Erik Prince, Hillsdale class of ’92, founder of Blackwater Worldwide, considers himself an entrepreneur, but also a patriot. In his memoir, “Civilian Warriors,” he writes of his military contractor business’s involvement with the CIA and State Department in the post-9/11 world that “Blackwater’s contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom wasn’t ever conceived of as a business decision.”
Yet his recent activities suggest that he’s changed his mind. He seems neither to be motivated by a patriotism that would tie his material resources to the furtherance of the United States’ interests, nor by a patriotism that would cause him to love his country for its beauty, its people, and its ideals, and wish to live as an American.
Under Prince, Blackwater did what it was hired to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, however, Blackwater contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad when they responded to what they perceived as an active threat in a crowded square. The trial of four contractors involved in the shooting concluded this past October with one convicted of murder and three others of voluntary manslaughter.
Public scrutiny in the aftermath of the 2007 debacle was intense. The government scaled back its contracts with Blackwater; Prince stepped down as CEO while remaining board chair; and the company attempted a rebrand. After a number of other names, including Xe Services, it is now called Academi.
In 2010, Prince sold the company and moved to the United Arab Emirates. He co-founded a security firm with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and promised never to work for the American government again. This following the market after getting burned for what was supposedly an act of service is troubling.
Ties severed with America, Prince has tied himself to the Chinese government. As chairman of the Africa-centric security and logistics Frontier Services Group, in which Prince invested with the Chinese state-owned Citic group, Prince is making money opening up markets in dangerous parts of Africa. As he described his Chinese move to WSJ, “this is a very rational decision — made, I guess, emotionless.”
Prince felt burned by America and so, perhaps truly emotionless, he has turned to China, seemingly because the bottom line matters more than the nation you say you love. As he told the Wall Street Journal early this year, “I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next.”
He is, alongside China, engaging in a kind of exploitative colonialism in Africa — taking advantage of weak states to set up mines, big transportation, and oil refineries — reminiscent of that which Spain employed in South America. Who in these situations had the monopoly on violence? Though Prince told the WSJ that importing foreign security rather than hiring local gunmen will be the exception, throwing essentially foreign warlords — even if the men pulling triggers are local — into the African natural resources economy will likely increase the number of blood diamonds in the world, degrade the life of the average African, and pad the pockets of whichever government or strongman wants a bribe.
“This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours — we’re here to build a great business and make some money doing it,” Prince said in a WSJ interview about his work with China, which he believes, “has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.”
Clearly this isn’t Chinese patriotism, but it also makes old claims to American patriotism ring hollow. Sure, his desire to make a buck are pretty American, and isn’t inherently wrong in itself — it does in fact enable him to engage in massive acts of financial and resource charity — but it does seem to prevent Prince from practicing the kind of introspection one would hope of a Hillsdale graduate. As an entrepreneur, he’s very good at pointing out American government inefficiency, but when Prince turns his eyes to himself and what he’s doing, I hope he’ll realize efficiency is not everything.
