The Prince of War

In the early aughts, the global war on terror—as the U.S. military refers to its forever wars hunting those it deems “terrorists” all over the world—created a number of new cultural mainstays in the United States: Osama bin Laden, waterboarding, Islamophobia, Jack Bauer. Within that pantheon, nestled somewhere between nü metal and Jeremy Renner, is the infamous Erik Prince—shadowy founder of the disgraced mercenary firm Blackwater. Like many aspects of the GWOT, we’re still stuck with him more than two decades later.

Even Prince’s boosters are forced to acknowledge that he has a checkered past. First making his millions in the early days of the Bush administration by contracting his soldiers of fortune to the CIA and department of defense, where they consistently faced allegations of war crimes and human rights violations, Prince became synonymous with the greed and plunder of American conquest during the post-9/11 imperialist project. Now, in the second Trump administration—as in the first, for that matter—he is once again in the news, pitching fresh schemes from Africa to Latin America. “He’s searching for business opportunities in a Trump environment, just like he did under Trump’s first term, and then he disappeared under Biden,” said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University who has written about defense contracting and the mercenary business and has advised the Pentagon and CIA. “Now he’s back to doing the same thing.”

Not long after Trump’s second inauguration, Prince went on the right-wing cable channel NewsNation, urging the White House and ICE to use “additional private sector” defense contractors to carry out their fascistic mass deportation plans. The United States, you see, lacked the capacity to carry out the millions of deportations promised by the administration. Lucky for them, Prince and his associates had come up with a $25 billion proposal, involving El Salvadoran prisons and his hired guns. As it stands now, only the El Salvadoran prisons got the White House’s business.

Prince didn’t stop there. In March, President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador—who declared the country was in a state of “internal armed conflict” last year, effectively imposing martial law—announced a “strategic alliance” with Prince to “strengthen our capabilities in the fight against narco-terrorism and to protect our waters from illegal fishing.” A month later, Prince was making audacious promises to another embattled regime, angling to secure mineral extraction sites for the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then, in late May, reports surfaced of Prince’s newest venture setting up a drone assassination program for Haiti aimed at hunting down criminal gangs.

Reporting this piece, I had a hunch that Prince’s name would come up in the Ukrainian military and intelligence circles I’ve encountered while reporting on the war there since 2016. Multiple sources told me that Prince was indeed circling Ukrainian defense contractors and eyeing the country’s valuable drone sector. He had previously seen the opportunity to exploit Ukraine’s desperation in 2020, offering the shoddy blueprint for a $10 billion private army. Several requests for comment were sent to Prince through his encrypted cell phone company (another one of his hustles), Unplugged, which have not yet led to an interview. A company representative assured The Baffler there would be a response.

For national security reporters like me and the many American veterans I’ve interviewed across the years, Prince is an almost celebrity avatar of the GWOT: a byproduct of the paranoia, desperation, and billions spent fighting phantoms during those years. But in the wider American consciousness, he embodies the war’s excesses, either as a ghoulish “Bond villain” or as an embodiment of the hubristic notion that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were lost because the United States did not go far enough. He has emerged as the condottieri behind Trump’s consigliere, Steve Bannon, for both reasons—he is emblematic of the tough, authoritarian, America-First approach touted by Bannon, and also, he makes “the libs” very mad.

Prince does, indeed, seem to fit the “Bond villain” billing. A former Navy SEAL and the son of a Michigan billionaire who spent a lifetime funding far-right evangelicals, he cuts the figure of a wealthy, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, globetrotting spook. He has allegedly back channelled for Trump with the Kremlin in the Seychelles and recruited ex-spies to infiltrate stateside liberal groups. Prince was an early backer of Trump in 2016 and thought to be a “shadow adviser” during his first presidency. But murmurs suggest his kin on the right are now beginning to weary of him too. “There’s some rumor he’s been talking around Gaza, but that’s being done by Orbis, and Orbis thinks he’s a clown is probably my guess,” McFate told me, referring to the American consultancy firm hired to take charge of the failed food deliveries to Palestinians, who are facing genocide and famine. “The White House doesn’t have time for him; I think he’s controversial even for them.”

Still, Trump’s inner circle is at least tolerant of Prince. In many respects, he straddles the line between Trump’s isolationist backers and those with more interventionist approaches: he pitches himself as a kind of third way for American imperialism, in which the United States gets to maintain its profound influence overseas without putting American boots on the ground—officially, anyway. That the right and the left largely accept that he is a kind of master mercenary reflects Prince’s most useful skill: his extraordinary gift for selling himself. Indeed, his critics and his admirers have, by and large, accepted the narrative spun by Prince himself.

In reality, his projects are routinely failures. What are considered Prince’s early successes—his contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan—quickly spoiled. Legal problems plagued Blackwater, including in 2007, when some of its privateers murdered seventeen civilians in what’s now known as the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad. The Obama administration quickly raised the legal and oversight heat on Prince and Blackwater, leading to its sale in 2010. (Trump later pardoned four former Blackwater employees implicated in that massacre.)

“He left Blackwater nearly bankrupt and full of lawsuits,” said McFate. “Every place he’s touched, he turns it into crap.” Still, Prince also left the company with his reputation largely intact. Jeremy Scahill’s meticulous 2008 takedown, Blackwater, immortalized Prince’s biggest failure. Yet the investigative triumph helped Prince bolster his credibility in certain quarters, when it should have shredded it. In hundreds of pages, Scahill tirelessly documents Prince’s private army and its vile transgressions as representative of the avarice inherent to the American military industrial complex. But it has also been weaponized to become a part of Prince’s mythmaking as a powerful puppeteer.

After Blackwater, Prince’s list of misfires is a long one: creating a Chinese mercenary outfit made up of ex-soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army, which he quickly resigned from. Repurposing Colombian servicemen to build a private military for the United Arab Emirates. Defying a global arms embargo to try and arm a warlord in Libya. Nearly selling Trump on privatizing the war in Afghanistan. Clamoring to invade Latin America. “Zero successful operations,” McFate said plainly, noting that Prince and his sister, former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are trust fund kids with a fleet of yachts on Lake Michigan, Beltway elites who’ve coasted on family money for decades. “He’s really not a mercenary; he’s a business developer guy who claims he’s a private military contractor genius.”

Not unlike the Silicon Valley swindlers who also came to prominence during his rise and now populate the MAGA-verse, Prince is well known for making grandiose, undeliverable promises. With a track record similar to “move fast and break things,” the former motto of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Prince presents decks for outrageous and expensive missions that governments and businesses somehow bite on—until reality sets in. “War is a racket, especially for men like Erik Prince,” said Baffler contributor Ed Ongweso Jr., a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international team of scholars monitoring and analyzing tech innovation and militarism. Ongweso sees Prince’s work in the same tradition as billionaire Peter Thiel’s surveillance behemoth, Palantir, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX—both Pentagon contracting darlings. “Deputizing mercenaries to deport migrants for detention in other countries, using mercenaries to traffic arms for failed clandestine operations, deploying mercenaries to kill civilians: Prince’s line of work is expensive, and he’s always been eager to milk the government for every penny he can get as recompense.”

Like the tech oligarchs who came up beside him, Prince has managed to stay on top by relentlessly pitching himself as a solutions-oriented innovator willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. He appears regularly in the press, hyping up projects that rarely come to fruition. According to McFate, these showy news items have led the broader cohort of private military contractors in the United States and abroad to despise Prince for maintaining such a public persona in a covert profession: “The mercenary world hates him more than the journalist world, because he’s seen as this ornament of incompetence.” Indeed, he has been a useful cudgel for democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of Prince. She recently cited him at the confirmation hearing for Stephen Feinberg, current deputy secretary of defense, pointing out how the two were in cahoots on devising private sector “alternatives” for Trump’s Afghan war policy in 2017.

Prince’s ambitions to shape American policy abroad are undoubtedly still intact. In a naked plea for business on one of last year’s episodes of his personal podcast, Off Leash With Erik Prince, he advised that the United States should, “put the imperial hat back on” and colonize Africa. Whether or not Prince can successfully translate one of his PowerPoints into contracts with a friendlier White House and Pentagon remains to be seen. One thing does seem clear: the new administration is primed to continue violating civil liberties, paying its friends with handsome government contracts, and forcing more foreign dignitaries to stay at the president’s family hotel chain, all in a bid to roll back the clock to some of the worst Bush years—perhaps the only era in which Prince truly thrived. In the meantime, he is sure to be searching for buyers wherever he can find them.