The convergence of concentrated corporate power and a breakdown in democratic norms have facilitated a form of ‘predatory’ political rule, which culminates in the prioritisation of executive speed and force over established procedures and diplomacy. This century has been characterised by rapid technological breakthroughs that pose a significant challenge to democracies worldwide. The main actor is the United States which, without hesitation has welcomed the billion-dollar tech giants not merely as the biggest donors to their political campaigns but also into their systems of government, culminating in Elon Musk heading up the Department of Government Efficiency. When before big business and politics were separated by a revolving door, they now sit in an open plan office. Within the United States, civilians in ICE uniforms are hunting down immigrants while locking up adults and minors in detention camps, which raises, to say the least, significant questions regarding its adherence to international legal norms. Internationally, over the last year, Donald Trump has conducted at least seven military operations in other nations, undermining both international law and the baseline principle of sovereign independence, while blatantly and strategically undermining their regimes to extract natural resources and benefit American petrodollar. At the same time, the tech billionaires – Elon, Mark, Sundar, Sam, Jeff and Demis – have been acting as parasites, leeching off the government and the people (their major consumers sets) while harming both. The path laid out by the US ideology, consisting of predatory politics and its pro-competitive approach to the market is no longer fit for most global states. Despite Xi Jinping’s words of warning, ‘the law of the jungle’ is already here – one in which the strongest survive, and hesitancy to act is already a failure.
The rise of predators
The emergence of predators-as-political leaders has become, in the words of Slavoj Zižek, ‘the latest expressions of the crisis of liberal democracy’. The term caught my eye because over the last four years, I’ve been on guard for ‘predatory behaviour’ in the context of competition law – a suite of aggressive corporate practices used to win market share and eliminate rivals. Corporate predators typically manifest their dominance by entering cartels, engaging in exclusive dealing arrangements or price-fixing. A notable distinction between political and market predators is, of course, the difference between their ‘in-principle’ mandates: while corporations are concerned with maximising profits for their shareholders and improving the quality of their offering, governments are concerned with advancing public benefits and preserving the sovereignty of their state. Sometimes the businessman and the government official become one, and, lo and behold, the tactics used in managing a corporation become applied to world politics. Whatever vision these predator-leaders claim to pursue, their approach to solving ‘real problems’ has led to global instability and chaos, destroying the conditions necessary for the thriving of neoliberal market economy they have enthusiastically pursued while causing wars, skyrocketing numbers of deaths, and human and ecological suffering.
Technological advancements in military infrastructure have created optimal conditions for the rise of predatory politics. Firstly, the developments have meant that we now live in a world where offense is cheaper than defence. It is unsurprising that the number of wars has doubled in the last five years compared to the previous decade. The asymmetric warfare that has recently emerged between older generation military assets and missiles, and new ones means that a navy aircraft carrier worth $13 billion can be sunk by a missile worth just $15 million. Ukrainian interceptor drones ranging from €1,000 to €4,000 in February 2026 took down over 70 per cent of all Shahed-type drones, worth €25,000 and €40,000 each. With the introduction of AI, warfare has evolved to make retaliation or defence nearly impossible, as a single command can trigger a high-precision multi-target attack. A tragic example of that is the recent murder of Amal Khalil, a Lebanese correspondent covering the Israel’s invasion in Lebanon for Al-Akhbar, whose targeting by drone strike highlights the new lineaments of contemporary warfare.
Giuliano da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator (2025) offers a semi-fictional, insider perspective on these predator-leaders and draws historical parallels to explain their re-emergence. Da Empoli revisits histories from the times of Machiavelli and Aztecs, stating that “the hour of the predator is essentially just a return to normality. The anomaly was the brief period during which we believed that we could curb the bloody quest for power with a system of rules.” By analogising politics with sport, he describes how for predators two things matter most: speed and force. Their substantive rationale goes: “When the system, with all its procedures and hierarchies, no longer produces the desired result, there remains the possibility of direct intervention: breaking the official rules to re-establish substantive justice.” Kremlin insiders call it “going into manual override”. Throughout history, political predators pushed the wheels of history forward. Whereas before they at least attempted to convince the public of the legitimacy of their actions, now, they are acting almost singlehandedly and without any seeming accountability to the public that they should serve.
The politics of manual override are inherently opposed to the rule of law and diplomacy, which are the foundations of a stable global economy. Predators despise procedural constraints and undermine them by arguing that ‘there is no alternative’ – a slogan that echoes Thatcher-era policies that advocated for a globalised market economy and preached that ‘deregulation’s good, if not God‘. Indeed, predator-leaders suffer from a saviour complex, as evidenced by Trump’s most recent post of an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. This ‘no-alternative’ rhetoric easily wins against arguments for measured diplomacy, which is particularly hard to resist in the offense-forward military context. In addition, oft-critiqued ‘toothlessness’ of international institutions and current geopolitical remodelling of world economies and powers, contributed to the rise of rule-by-predators and threatened the state of internationalism (however imperfect) that has been achieved so far. On the other hand, this period may also give rise to new alliances, for example, the EU-Mercosur or the Australia-EU trade deals, which emerged as an antipode to the Washington’s assault on multilateral trade norms.
Predators reject compromise and undermine diplomatic ties, often claiming baseless victories. This is evident in Putin’s ‘three-day special operation in Ukraine’, which has lasted three years, and Trump’s tick tacking in his statements about the US-Israeli joint war in Iran. The unilateral prioritisation of national interest over collective security appears increasingly inadequate in an era defined by global systemic risk. But with markets and nations now suffering from predatory politics, international relations based on substantive cooperation are the only viable path forward. That is why, in the words of Zizek, ‘the idea of the European Union is worth fighting for, in spite of the misery of its actual existence: in today’s global capitalist world, it offers the only model of a transnational organization with the authority to limit national sovereignty and the task to guarantee a minimum of ecological and social welfare standards’.
In the face of predatory politics, the European Union has emerged as the primary advocate for regulated capitalism and democratic guardrails, moving away from the archaic Cold War-era views on alliance. Its decision to proactively regulate technology companies through the Digital Markets Act, costing these companies around $97.6 billion in revenue annually, signals a fundamental bifurcation in values away from its transatlantic NATO ally. Because it is impossible to remain ambivalent in the face of ‘might is right’ policy, this phenomenon will push states into camps, even if a single anti-American one. Despite its preeminent military capacities, the U.S. is in relative decline. It remains to be seen to what extent the international rules-based order and diplomacy of the not-so-distant past can withstand and accommodate the post-predator era. An even bigger question is what that new era will look like.
The rise of the parasites and the Brandesian approach
The correlation between domestic competition levels and the concentration of political power is well-documented. At the start of the twentieth century in the United States, the New Brandeis School, consisting of antitrust legal scholars and policymakers, formed the view that excessive economic concentrations have a negative effect on democracy, frequently leading to authoritarianism. The appointment of Lina Khan as the Chair of the US Federal Trade Commission between 2021 and 2025 has signalled a resurgence of the Brandeis perspective. Even in the United States, the degradation in the quality of digital products – a phenomenon that Cory Doctorow termed ‘enshittification’ – forced the regulator to target dominant digital platforms, like Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. As stated earlier, probably the biggest dilemma for any capitalist entity is how to maximise the profits while maintaining (or improving) the quality of their offering. The gradual but systematic degradation of the once-good-to-consumers digital services and products reveals the paradox in the Chicago School’s consumer welfare principle (focused on the price that consumers pay). Tech giants can achieve the first limb of the capitalist mandate (profits) without worrying about the second (quality). This is because their products are often free to consumer yet still capable of making millions through advertising and premium fees. On the competitive price analysis alone, the consumer may not be harmed, but the overall enshittification is obvious.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Neo-Brandesians set antitrust action on a new course. The movement took its inspiration from the work of Justice Louis Brandeis, who served as the Supreme Court judge between 1916 and 1939 and reinvigorated the traditions of democratic distribution of power and opportunity in the political economy. His views could be summarised as follows: ‘We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both‘. The Americans brought a Brandesian understanding of the market with them when they arrived in Germany after World War II, setting out, in the first instance, to pull apart German plants and factories. Although the longer term Morgenthau Plan was abandoned, Germany’s infrastructure and know-how (to the value of $10 billion) was taken away not only with a view to obtaining reparations but also in the belief that a weakened German economy would stifle any possible resurgence of an authoritarian regime. Although a lot has changed since the 1940s, the connection between excessive economic and political powers has remained a threat to modern democracies.
Big Tech has challenged competition authorities to develop new frameworks for market analysis. The EU’s approach represents a rejection of the Chicago School’s unregulated free market stance. The ‘gatekeeper effects’ were the primary concern behind the Digital Markets Act, an ex-ante regime designed to proactively regulate pre-selected dominant firms like Google, Android, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft. Before the DMA, the largest tech companies used massive data harvesting to entrench their market dominance, extracting value from both consumers and suppliers, resulting in monopolistic and monopsonistic distortions. A well-covered example is the case of Amazon’s predatory pricing vis-a-vis a start-up manufacturer of nappies (Quidsi or Diapers.com). After the tech giant slashed the prices for its nappies by 30 per cent and lost over $100 million in three months, it was able to force Quidsi to accept its takeover in November 2010 – a textbook example of predatory pricing and killer acquisitions where a large company forces a smaller entrant to foreclose, thus suppressing competition in the relevant market. The Brussels Effect saw the DMA’s legacy spread worldwide, with the majority of jurisdictions adopting or actively considering a similar regime in recent years.
Added regulatory scrutiny is a positive development for both market competition and democratic health. As Clinton Fernandes has argued, the effects of the European Union’s regulatory policies are precisely what unsettles Trump. Since the EU’s refusal to support him and Israel in the Iran War, Trump has been putting NATO under question, calling US relations with Europe a ‘one way street’ and the organisation of NATO a ‘paper tiger’. Along with Trump, American far-right figures such as Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel have increasingly backed an anti-EU agenda, as illustrated by JD Vance’s appearance in Viktor Orbán’s election campaign, where he accused the EU of ‘disgraceful meddling’ in Hungary’s election. Undoubtedly a serious risk for Europe, the weakening of NATO offers an opportunity to see new geopolitical configurations away from the East-West divide. A great example of such new partnership is the Australia-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which, after a decade of negotiations has finally been signed, with disagreements about the naming protocols for feta and prosecco fading in comparison with the pressing need to secure reliable markets and alleviate reliance on the United States and China. Even more notable for the EU was the signing of the Mercosur trade deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, an agreement that took 25 years to negotiate. Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs undoubtedly pushed these deals to completion. The contrast between European and American priorities sends a clear signal that the long-standing US-led economic order is shifting. Australia, meanwhile, remains tied to a A$368 billion-plus AUKUS defence partnership with the United States and must consider whether greater political diversification and regional alignment would better serve its interests amid growing uncertainty in the Asia-Pacific, including around Taiwan.
Concluding remarks
In politics, formal procedures matter, yet predators view them as needless roadblocks. Halfway through his book, da Empoli draws a distinction between the rule by predators and rule by lawyers. He points out that, of all the Democrat presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the United States since 1980, Tim Walz – Kamala Harris’s running mate – was the first not to have a law degree. Meanwhile, Trump has replaced lawyers with proactive businessmen and has shown how politics can be done by anyone willing and able to act without reservation. As with all predators, he promised to solve people’s problems (crime, immigration, cost of living) while showing a complete disregard for rules, diplomacy and procedure. However, the form is as important, if not more important than substance in world politics. It is the reason why the Israeli Defence Force has been able to continue the genocide in Palestine, bombed children in a girl’s school in Minab, Iran and RSF has created a man-made famine in Sudan in what has been described as ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’. The resolution of these conflicts could look differently. How nations comport themselves, what protocols are brought to bear, is imperative when human lives are at stake. A century ago, we did not have the international mechanisms and rights bestowed under such by which to appeal for justice; today predators trample hard-won international treaties and alignments. Unbridled markets, like unrestrained political power, lead to chaos. We can only hope that the current era of short-termism will eventually end, at which point we must champion a deeper form of global co-operation through measured diplomacy while properly addressing the pitfalls of the previous rules-based order that led to this chaos.