Prominent artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI recently appointed newly retired U.S. Army General and former National Security Agency (NSA) director Paul M. Nakasone to its board of directors.
Nakasone will join the Board’s newly announced Safety and Security Committee, slated to advise OpenAI’s Board on critical safety- and security-related matters and decisions.
Established following an exodus of OpenAI higher-ups concerned about the company’s perceived de-prioritization of safety-related matters, the new Safety and Security Committee is OpenAI’s apparent effort to reestablish a safety-forward reputation with an increasingly wary public.
AI safety concerns are of the utmost importance, but OpenAI should not use them to ram through an appointment that appears poised to normalize AI’s militarization while spinning theever-revolving door between defense and intelligence agencies and Big Tech.
The ‘revolving door’ strikes again
Following his 38-year military career, including over five years headingU.S. Army Cyber Command, Nakasone’s post-retirement OpenAI appointment and shift to the corporate sector mimics the military-industrial complex’s ever-“revolving door” between senior defense or intelligence agency officials and private industry.
The phenomenon manifests itself in rampant conflicts of interest and massive military contracts alike: according to an April 2024 Costs of War report, U.S. military and intelligence contracts awarded to major tech firms had ceilings “worth at least $53 billion combined” between 2019 and 2022.
Quietly lifting language barring the military application of its tech from its website earlier this year, OpenAI apparently wants in on the cash. The company is currently collaborating with the Pentagon on cybersecurity-related tools to prevent veteran suicide.
A slippery slope
OpenAI remains adamant its tech cannot be used to develop or use weapons despite recent policy changes. But AI’s rapid wartime proliferation in Gaza and Ukraine highlights other industry players’ lack of restraint; failing to keep up could mean losing out on lucrative military contracts in a competitive and unpredictable industry.
Similarly, OpenAI’s current usage policies affirm that the company’s products cannot be used to “compromise the privacy of others,” especially in the forms of “[f]acilitating spyware, communications surveillance, or unauthorized monitoring of individuals.” But Nakasone’s previous role as director of the NSA, an organization infamous for illegally spying on Americans, suggests such policies may not hold water.
In NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s words: “There is only one reason for appointing an[NSA] Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.”
All things considered, Nakasone’s OpenAI appointment signals that a treacherous, more militarized road for OpenAI, as well as AI as a whole, likely lies ahead.
Stavroula Pabst is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft.
Director, General Paul Nakasone, National Security Agency, appears before a Senate Committee on Intelligence hearing to examine worldwide threats, in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, USA, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. Photo by Rod Lamkey/CNP/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS
In his 1971 classic “Every War Must End,” Fred Charles Iklé painfully reminded every would-be commander and statesman of the wrenching tragedies that result from confusing military means with political ends.
Thus, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, any U.S. veteran counterinsurgent listening to President Trump’s press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday evening had to measure clearly the spoken words against such warnings and shudder.
"The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out," the president said. "Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area," he added. "Do a real job. Do something different."
These are the terms of a successful real estate developer and epoch-changing politician. They are filled with similar emotions raised by others who have also sat in the same office, especially next to a needful friend and flush with an electoral victory from which he believes he has a powerful mandate to bend the arc of history.
Yet these presidents are also not reflective of the American experience overseas. They instead represent the kind of nightmare that has awakened every American administration since Israel was recognized by President Truman in 1948.
For all its dynamism, America has long proven its structural inadequacies at this kind of security and development mission. It’s just not in its DNA, regardless of the clarity of the orders or willingness of its troops. No matter how well meaning at the outset, the United States has often failed its friends, not due to any perfidy but to lack of clear-eyed statesmanship towards Iklé’s famous ends and a repeated misreading of the unique relationship between America’s transient democracy and the sustained application of force necessary to compel an often invisible foe to submit to its will.
English philosopher John Gray recently noted that one of the positives from Trump’s election is that he was “not a war candidate” and was without “a universal mission” trying “to reshape” the world, but rather led with “a transactional realism.” Gray remarked that this realism is potentially more “morally clean” than the “negative soft power” results of both the neoconservative and liberal exercise of power (often intertwined) for 40 years since the end of the Cold War. Much of this exercise, if we haven’t yet forgotten, occurred in the killing fields of the Middle East.
Trump clearly wants to succeed where President Biden and his inept advisers clearly failed. Yet instinct must always be met by the rational, and both have practical, political, and global power ramifications that go well beyond one term of office.
On Wednesday his surrogates worked to dial his Tuesday remarks back, saying, he “doesn’t want to put any U.S. troops on the ground, and he doesn’t want to spend any U.S. dollars at all.” That would be smart, because otherwise the U.S. would be immediately involved in fighting a war that has not come to its natural political end, and likely never will. If American servicemembers touch the Gaza Strip, they are immediately in a state of war, surrounded not only by Hamas and other militant fighters and gangs, operating in a place where governing institutions now barely exist.
Strenuous rules of engagement for self-defense, which Trump bolstered during his first tenure, would mean more civilian harm and likely loss of life for our own soldiers. A carefully considered endgame here is not a choice, but a political and moral imperative.
Next, the mission has very little chance of immediate clarity or resolution. Lack of active-duty troop strength, exhaustion of weaponry in other overseas commitments like those in Ukraine, ship readiness and construction all mean that time would not be on America’s side in maintaining effective armed presence necessary to “clear, hold, and build.” Any presence in Gaza would immediately be opposed not just on all three sides facing land but also the one at the Mediterranean's edge requiring absolute naval command of the seas. The U.S. military’s history is filled with impossible odds when attempting to contain irregular adversaries with easy access to a porous border.
Much like in Iraq and Afghanistan, today’s readiness woes mean that the reserve component will be asked to do much of this work, if sustained. Although successful in many ways, America’s reserve force is still constructed from the same “total force policy” of General Creighton Abrams at the end of the Vietnam War, designed to prevent long-term commitment of overseas troops by dividing the necessary capabilities of such campaigns throughout the national guard and reserve. Consistently late and insufficient congressional budgets for defense has only increased uncertainty and added to strategic myopia.
Finally, the interplay of economic, diplomatic, and military statesmanship would require a deft coherence — and strategic honesty — that no American administration has successfully wielded since World War II. As the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted, “Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility. … Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.”
Although the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, famously written by the generals of the Iraq War clearly states that “counterinsurgency is not a substitute for strategy,” for American leaders desperately looking for any success in a strategic vacuum, it became one. And no one was ready to say it wasn’t — or to offer any viable alternative. There is no reason to believe anything is different today in terms of opportunistic careerism or strategic hubris.
What then could work to accomplish the president’s vision? This would be the first real test of President Trump’s Joint Chiefs whom he inherited from former President Biden. What will they recommend to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, someone with “dust on his boots” from two failed counterinsurgencies himself? What have they learned from America’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, or past efforts to resupply civilians in Gaza, and how are those lessons reflected in the plans they will present?
To truly “do something different,” as the president proclaimed, the United States might start by reviewing its own past playbooks on attracting allies to accomplish well-defined political objectives instead. That is why General Colin Powell regularly referred to Ikle’s book and urged his staff to study it, especially when determining recommended courses of action to then President George H.W. Bush about the desirable ends of ejecting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
But these are not the early unipolar salad days of 1991, but rather a much more competitive and unpredictable world. This is a solemn test of a new administration, and for those serving in uniform today, especially those in our youngest generations — those who will never allow America to fail within their temporal power. The stakes couldn't be any higher.
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Top photo credit: Hebron, Palestine, November 7 2010. Israeli IDF soldiers check Palestinian woman at military check point by the Abraham mosque in old town of Hebron (Shutterstock/dom zara)
For the first time, a U.S. president has dispensed with even the pretense of supporting a two-state solution.
President Trump’s latest remarks — proposing the forced displacement of Palestinians to Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab nations — should not just be noted as another inflammatory statement. They are the final nail in the coffin of a policy Washington has long claimed to uphold. His words make clear the two-state solution is dead, and Palestinian displacement isn’t a byproduct of American policy — it’s the goal.
President Trump’s comments came as he welcomed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the first foreign visitor to the U.S. in his second term. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and national security advisor Mike Waltz characterized Trump’s remarks as an example of his "creativity" and willingness to break from past approaches.
At the press conference held with the Prime Minister, the President was asked, “You just said that you think all the Palestinians should be relocated to other countries. Does that mean that you do not support the two-state solution?” To which the President responded, “It doesn't mean anything about a two-state or a one-state or any other state. It means that we want to have — we want to give people a chance at life. They have never had a chance at life because the Gaza Strip has been a hellhole for people living there. It's been horrible. Hamas has made it so bad, so bad, so dangerous, so unfair to people… And I have to stress, this is not for Israel, this is for everybody in the Middle East -- Arabs, Muslims -- this is for everybody.”
His avoidance of answering the question speaks volumes.
The comments on the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza have rightly sparked shock and outrage for their blatant endorsement of ethnic cleansing, even as they are now being walked back and reframed as a mere humanitarian proposal.
What’s been lost in the coverage of Trump’s remarks is the deeper shift it signals: his proposal to occupy Gaza — whether permanently or not remains unclear — and relocate two million people to Egypt and Jordan isn’t just logistically impossible; it’s a declaration that Palestinian displacement is the goal, not the consequence, of U.S. policy.
The insanity of “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” remains in the way policymakers and pundits still pound the table, insisting that a two-state solution remains the official U.S. position — even as every action taken by successive administrations undermines that very possibility. Decades of unconditional military aid, diplomatic cover for settlement expansion, and willful disregard for Palestinian sovereignty have made clear that "two states" was never an actual policy — only a talking point meant to delay accountability.
If nothing else, President Trump’s bluntness should force an overdue reckoning. If the two-state solution is dead — and by all practical measures, it is, then what comes next? The only path forward is the one that dares to address the reality on the ground: a one-state solution, an end to occupation, and equal rights and freedom for Palestinians. Anything else is just more of the same — and we already know how that ends.
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Top photo credit: U.S. Soldiers conduct area reconnaissance in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility in Syria, Feb. 18, 2021. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Jensen Guillory)
Statements from unnamed DoD officials suggest that President Donald Trump is planning to withdraw U.S. troops from Northeast Syria.
ISIS is largely degraded and regional states have pledged to carry on the fight, Bashar al-Assad’s regime is gone, diplomatic outreach to the new leadership in Damascus is underway, and Iran’s proxy forces have taken a severe beating while losing unfettered access to the Mediterranean via Syria. There’s little reason why U.S. troops should remain in Syria.
Critics of withdrawal argue that it could destabilize Syria’s fragile peace and benefit ISIS, especially since thousands of potential ISIS fighters remain in camps administered by the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF). These are real concerns and any withdrawal should be orderly and coordinated, encouraging diplomacy between Washington’s Kurdish partners (SDF), Turkey, and Damascus —but it should proceed.
Diplomacy between the SDF, Damascus, and Ankara could even be hindered if the SDF believe that U.S. troops will remain indefinitely. Arguing for an indefinite U.S. troop presence in Syria both overstates U.S. influence and ties troops to uncontrollable conditions.
It also offers an opportunity to make diplomatic inroads into the new de facto government in Damascus. Syrians have taken back their country and Washington should respond with diplomacy and sanctions relief rather than indefinite troop deployments. A responsible and timely withdrawal from Syria aligns with U.S. national interests and should be part of a broader effort to reduce the U.S. military presence in regions lacking both international and domestic legal justification.
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