--- title: "Is Elon Musk Running America's Foreign Policy Now?" description: "Musk has negotiated satellite deals, brokered back-channel talks and struck his own arrangements with foreign leaders — a private diplomacy that blurs the line between corporate interest and statecraft." url: https://fronts.co/videos/is-elon-musk-running-americas-foreign-policy-now.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/is-elon-musk-running-americas-foreign-policy-now/ datePublished: 2026-10-22T20:30:21.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-22T20:30:21.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/is-elon-musk-running-americas-foreign-policy-now-c2023b4a.png" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4987 --- In theory, the United States has a clear chain of commands when it comes to war. The buck stops with the commander in chief whose orders get passed out of the Secretary of Defense, and then on through the generals. The fact that the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor are both Marco Rubio should simplify things even further, right? Well, in practice, that no longer seems to be the case. For the past week, Cuba's been dealing with a new speed limit on its star-shield connection. Drones, moving faster than 160 kilometers per hour, suddenly lose their connection. That's crippled some of Ukraine's defenses against Russian attacks, letting Moscow bombard the country almost at will. What we did not know last week is that, at least according to the Wall Street Journal, the order to do that might not have come from anyone in the chain of command at all, but instead from Elon Musk himself. Musk is yet to respond to these allegations, though last week he punted the blame back to the White House. Whatever the truth turns out to be, Musk is just the most visible symptom of something much bigger here. When private companies, led by some of the world's richest people, hold the keys to a military's most critical systems, who's really in charge? Secretary Musk. So, let me check in on this situation last week. There was one overarching question that had been left unanswered. Who exactly had ordered the slowdown of Ukraine's Starlink service? The operating assumption at the time was that it had come from Washington, and, for good reason, the affected system, Star Shield, is a military-grade version of Starlink that operates under contract with the Pentagon and was ostensibly set up to operate under Washington's oversight. Plus, when combined with the apparent interruption of US intelligence sharing about incoming Russian missile attacks, it seemed obvious that whoever ordered the throttling of Star Shield had a name that either arrived with Crump or Smexeth. That assumption got blown wide open late Tuesday when the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that suggested that the man responsible for the slowdown was, in fact, Elon himself. According to the journal, which spoke to multiple US officials and people familiar with the decision, Musk personally ordered SpaceX to implement the speed restrictions on Ukraine that have crippled Kiev's ability to defend itself. This was followed up on Tuesday by a separate report from CBS News, which similarly found that Musk had been the one calling the shots. Now, Musk himself is yet to address the accusation that he's responsible, and we need to be very clear that at the time of recording, these are only allegations. We don't have any sources of our own inside SpaceX, and lacking a direct connection to Elon's brain, perhaps through that "neuraling" thing, we can as such only speculate based on reporting elsewhere. For his part, Musk has previously insisted that decisions concerning Star Shield's operation are ultimately made by the US military and the president. And regardless of what you make of the journal's findings, there's still plenty of reason to think Musk didn't simply go rogue and pull the plug on Ukraine without letting anyone know. Both reports show that Musk spoke with senior White House staffers, as well as potentially Trump himself, around the time that the decision was made, though they differ on the timing. What has made this whole story harder to understand is the administration changing its story almost daily. Trump himself initially insisted that neither he nor Musk were responsible, which led to headlines like "the two agree it must have been the dog that ate Ukraine's Star Shield." The president later followed this up on Monday by saying that he didn't know who ordered the slowdown, but wanted to find out. To Fed Secretary Pete Hager for his part followed that up on Tuesday by denying that the Pentagon had issued any directives, which would ostensibly mean that it either came from the White House or from Musk. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that there had been no foreknowledge of the decision, which is his way of saying, "I am as in the dark on this as you guys." And while Rubio might genuinely have been kept in the dark, given that he's long represented the more hawkish pro-Ukraine wing of the GOP, that doesn't necessarily tell us much about what the rest of Washington knew. The Trump administration's foreign policy has long been a haphazard collection of whatever the president is feeling on any given day, combined with major decisions being made by individuals with outsized roles over certain policy areas, from Venezuela's vice Roy Rubio to Steve Wickoff, who most recently praised Vladimir Putin, as a, quote, "humanitarian." And no, he was not being ironic. Such deep thought is probably quite beyond him. Zelensky, meanwhile, has been trying to get both sets of restrictions lifted on his country with mixed results so far. On Tuesday after a conversation with Rubio, the Ukrainian president confirmed that the US was once again providing early warnings of incoming Russian missile attacks. Unfortunately, the situation with Starship has proven much more difficult to resolve. As recently as Wednesday mornings, Zelensky confirmed that the speed restrictions remained in place despite repeated appeals to SpaceX and the Pentagon. Given that we're going on a full week of this restriction, we're getting a pretty clear idea of just how damaging this has been, and it's not pretty. Russia has continued launching enormous waves of attacks against Ukraine, especially targeting its energy infrastructure, despite Trump's so-called "energy ceasefire." On Monday, Russian strikes knocked out power to around 550, 000 homes across 15 Ukrainian regions, while additional attacks on Wednesday killed at least four civilians and damaged more power facilities. And we want to be clear in this video about what it really means when news organizations, like ours, use shorthand-like "America, throttle, star shield." Ukraine's world-class interceptor drones cannot take down Russia's latest jet- powered variants if they cannot exceed speeds of 160 kilometers per map. And without early warning intelligence, a ballistic missile launcher's key of cannot-sound aerates irons in time, meaning people are often still outside or in their homes when impacts occur. As such, scores of Ukrainian civilians have been killed by Russia across the last few days. Perhaps most reprehensible, this included a one-year-old baby killed in a park in broad daylight. But there have been countless others too. Children who will now never grow up, parents who will have to bury their kids, ordinary people slaughtered along their way to work, all thanks to a decision taken in Washington that apparently no one wants to own up to. This is also having an impact on the military side of things, while Kiev's long-range strike drones that so spectacularly hit data centers and refineries are unaffected as starling services for Ukraine were never switched on over Russia, the mid-strike campaign that has been devastating Russian logistics in occupied Ukrainian territory and along the front has also been hobbled. In fact, if you could have presented Vladimir Putin with a magic button that would cripple Ukraine's forces and leave Kiev unable to defend its cities, it would have looked exactly like this star shield shut off. All of this has not gone over well with Congress and for once the outrage appears to be bipartisan. Late last week nine senators, four Republicans and five Democrats, demanded an investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General into what happened and who had ordered this and where the SpaceX acted within its contractual authority. Since then, the pressure has only grown. Four Democratic senators sent a separate letter directly to SpaceX, demanding answers, while Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has called for mask and other officials to be hauled in before Congress to testify under oath. Whether or not that actually happens remains to be seen. But the whole situation has raised a pretty down alarming question about who's really calling the shots over the foreign policy of the world's superpower. Terms and Conditions For all the attention that Elon Musk gets, much of which he happily invites on himself, he's just one part of much bigger dynamic reshaping how modern warfare is fought. Private companies have played an enormous role in warfare for centuries and the debate over just much influence they have had over state affairs and war policy is hardly a new one. But unlike in years gone by when said companies merely manufactured the hardware and an assortment of things that go boom, they started to take on an increasing role in providing the technology that militaries depend on to actually conduct their operations, often while retaining considerable control over how that technology is used. The implications of the shift are difficult to overstate. When a country purchased a fighter jet from Lockheed Martin, for example, it wasn't expected to be phoning the CEO for permission every time it wanted to fly a sortie. And while conventional military hardware still requires ongoing contracts for everything from spare parts to maintenance and software updates, there is a huge difference between that and using systems that seemingly have a kill switch sitting in Elon Musk's office. This is a shift that's caught some attention, but evidently not enough. In a study published last December, researchers at the Carnegie Endowment wrote that the traditional relationship between militaries and their suppliers had essentially been turned on its head. By the time 2026 rolled around, tech companies were approaching militaries with their own ideas about how wars should be fought, offering everything from intelligence analysis to AI-powered targeting systems. And as these technologies become embedded in military operations, their developers are solidifying their influence over the systems that governments rely on to make decisions about war. Ukraine has become something of a testing ground for this new approach, particularly because of how much it has been forced to innovate over the past four years. When Russia invaded back in February 2022, Ukraine didn't have the luxury of sitting around and saying, "This idea seems promising, but let's organize a committee to report to another committee about whether we can start discussing this. They just had to get rolling… fast." The results have been impressive, but they've left the country vulnerable to single points of failure where foreign tech is concerned. This isn't the first time that Musk has found himself playing wannabe "grand marshal" over battlefields either. Shortly after the initial invasion, he refused a Ukrainian request to activate Starlink coverage near Crimea, essentially preventing a planned naval drone attack against Russia's Black Sea Fleet. Musk later defended the decision by arguing that he didn't want SpaceX becoming complicit in a major escalation of the war. More recently, he found himself on the other side of the equation working with Kyiv back in February to disable Starlink terminals being used by Russian forces, which had a significant impact on Moscow's ability to communicate across the battlefield. The point here isn't that he's been a consistent ally or a consistent foe of Ukraine, he has been neither or perhaps both. Instead, the point is that this guy can, depending on how he feels on a given day, have massive impacts on how wars are being fought. SpaceX is not the only company to potentially hold this power, though. One of the biggest players is Palantir, the US tech company led by Alex Cobb, which has become deeply involved in Ukraine's intelligence gathering and targeting operations. Earlier this year, Kyiv deepened its partnership with the company to develop something called Brave One Data Room, a system that allows Ukrainian developers to train AI systems using real-world battlefield data, particularly to help detect and intercept Russian drones. Much of this has been genuinely to Ukraine's benefit, as it's allowed them to adopt technologies that would otherwise take in years to develop natively. But it does raise some uncomfortable questions about just how embedded companies that do not answer to Kyiv's government are becoming in the systems it depends on to fight the war. To be clear, there's no evidence that Palantir or any of the other companies involved are considering following SpaceX's lead, with or without nudges from Washington, or even that Palantir has the contractual authority to impose similar restrictions. But that's the broader point. As companies become more involved in the actual operation of military systems, the potential consequences of a dispute with one of them become way more serious. And even if a government decides that this sort of dependence is simply too dangerous to tolerate, getting out of that relationship can be a hell of a lot harder than getting into it was. Going It Alone Now, surprisingly, the Star Shield throttling is going over about us all in Europe as it is in Ukraine, with governments increasingly questioning just how much of their national security they can afford to leave up to American companies. That's a trend that's been playing out for years, and we've previously covered Europe's shift away from being largely dependent on Uncle Sam, even if the continent remains way short of its goals in most respects. The issue is that unlike more generic military hardware, the ultra cutting edge stuff is damn near impossible to find alternatives for. Starling and Star Shield are so important for a reason. The alternatives, them, are seriously lacking to the extent that they exist at all. Take for instance, Europe's closest competitor to Starling. It's called OneWeb, which is already providing satellite communications to Ukraine. On paper, that sounds like an easy enough switch. You disconnect from Elon Network, you connect to OneWeb, and you're back in business shooting down incoming drones from Russia. Right? Well, not so fast. The context here, OneWeb operates roughly 600 satellites compared to Starling's approximately 10,000. Its terminals are also larger, heavier, and more power-hungry, all of which run counter to what Ukraine's drone program is trying to build. When combined with the fact that the company that owns OneWeb announced last year that its existing satellite capacity in Ukraine was already sold out, you're pretty much dead in the water. And while there are alternatives in progress, including a very creatively named GovSATCOM project and a new satellite network called IrisSquared, the actual capabilities of the former are best left unmentioned, while the latter has potential but is unlikely to come online until the end of the decade. Not exactly helpful to the Ukrainians trying to shoot down Russian drones today. Even if Europe does get attacked together a bit more, though, it doesn't really address the underlying issue. The role that private companies will play in all of this. Much of this tech will still be developed and operated in the private sector, which raises the possibility that the continent could simply replace its dependence on US billionaires with a dependence on future European ones. OneWeb, after all, belongs to UtalSAT, which is a private sector company. And there's an important distinction here. European governments would have considerably more legal and political leverage over companies operating within their own jurisdiction, particularly if their contracts were designed from the outset to prevent this sort of situation. That Ukraine is currently facing. This is true of the US as well. The Defense Production Act allows the president to force private companies to accept and prioritize government contracts when he decides it is needed, with jail time as a possibility for CEOs or other executives who willfully ignore it. This isn't one of those pie-in-the-sky laws that technically exist but have never been implemented either. It was used on a huge scale during the Korean War and then more recently during the Covid lockdowns. So the chance of Elon being able to cut off the US military over a dispute with whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office is slim to none. That's a pretty massive point of leverage that Ukraine would doubtlessly love to have right now, but Kyiv has no central authority over American companies. So even though it might be a long uphill battle, there really isn't much alternative for Europe but to begin to develop its own tech infrastructure and move away from that of US companies. And that effort is going to take way more than simply buying made in Europe alternatives. If the continent is serious about reducing its military and by extension technological dependence on Washington, it's going to have to ensure that the governments paying for these systems are the ones who actually control how they are used. Just look at Poland, which spends roughly $50 million annually so that Ukraine can stay connected to Starlink. We're not sure what the refund policy is with Starlink, but we'd encourage Poland's foreign minister to have a quick look at the Ts and Cs. And this is the key takeaway from all of this, not just for Europe, but for all of America's allies across the world. At a moment, considered critical for European security, the United States has not just refused to help its putative allies. It has undertaken actions that directly benefit the nation threatening Europe's security. And it has done so either at the whims of a president who America's famous system of checks and balances refuses to reign in, or else at the whims of an unstable billionaire who thinks he's above the law. Allegedly. This, despite Europe paying its company, tens of millions of dollars a year for the service. Think for a second about what that means. Right now, there will be military planners in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Manila, Jerusalem, Canberra, and beyond who are watching this. Who aren't thinking, hmm, seems like a Europe problem, but will instead be thinking, "Oh, that could be us." All of the advanced democracies who helped uphold and sustain the American alliance system, likely the most powerful system of alliances in human history, who spent billions of dollars annually on American kid, will all now be scrambling to find alternatives. Because if the US can throttle Ukraine for no damn reason, then who is to say a different president or a different billionaire couldn't do the same in a war with China or North Korea, or at a moment of existential risk for any of these countries? This should be the takeaway of today's video. Over the last week, the United States and SpaceX have both ensured that no government will ever be able to trust them again. And while there are currently few alternatives to Starlink, the race will now be on to develop as many as possible. It's going to take time, it's going to be difficult, and it will be a hell or expensive, but other nations and organizations will get there. And when Elon Musk comes down from some future ketamine high or something 10 years from now to a United States that can no longer easily sell its technology and weapons abroad, the United States thus diminished in power and influence, we all know that this is the moment that made that future inevitable. Thank you for watching.