition to the Mexican-American War to modern-day protests against military contracts in the tech industry, dissent has, rightly or wrongly, often been framed as an expression of love for one’s country. In Israel, mass resignations by IDF reservists over proposed judicial reforms inadvertently and regrettably weakened the nation’s defense posture on October 7th—a stark reminder that internal divisions, while sometimes a sign of democratic health, can also invite external threats. Though the book does not fully explore the tension between duty and conscience — a task admittedly beyond its stated scope — it does leave readers with a pressing question: When, if ever, is refusing to cooperate with the government an act of patriotism?
At its core, The Technological Republic trumpets a clarion call to America’s best and brightest: Silicon Valley must re-engage with the national interest, or it risks ceding the future to authoritarian regimes. Whether this call is heeded remains to be seen. But Karp and Zamiska make one thing clear: the stakes could not be higher.
[i] This example is discussed in Raj M. Shah & Christopher Kirchhoff, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War (2024), pp. 1-3.
[ii] This omission is somewhat surprising given that Karp was one of the most outspoken CEOs after Oct. 7, 2023. Palantir took out a full-page ad in the New York Times stating it “stands with Israel” and offered internships to students who felt threatened by the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses.
