There was a time when the arms dealer waited in the corridor. He financed the campaign, endowed the think tank, took the general to dinner, and hoped the man inside the office would remember him when the contract came up. The wall between the money and the decision was thin, often corrupt, but it was there. Someone held the public trust, and someone else tried to buy it, and you could at least tell the two apart.
That wall is gone. The financier no longer waits in the corridor. He holds the office. He signs the checks. He is the buyer and the seller, the regulator and the regulated, the public interest and the private portfolio, fused into a single man in a single suit, and the arrangement is entirely legal, which is the whole problem.
One of these men may already be familiar from a previous article. His name is Friedrich Merz.
The chancellor was the warm-up act....
Line them up. Merz chaired an asset manager and then commanded the German rearmament that manager profits from. Phelan ran a billionaire’s money and then took command of the Navy that buys from the companies he held. Feinberg ran a private equity empire and then took the Pentagon’s second chair and filled the building with his former partners. Different countries, different uniforms, one profession and one move: from owning the assets of war to commanding the state that pays for them.
The line worth repeating from Merz’s own story turns out not to have been about Germany at all. The buildup manufactures the danger it claims to answer. Every European budget hardens Moscow’s conviction that it is being encircled, which justifies the next budget, around and around, while the men who profit count their dividends and call it security. That was true of one chancellor. It is true of an entire class of men who have stopped seeing daylight between the public interest and their own book, because across their whole careers there never was any.
The old fear, the one Eisenhower named in 1961, was that the military-industrial complex would acquire unwarranted influence over the government. That fear is quaint now. Influence is what you need when you are standing in the corridor. These men are not in the corridor. They are behind the desk, and the desk has a checkbook with no ceiling, and the recruiting brochure is on the table telling the next banker that whatever he needs, he can get.