Manufacturing the Emergency

War, Permanent Crisis, and the Leaders Who Need Both

“War breeds tyrants.” These words appear in the closing of a carefully written essay by British author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books. The argument leading to the short sentence is historically grounded and emotionally compelling. Put briefly, the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, far from liberating an oppressed population, has delivered the Islamic Republic the gifts of legitimate grievance, nationalist consolidation, and the cover of existential threat to crush dissent that was already being crushed (de Bellaigue, 2026).

Drawing powerfully on the precedent of the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup that toppled the hugely popular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh on Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s 1956 poem “Winter,” de Bellaigue makes a genuinely important case that external military force can freeze political possibility as surely as it destroys infrastructure.

A sharper question raised by the essay, “Iran’s New Winter,” is whether war breeds tyrants or amplifies what was already latent in a political order or leader. The Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism preceded the recent conflict by four decades; what the current war has supplied is the ultimate authorization for concentrating power embodied in the enemy at the gate. De Bellaigue argues that the attacking powers did not export emergency logic to the country so much as catalysed it.

Moreover, as I’ll claim here, the U.S. and Israel themselves arrived already organized according to many of the structural mechanics of permanent crisis. Their military campaign then produced exactly the renewed adversary that garrison-state democracies structurally require and whose belligerence retroactively validates the permanent-exception apparatus those states had spent decades assembling. While war breeds tyrants, de Bellaigue observes, the deeper pattern we need to recognize is that the states that launched this war had already been breeding tyrannical dynamics of their own.

Nearly a century ago, German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt grasped that pattern’s theoretical structure with uncomfortable clarity. In The Concept of the Political, the argued that the sovereign’s definitive act is the designation of an enemy, the friend/enemy distinction constituting the very essence of politics. When political communities define themselves through existential opposition, pluralism gives way to mobilization and hesitation begins to look like betrayal. Schmitt’s more deeply unsettling claim was that democracies deploy the same logic with greater sophistication and more durable institutional cover (Schmitt, 1932/2007).

In the early 2000s, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception traces the historical process by which that act ceased to be exceptional at all. The temporary suspension of normal legal order, invoked in genuine emergency and retained as convenient technique, had become the dominant paradigm of governance itself in advanced democracies. However, the exception does not resolve back into the norm; it progressively displaces it, maintaining the outward forms of constitutional government while emptying them of the constraints those forms were designed to impose. In other words, the emergency becomes institutionalized (Agamben, 2005).

At a time when the leadership is modeled and exercised across different sectors and institutions, my claim here is that the same structural logic governs the organizations and executives who build their authority around manufactured crises.

I. The Logic of the Permanent Enemy

Invoking Schmitt requires a precision his original admirers did not observe. My turn to his analytical framework here carries no endorsement of his politics, which led him to serve as the Nazi regime’s constitutional theorist. For me, his value is diagnostic, since he named, with greater candor than much of the liberal tradition has provided, the friend/enemy mechanism that constitutional democracies have also proven entirely capable of deploying.

Recent writing about democratic backsliding arrives at a similar structural conclusion through empirical rather than theoretical means. Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018) and Johns Hopkins’ Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy (2018) both document how constitutional democracies erode through the incremental displacement of oversight mechanisms, with each emergency furnishing authorization for the next accumulation of executive power, with no rupture required. Their convergence on a similar structural conclusion itself illuminates the phenomenon they independently describe.

These more recent arguments also push away from a post-World War Two European political culture that defined itself, in large part, against this very calculus. While German and American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s probing analysis of totalitarianism documented how fear dissolves judgment into obedience, her critique reaches further (Arendt, 1951/2025).

Her extension of the concept of natality, of humans being born into this world, drew a connection between the capacity of citizens to initiate genuinely new political beginnings not already scripted by prevailing power arrangements (Arendt, 1958/2018). With it, she identified both the institutional constraints that authoritarian emergency governance systematically destroys and, more importantly, the democratic capacity for origination itself.

French philosopher Raymond Aron approached the same problem from a more strategic vantage. In his memoirs, he famously acknowledged that, in politics, “one chooses one’s enemies, one doesn’t choose one’s allies [“[en politique] on choisit ses adversaires, on ne choisit pas ses alliés”] (Aron, 1983, p. 119). His more probing argument, however, was that once a state defines its identity through permanent existential opposition, proportionality becomes unanswerable from within that identity’s own categories. Every constraint on force appears as a concession to the enemy, and the political community organized around permanent threat cannot reliably distinguish the force that defends it from the force that constitutes it (Aron, 1954/1955; Aron, 1966/2003).

The post-September 11 United States provides a ready real-world example of this theoretical landscape. The USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless surveillance programs, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, prolonged armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan following U.S. invasions, and the dramatic expansion of presidential war powers all emerged from a constitutional democracy invoking an existential enemy (Cole and Lobel, 2007).

The Iraq War Authorization for Use of Military Force, or “AUMF,” passed in 2002, has since authorized military operations across dozens of countries through four successive administrations. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented that expanding jurisdictional sprawl with each administration’s discovery of its convenience, such as when it was used to justify the killing of a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020 (Ebright, 2023).

Bush and Cheney did not become tyrants in a traditionally recognizable sense, but they bequeathed their successors a machinery of executive power that each subsequent administration found convenient to inherit and extend. The framing authorizes and the exception accumulates over time.

I am convinced that conversion is not limited to political leaders. Corporate executives have deployed the same logic, framing competitive pressures as existential threats, internal dissent as ideological subversion, and the consolidation of executive authority as the only rational response to permanent emergency. To be clear, by making such a claim, I am not suggesting that all business – or political – emergencies are manufactured. Genuine competitive disruptions, safety failures, and liquidity crises warrant directive and concentrated leadership response.

The question that concerns me is whether that concentration is released once the acute threat passes or retained and extended as a mode of governance. My aim in the following is to pursue that parallel deliberately, moving between political and corporate cases not to draw superficial analogies but to demonstrate that the structural mechanics are shared.

II. Danger as Infrastructure

That view has precedent in the permanent mobilization extending beyond the state that French philosopher Paul Virilio originally theorized, in part with Sylvère Lotringer, a half-century ago (Virilio, 1977/2006). Virilio’s central argument was that modern societies have reorganized themselves around the permanent anticipation of war rather than war as a discrete event, military logic colonizing economic, technological, and civic life from within.

His concept of pure war, developed in sustained dialogue with Lotringer, describes not a conflict but a persisting condition. The total mobilization of social institutions around a threat can never fully be resolved (think of an enemy having the capacity to launch nuclear weapons) because the threat itself never fully arrives or materializes (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983/2008). Contemporary corporate life absorbed its mechanics with remarkable efficiency, and the absorption has proven so complete that its most prominent practitioners now openly advocate for it.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, argues in The Technological Republic that Western liberal democracies have compromised their security by allowing technology sectors to become indifferent to national defense (Karp and Zamiska, 2025). Whatever one makes of the policy prescription, the book is a remarkable cultural document: here is a leading Silicon Valley executive calling, without apparent irony, for precisely the security-technology integration that political scientist and communications theorist Harold D. Lasswell had identified, eight decades earlier, as the structural signature of “garrison state” governance.

The garrison state, proposed by Lasswell in 1941, is a developmental construct” that operates through a specific mechanism. His formulation was that modern states could shift from the dominance of “specialists on bargaining” to the supremacy of “specialists on violence” through a gradual, fear-driven reordering of priorities, with no rupture required (Lasswell, 1941). “The socialization of danger” by states was the key mechanism by which threat becomes ambient and populations come to accept, and eventually demand, the prioritization of security over other competing values.

A fuller explanation of the institutional mechanisms that sustain this process emerged in the late-Cold War 1980s and has continued since. As historian Andrew Bacevich writes, the U.S. military posture throughout this era reflects a structural commitment to ongoing intervention – predominantly in the Middle East – that serve insitutional interests, including defense contractors, career officers, and congressional constituencies, far more reliably than any coherent strategic objective (Bacevich, 2016). The war does not end, put bluntly, because too many actors benefit from its continuation.

Corporate leaders who restructured their organizations around threat-response architectures during these same years, frequently relying on the rhetoric of downsizing as the basis of competitive survival, were drawing on the same institutional logic, applied to market position rather than national security.

Many business leaders now follow an analogous logic through which the instability that justified an executive’s consolidation of authority becomes the instability that authority requires in order to persist. As I’ve explored elsewhere, digital platforms have in recent decades since thoroughly socialized anxiety and danger, making ordinary citizens active participants in their own securitization (Slocum, 2026). Platform architectures designed to maximize engagement discovered that threat, outrage, and the perception of existential danger generate the strongest and most durable user responses, producing an attention economy structurally biased toward the amplification of emergency.

Meta’s own internal research, spotlighted during whistleblower Frances Haugen’s later congressional testimony, documented that posts receiving angry-emoji reactions were shown in feeds at five times the rate of less emotionally charged content, a design dynamic that the company’s engineers had identified and that leadership declined to correct because the engagement it generated was too commercially valuable (Horwitz and Seetharaman, 2020). The platforms require no ideological commitment to securitization; fear generates engagement, and engagement is what the business model requires.

These algorithmic systems now reward content that heightens threat perception, and users sorted into self-reinforcing informational enclaves circulate and intensify narratives of danger that would previously have required coordinated state resources to sustain. The socialization of danger has been outsourced, at algorithmic speed and scale, to citizens who experience the process as autonomous expression. In democratic systems, the result is populations who actively demand the emergency measures Schmitt’s sovereign was once required to impose. Surveillance architectures, exceptional legal powers, and the identification of enemies, all emerge as responses to threats that citizens themselves have helped construct and amplify.

Today’s digital garrison state no longer requires a garrison mentality handed down from above. It is crowdsourced from below, through billions of micro-interactions on platforms whose business model depends on the continuous renewal of anxiety.

III. Crisis as Episode

Understanding what happens when leaders internalize that dynamic requires distinguishing between two fundamentally different relationships to crisis. Conditions framed as survival-level threats reliably produce leaders who centralize authority and suppress internal dissent. Total industrial-era mobilization tends to concentrate authority at the apex of command hierarchies, suppresses dissent as incompatible with organizational survival, and derives its institutional coherence from the clarity of a total threat. That model is, in Lasswell’s terms, the organizational form that garrison-state logic most naturally generates, and its structural mechanics, as de Bellaigue observes, have historically proven compatible with the breeding of tyrants.

West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s management of the 1977 “German Autumn” illustrates the contrasting episodic model at political scale. When the Red Army Faction simultaneously kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer and hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181, Schmidt assembled a crisis committee, imposed tight information controls, and made the consequential decision to deploy the GSG 9 counterterrorism unit to Mogadishu, securing the passengers’ safe release.

Once the acute threat passed, Schmidt explicitly rejected calls to institutionalize expanded emergency powers as a permanent counter-terrorism posture. Instead, he argued that constitutional democracy’s proper response to terrorism was to stabilize and strengthen its institutions rather than suspend them. The enemy was definable in this case, the tactics employed by authority were directive and bounded, and the emergency remained an episode. Afterwards, he returned to longer-term work of economic management and NATO strategy (Hanshew, 2012).

More recent emergencies, distributed and ambiguous by nature, have likewise rewarded leaders who distribute authority rather than concentrate it. Former U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal’s reconstruction of Joint Special Operations Command after 2004, documented in Team of Teams, is a revealing organizational case study of its time (McChrystal, et al., 2015). It begins with an elite military force discovering that traditional command concentration was actively degrading the adaptive response the environment required, and details the systematic dismantling of it in favor of networked, distributed decision-making.

The question for any leader operating under genuine crisis conditions is whether the emergency is real, the concentration of authority temporary, and the organization’s capacity for distributed judgment rebuilt once the acute threat passes. Consider examples from leadership in the corporate realm.

Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 Tylenol crisis is the commercial archetype. When cyanide-laced capsules killed seven people in Chicago, CEO James Burke withdrew 31 million bottles from the marketplace voluntarily, accepted short-term costs estimated at $100 million, and communicated with regulators and the public with complete transparency. The authority was directive and the mandate explicitly bounded. Once tamper-proof packaging was deployed and consumer trust restored, Burke returned the company to its normal governance structures (Schulz and Schultz, 1990). The emergency remained an episode.

As further illustration of the wider pattern, Andy Grove’s management of Intel’s DRAM collapse under Japanese competition in the mid-1980s is likewise clear. Grove drove the company’s pivot to microprocessors with near-unilateral authority, explicitly intolerant of internal dissent when survival was at stake (Grove, 1996). Once the strategic pivot was secured, Intel returned to more distributed decision-making and built the organizational capacity that outlasted Grove’s own tenure. The emergency served transformation and then subsided.

Grove’s pivot became the practitioner archetype for what Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz explored, in a widely read 2011 blogpost, as the “wartime CEO.” This is the leader who demands singular focus, tolerates no distraction from the survival priority, and treats procedural dissent as a luxury the organization cannot afford in extremis (Horowitz, 2011). Horowitz’s typology captures the behavioral repertoire that genuine existential threat can legitimately require, and his Grove-centered examples make that case persuasively.

Ironically, his discussion of CEOs leaves largely unaddressed the capacity it most needs to specify. What allows the leader, that is, to recognize when the war has ended and return the organization to the distributed governance that peacetime conditions reward. That transition, from wartime concentration of paranoia, intensity, and authority back to peacetime creativity, distribution, and big, hairy, audacious goals, is precisely the capacity the many leaders appear conspicuously to lack.

Maersk’s response to the NotPetya cyberattack provides a further parallel. The 2017 ransomware destroyed the Danish shipping company’s IT infrastructure across 130 countries overnight. In response, leadership imposed directive emergency control, communicated openly with customers and investors about the scale of the disruption, and rebuilt 45,000 PCs and 4,000 servers within ten days – before returning to distributed governance. While the crisis absorbed an estimated $870 million in losses, Maersk’s institutional integrity remained intact because the emergency was treated as a bounded episode rather than a rationale for lasting centralization (Greenberg, 2018).

In each of these corporate leadership cases – Tylenol’s tainted product, Intel’s price-competitive displacement, Maersk’s ransomware destruction – the enemy was bounded, external, and in principle resolvable. Their defeat could be recognized, the emergency declared over, and the authority used to address it returned or redistributed.

Boeing’s recent history illustrates a related if potentially more long-term failure mode on the brink of becoming permanent. The 737 MAX certification crisis was a genuine engineering emergency that warranted exactly the kind of directive, accountability-focused response Grove exercised at Intel. Yet under CEO Dennis Muilenburg, the company chose perception management over engineering accountability, sustaining the fiction of normalcy through successive earnings calls while the organizational dysfunction underlying the crashes went unaddressed (Robison, 2021).

Mishandling real emergencies can produce institutional and reputational damage as long-lasting as manufactured ones. The difference is that mishandled genuine crises eventually force a reckoning that manufactured ones are specifically designed to defer.

IV. Crisis as Identity

An instructive corporate example is Travis Kalanick’s tenure as CEO at Uber in the 2010s. From its founding, Uber organized its cultural identity around permanent disruption, framing regulatory frameworks not as legitimate public-interest constraints but as the weaponized resistance of entrenched incumbents. Kalanick’s internal culture codified this posture through norms that encouraged corporate infighting and long work hours, deliberately blurring the boundary between genuine competitive threat and manufactured existential emergency.

The permanent-crisis culture had sheltered a deeper organizational dysfunction that was exposed initially in early 2017 by engineer Susan Fowler’s whistleblowing account of systematic harassment at the company (Fowler, 2017). A series of other revelations then precipitated an independent investigation that returned a withering report in June about Uber’s toxic culture. Kalanick took a leave and ultimately resigned, after which it became clear that the grueling “bro culture” he engendered had consumed the company’s capacity to distinguish its actual adversaries from the ones its leadership required in order to govern (Isaac, 2020).

Elon Musk’s trajectory makes that threshold even more visible by crossing it. His account of the 2018 “production hell” for the Tesla Model 3, sleeping on factory floors and publicly dismissing executives who could not sustain the required pace, deployed military registers that were, in that moment, neither unfamiliar nor necessarily inappropriate for a company genuinely at risk (Vance, 2015; Duhigg, 2018).

However, following his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which was rebranded as X, the deployment of emergency actions metastasized beyond any tethering to operational reality. Mass layoffs were framed as the removal of ideological enemies and wasteful non-contributors. Content moderation changes, in particular, were justified through an explicit friend/enemy discourse in which constraints on speech represented an assault by “the woke mind virus” (Schiffer, 2024).

By 2025, Musk’s role in the U.S. Government heading DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) reproduced the same outcomes at a national scale. Mass terminations framed as the purging of ideological opponents, institutional oversight characterized as hostile capture, and each successive accumulation of authority justified by a permanent emergency posture. Rather than institutional counterweights performing legitimate oversight functions, Inspectors general, career civil servants, and entire federal agencies were characterized as enemy combatants embedded within the state, their procedural resistance treated as evidence of the ideological capture DOGE had been deployed to reverse.

Musk and Trump, a specialist in technology and a specialist in political mobilization, embodied the garrison-state logic theorized decades earlier by Lasswell. To an unsettling degree, each amplified the other’s emergency claims, with an algorithmically primed public as their shared infrastructure. The enemies that sustain such crisis-as-identity are typically different in kind from those that episodic leaders face. They are internal, ideological, and structurally inexhaustible, requiring continuous rediscovery because any single defeat would end the emergency that justifies the authority.

When permanent crisis hardens from phase into fixed identity, leaders concentrate authority and render opposition illegitimate in advance while borrowing from the same Schmittian calculus that authoritarian regimes employ at far greater human cost. Agamben’s analysis further explains the durability of the approach by explaining that once the exception has been institutionalized as technique, the leader who dismantles it loses the authority the exception was generating.

Crisis as the basis of fixed identity marks a form of pure war at the organizational level. The condition is genuinely self-perpetuating by re-building organizations built around permanent emergency cannot function in its absence, and leadership committed to that identity cannot relinquish it without relinquishing the authority the emergency generates. Once the exception is institutionalized as technique, as Agamben’s analysis makes precise, dismantling it requires the leader to acknowledge that the emergency was, at least in part, a governance choice. That acknowledgment is exactly what the identity forecloses.

The organization does not merely sustain the emergency; it becomes incapable of imagining institutional life without it. What began as a leadership posture hardens into an organizational grammar, one that can no longer parse the difference between genuine threat and manufactured necessity – and that renders the board intervention, the regulatory correction, or the electoral defeat the only available exits.

V. The Pattern Confirmed

The political orders that launched the campaign against Iran had already internalized precisely that structural dynamic, which is what made the war, in their terms, an asset to be managed as much as a crisis to be resolved. When corporate emergency identity merges with state power, as in the configuration of Musk and the executive branch that I just described, the distinction between organizational and political emergency manufacturing collapses into a single governing logic.

At the national scale, however, the stakes of that collapse are categorically different: the enemies designated are populations rather than competitors, the exceptions authorized carry lethal institutional and military force, and the oversight mechanisms being dismantled are the ones that mark the boundary between constitutional governance and its authoritarian alternatives.

That structural dynamic is what Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political posture had embodied long before the first attack on Iranian targets in February 2026. Striking out at existential threats has become a politically self-perpetuating exception for the longtime Israeli Prime Minister, whose authority to take action requires the emergency it claims only to respond to. When he began his push in 2023 to subordinate Israel’s Supreme Court to parliamentary control, for example, he triggered the most serious constitutional crisis in the country’s history (Kershner, 2023).

The reform was framed in terms of sovereign prerogative against a judiciary characterized as an enemy of democratic will, and it proceeded while the Prime Minister faced corruption indictments in three separate criminal cases. The Schmittian calculus was precise, using an electoral majority to neutralize the institutional check most capable of constraining executive emergency power.

Scholarship on Israeli militarism has documented how defense, civil, and technological institutions have become so thoroughly intertwined that military logic organizes civilian economic and political life from within (Ben-Eliezer, 1998; Sheffer and Barak, 2010). In fact, expanding their focus on militarism in Israeli society, political scientists Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak turned to examine the broader category of informal yet deeply-rooted security networks that shape the country’s culture and politics (Sheffer and Barak, 2013). Amidst other specific drivers and motivations, the war with Iran can be viewed as a natural expression of those longstanding networks, not as an interruption of it.

The same structural pattern characterizes Donald Trump’s domestic posture in the U.S. His second administration’s systematic expansion of executive emergency authority through the designation of internal enemies as the constitutive act of governance, and the progressive erosion of the legislative, judicial, and journalistic oversight mechanisms most capable of constraining the accumulation of power (Cole and Lobel, 2007; Esman, 2007).

What arguably distinguishes Trump’s construction of permanent emergency is its procedural sophistication and its reliance on continuous enemy rotation. Whereas an earlier generation of executive overreach remained largely reactive, often responding to identifiable events, Trump’s second administration has systematically converted episodic challenges into an unbroken existential emergency. Consider the framing of immigration flows became an “invasion” authorizing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 or trade imbalances constituing a civilizational competition requiring wartime executive discretion or judicial rulings becoming evidence of hostile institutional capture.

In each instance, the designated enemy was never fixed long enough to be resolved, ensuring the emergency remained perpetually renewable. That rotation is itself an essential aspect of the mechanism. When one category of threat approaches resolution or loses salience, another is identified, each iteration further normalizing the executive’s prerogative to name the emergency and define the adversary, independently of the institutional frameworks designed to constrain exactly that power.

Both leaders arrived at this war already operating according to the Schmittian calculus they shared, albeit in different registers, with the regime they attacked. The amplification thesis which I noted earlier finds its most disturbing expression in these parallels. The United States and Israel, that is, were not democracies reluctantly militarizing in response to genuine external threat.

They were garrison-state democracies, already exhibiting significant authoritarian tendencies domestically, for whom the military campaign produced exactly the outcome most structurally useful to their internal power arrangements. A strengthened Iranian adversary whose renewed belligerence validates the permanent-threat logic allows the the cycle to confirm and perpetuate itself.

This convergence is precisely what Lasswell’s socialization of danger anticipates and Virilio’s permanent mobilization explains. Iran has been delivered a new winter, colder than anything since 1953 and inarguably more difficult for the Iranian people. At the same time, the attacking powers’ own democratic institutions entered this episode already weakened by the same concentrated-authority calculus they claimed to be projecting outward.

As I’ve suggested, the same structural dynamic governs corporate executives who have make permanent crisis the condition of their authority. Each requires an adversary, whether geopolitical, competitive, or internal, credible enough to justify the power the emergency produced.

VI. The Wall Before Our Eyes

De Bellaigue’s closing moral observation in “Iran’s New Winter” stands, pointing to Trump’s and Netanyahu’s genuine responsibility for deepening the suffering of people who had already suffered enormously. His final image, of a society in which the wall of dark cloud before the eyes admits no greeting, no acknowledgment, and no outstretched hand, applies with uncomfortable precision beyond Tehran.

What the essay’s theoretical scaffolding shows is that the image describes the political psychology of the attackers as much as the condition of the attacked. Put simply, leaders who need the emergency to govern have internalized the same structural logic. Once their manufactured threat validates concentrated authority, concentrated authority produces the friction and resistance that justify further emergency measures, and the cycle self-confirms.

Foreclosed by this cycle is the democratic capacity for origination, for political beginnings not already scripted by the emergency’s own terms. Strategic rationality (and the resistance it produces) collapses as survival logic renders every constraint on force a concession to the enemy. The social body becomes colonized by mobilization logic until the declared war cannot be distinguished from the political order it claims to defend.

As I’ve repeatedly suggested, that same political psychology is not confined to geopolitics. The tech executives who build the platforms that socialize danger, and who then leverage the anxieties those platforms amplify to justify their own emergency authority over workforces, public institutions, and the terms of political discourse itself, practice the same logic. Or think of the AI-company leaders who issue civilization-scale warnings about their technologies while, at the same time, they accelerate their efforts to build (and fund) their own companies.

The pattern is recognizable wherever leaders make crisis the foundation of their authority; that is, where instability is cultivated rather than resolved, where opposition is framed as existential threat, and where every constraint on power presents itself as an assault from within. Silicon Valley’s most prominent practitioners have absorbed this lesson as thoroughly as any garrison-state administrator, and in Musk’s case carried it directly into governmental power. Once the organizational emergency hardens into identity, the identity requires the emergency to persist.

Democracies that have spent a generation normalizing emergency as a permanent condition, and business organizations whose leaders have made crisis the foundation of their authority, finally face the same crucial question. The executives who have built that authority as measured in market capitalization, the command of government agencies, or the reach of platforms that amplify emergency at algorithmic scale increasingly preside over organizations that have been trained to perform vigilance rather than exercise judgment and are now structurally dependent on the threat that was supposed to justify their mobilization. At what point, we must ask, does the declared war stop describing circumstances and begin producing them?

References

Giorgio Agamben (2005) State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, University of Chicago Press.

Mehdi Akhavan-Sales (1956) “Zem estān” [Winter], in Zem estān, Morvarid (Quoted and translated in de Bellaigue, 2026).

Hannah Arendt (1951/2025) The Origins of Totalitarianism, expanded ed., Library of America.

---------- (1958/2018) The Human Condition, 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press.

Raymond Aron (1954/1955) The Century of Total War, trans. E.W. Dickes and O.S. Griffiths, Beacon Press.

---------- (1966/2003) Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, trans. Paul Thompson, Routledge.

---------- (1983) Mémoires : 50 ans de reflexion politique, Juillard.

Andrew J. Bacevich (2016) America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, Random House.

Uri Ben-Eliezer (1998) The Making of Israeli Militarism, Indiana University Press.

David Cole and Jules Lobel (2007) Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror, New Press.

Christopher de Bellaigue (2026, May 28) “Iran’s New Winter,” New York Review of Books;

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/irans-new-winter-christopher-de-bellaigue/

Charles Duhigg (2018, December 13) “Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell,” Wired;https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/

Katherine Yon Ebright (2023, March 23) “Curb the Presdient’s War Powers to Prevent Future Iraqs,” Brennan Center for Justice; https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/curb-presidents-war-powers-prevent-future-iraqs

Milton J. Esman (2007) “Toward the American Garrison State,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 19(3), 407-416; https://doi.org/10.1080/10402650701525003

Susan J. Fowler (2017, February 19) “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange year at Uber [Blog post]; https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber

Andy Greenberg (2018, August 22) “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History, Wired;https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

Andrew S. Grove (1996) Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company, Currency/Doubleday.

Karrin Hanshew (2012) Terror and Democracy in West Germany, Cambridge University Press.

Ben Horowitz (2011, April 14) “Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO,” Andreesen Horowitz; https://a16z.com/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/

Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman (2020, May 26) “Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive,” Wall Street Journal; https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499

Mike Isaac (2020) Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Norton.

Alex C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska (2025) The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, Crown.

Isabel Kershner (2023, August 10) “Israel’s Supreme Court Prepares to Rule on Its Own Fate,” The New York Times; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/world/middleeast/israel-judicial-overhaul-supreme-court.html

Harold D. Lasswell (1941) “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology, 46(4), 455-468; https://www.jstor.org/stable/2769918

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt (2018) How Democracies Die, Crown.

Stanley A. McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell (2015) Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, Portfolio/Penguin.

Yascha Mounk (2018) The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, Harvard University Press.

Peter Robison (2021) Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, Doubleday.

Zöe Schiffer (2024) Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, Portfolio.

Carl Schmitt (1932/2007) The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press.

Marion C. Schultz and James T. Schultz (1990) “Corporate Strategy in Crisis Management: Johnson & Johnson and Tylenol,” Essays in Economic and Business History, 7; https://commons.erau.edu/publication/58/.

Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak (2013) Israel’s Security Networks: A Theoretical and Comparative Perspective, Cambridge University Press.

Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak, eds. (2010) Militarism and Israeli Society, Indiana University Press.

David Slocum (2026, April 22) “The Evolution of the Digital Garrison State: Harold Lasswell and the Socialization of Danger,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/the-evolution-of-the-digital-garrison

Ashlee Vance (2015) Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ecco Press.

Paul Virilio (1977/2006) Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti, Semiotext(e).

Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer (1983/2008) Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti, Semiotext(e).