We no longer live in a world where our biggest fear would be the government controlling high level corporations and their operators.
We now live in a world controlled by Sociopathic Oligarchs who can afford to create government level technology. Right now it’s mostly tourism rockets and satellites, but now we see Skum weaponizing that technology, and/or using it as a bargaining chip. He has cut off Starlink in a war zone to benefit the county who defers to him, but is openly hostile to the US, and now he’s threatening to cut off our access to the space station. He is using tech that WE PAY FOR with government contracts and grants, to pursue his own diplomacy, for his own benefit, and against our interests.
Eventually, someone will start building and stockpiling actual weapons, perhaps even atomics. Then we will be asking why someone didn’t step in and stop them before they became a bonafide threat.
We paid for Skum’s technology, and he gets to control it as a courtesy. Just the threat of using it against us should be enough reason to declare him a national security threat, confiscate his American-taxpayer financed businesses, and imprison him.
First of all, America is not “the most violent empire on the planet.” America has the capability of being the most violent nation, but at the moment, our potential for violence is being eclipsed by other nations who are actively employing the same levels of violence that we are capable of. Nothing we are currently doing comes close to the violence that Russia and Israel are employing.
And yes, America is the only nation to have deployed nuclear weapons against human targets, but that was 80 years ago, and ended the worst war in human history. After demonstrating its power, just the presence of nuclear weapons in a nation’s arsenal has been enough to keep the most powerful, well-armed, violent nations (including America) from going too far.