From Sherman Kent to Palantir: New Manuals for a Disintegrating World Order

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an an X post become the new handbook for a dying world order? Palantir Technologies recently transformed the 22 key arguments from the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025) by the company’s CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska into a concise series of posts on X. This post rejected Silicon Valley’s “app tyranny”, advocated for engineering talent to be directed towards national defense and strategic innovation, and positioned “hard power” as indispensable for the West’s survival. Criticism of the post was not long in coming. From established authors to social media influencers, many people contributed to the debate, writing articles on the subject. Headlines screamed “techno-fascism”. Academics warned against authoritarian tech elites. Social media figures described this vision as a dangerous fusion of artificial intelligence and conservatism.

However, the debates largely failed to move beyond emotional reactions to the bold voices raised by Palantir founder Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and others against conventional states. As a young academic who has been working on techno-politics and US security mechanisms for years, I strive to examine the issue from a rational perspective. I discuss these studies in greater detail in my book “Security Mechanisms and Techno-Politics in the United States”, to be published by Routledge in August 2026. What truly concerns me, however, is how quickly we resort to slogans rather than historical context. Before labelling the book text that became Palantir’s X post as ‘techno-fascism’, we must ask: Does this book represent a radical break, or does it serve as a new kind of field guide written during a period when the international order is collapsing, much like Sherman Kent’s “Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy” (1949), which was penned at the very moment a new world order was emerging?

The birth of the new order: 1945 and the construction of the American century

Let us return to 1945. The Anglo-Saxon allies had collaborated with the Soviet Union, led by Stalin, to defeat the Hitler regime. This victory gave rise to a rules-based order that established the United Nations, NATO, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the bipolar competition between the democratic West and the communist East. The establishment of Israel in 1948 cemented the US-Israel strategic partnership. The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed the end of British hegemony. The US became the undisputed leader of the Western bloc.

Technology and intelligence developed in tandem with this new order. Stanford University, founded in 1891, laid the foundations for what would eventually become Silicon Valley. The Stanford Industrial Park, Hewlett-Packard’s first garage venture, the relocation to the Valley of William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, and Robert Noyce’s breakthroughs in the field of semiconductors transformed this region into the centre of the microelectronics revolution. All these developments took place in the late 1940s and 1950s. That is, precisely during the period when the CIA (1947), the West’s primary intelligence agency during the Cold War, was established, and the Soviet KGB was formalized in 1954.

It was against this backdrop that Sherman Kent emerged. A member of one of Yale’s founding and rather ‘white’ families, Kent had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war. Following the organizational crises of the CIA’s early years (1947–1950), figures such as Kent, William Langer and Max Millikan were tasked with professionalizing American intelligence. Kent’s 1949 book was not merely an academic study of analytical methods. It was a practical handbook for American global policy. It guided policymakers on how intelligence should be gathered, analyzed, and utilized to establish and maintain US global hegemony. Kent became the founder of the analytical school that still shapes the US intelligence community today and launched the journal Studies in Intelligence. This journal is still in publication. His work embedded analytical thinking into the very fabric of the American century.

The moment of unravelling: The collapse of the liberal order and the new interregnum

Let us now fast-forward to 2026. The post-1945 liberal international order is not merely undergoing reform; it is effectively unravelling. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated at the Munich Security Conference in February: “The world order that has existed for decades no longer exists.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his speech at Davos, described this moment as “not a transition, but a rupture.” The Trump administration’s latest National Security Strategy made this an explicit doctrine. According to the strategy document, the liberal order led by the US was coming to an end. This was undoubtedly not because the US was weak, but because it chose not to sustain it. The title of the 2026 Munich Security Conference Report, devoid of irony, was: Under Destruction.

The words of Antonio Gramsci, which have become a staple in the vocabulary of many of our politicians, have never been more relevant: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interim period, a multitude of pathological symptoms emerge.” At times when old structures dissolve faster than new ones emerge, new handbooks inevitably appear. These are not impartial academic studies. They are field guides for those who wish to shape what is to come.

The new handbook: Palantir and the search for a techno-political direction

Alongside Peter Thiel’s long-standing intellectual project and the government contracts secured by Palantir, Karp and Zamiska’s book The Technological Republic serves as such a guide. Kent wrote his book at the dawn of a rules-based order built upon American hard power and institutional alliances. Karp and Zamiska, however, are writing The Technological Republic at the twilight of that order. Just as Kent’s generation faced after 1945, they too diagnose the same problem: a fluid world requires purposeful techno-political guidance. However, the direction they propose is clearly conservative. Silicon Valley must repay the ‘moral debt’ it owes to the country that made its rise possible. Engineering talent must be shifted from consumption-focused, distracting fields to defense, intelligence and strategic artificial intelligence. ‘Hard power’ is not a dirty concept; it is the foundation of any viable republic. Pluralism without power is weakness.

This call emerges as an argument that the market-driven, borderless globalization of the past thirty years has eroded the national purpose, weakened sovereignty, and left Western societies defenseless against rivals who have never denied the reality that technology is not neutral. The software Palantir has developed for defense and intelligence agencies is presented not as an expansion of surveillance, but as a necessary fusion of private-sector innovation and public mission. Just as DARPA funding, once under the US Department of Defence, made the birth of Silicon Valley possible.

Palantir’s critics are right to be concerned about the risks of surveillance, the militarization of artificial intelligence, and the concentration of power in private actors. However, labelling the entire project as ‘techno-fascism’ prevents us from seeing the context in which this company and Karp’s book emerged. Kent’s handbook was never value-neutral. It served American hegemony. Karp’s book is similarly biased, politically conservative and technologically grounded in realism. Yet it stems from the same awareness. According to this awareness, power vacuums invite disorder.