The Starlink-Ukraine Scandal, Phase 2

Billionaires should not be making decisions critical to national security. That’s straightforward. And the case of Elon Musk and his attempt to undermine Ukraine makes that clearer than ever. Recent events, that is in the past 24 hours, really don’t change that point. If anything, they reinforce it.

Hi, Paul Krugman.

Yesterday, I wrote that Starlink’s control must be taken away from Elon Musk.The occasion was that Musk abruptly and without warning downgraded the effectiveness of Starshield, which is a sort of high velocity, high frequency version of Starlink that has been playing an essential role in Ukraine’s defense.

Suddenly, the speeds of communication were capped, which is devastating for Ukraine. Exactly how that happened? The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk made the decision or gave the order. Musk said that, oh, that’s under the White House’s control. The White House said, no, it was just him.

In fact, none of the parties to all of this are credible. None of them are reliable narrators. And it doesn’t really matter. The point is that this is a gray zone situation. That should not exist, that it should be very clear that if national security is at stake, which it is — this is a war in which US technology is playing a critical role — that unambiguously, this should be under the control of publicly elected officials, the president and Congress, not some guy who happens to have a lot of money. But it is not.

We have private property, but we are a democracy. And critical decisions for the national interest should be made by democratically elected leaders.

OK. So the development since then is that,according to both the Journal and the Times, Trump called Musk and asked him to lift the restriction on transmission speeds.

It’s completely unclear right now whether that has actually happened or to what extent it’s happened. Some reports say that speeds are up. Others say that nothing has changed. Obviously, this matters critically for how many Ukrainians will die this winter. But think about this at a fundamental level. The president asked a private business to stop killing Ukrainians.

This is not the kind of thing where you ask. Especially Donald Trump, who is very fond of giving orders in places where he has no authority. In this case, the idea that he’s saying, pretty please, Elon, don’t let quite so many Ukrainians die — this is not how things should be working.

This guy, meaning Elon Musk, should not be in this position. Beyond that, what we’ve actually seen is the fact that Trump asked, has certainly made a point of having people leak the fact that he had asked, although he himself has been a little bit blurry on exactly what happened,

This is actually telling you that having national security interests explicitly under control of elected politicians is a good thing even if the politicians have bad intentions. There’s no real question that whatever the details of how it happened that Starlink denied high-speed access to Ukraine, obviously it’s what Musk wanted, but also that at the very least Donald Trump was okay with it and it may have been what he wanted as well.

But Trump and Trump’s officials were hiding behind Elon Musk, were saying, well, this was Musk’s decision and, well, it’s a business and we don’t know what happened.

Again, nobody involved in this should be believed, should be trusted. And for the exact truth, I’ll wait for years of investigative digging to find out what happened, plus subpoenas. Because if Democrats do take Congress, especially if they take the Senate, they will be investigating with support from at least some Republican senators. Patriotism is not completely dead on the GOP side.

The important point here is that the public outcry, the outrage, the many articles written similar in some respect to mine, — though I think I was more explicit than most in saying essentially that we need to nationalize or at least take control of Starlink — but the public outrage mattered.

Even though Donald Trump clearly wants Vladimir Putin to win, he doesn’t feel that he can act too openly He can’t take a pro-Russian stance. He can’t be seen to be openly and explicitly undercutting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, which is, and was trying to avoid that.

Whether he gave the order or Musk gave the order doesn’t really matter. The fact was that the private ownership, private control of Starlink allowed Trump to hide behind, or he thought it would allow him to hide behind, the fact that this was a private enterprise. For the U.S. government to have ordered a U.S. government agency —say if Starlink was run by the Defense Department —for the U.S. government to order the Defense Department to cut Ukraine off at the knees was too much even for Trump.

And once it became clear that the attempt to pretend that this was not in accord with Trump administration intentions, whoever actually pulled the switch, was too much. And so now Trump is very visibly asking, pretty please, asking Elon Musk to let Ukraine defend itself.

That’s telling you that even with a bad president, explicit public control of national security does help. It means that public outrage gets reflected in policies that are somewhat less treasonous than would otherwise be taking place.

But this, of course, is just the beginning. Hopefully, in a little over two years, we will have a president who actually does support US interests and doesn’t work for Vladimir Putin. Before that, we will have a lot more, almost surely, a lot more congressional oversight. So this is a situation in which public policy will be infinitely better if it’s explicitly public policy than hiding behind the skirts of a multi-billionaire who owns these critical national assets.

Again, we don’t know what’s really happening. We don’t know whether the intention is to kind of muddy the waters and then to allow Musk to continue to undermine Ukraine. There’s just so much we don’t know. But we do know that the situation is unacceptable. It’s unconscionable.

National security is a matter for national policy. We know that whether Musk really acted independently — or whether the pretense that he was acting independently allowed Trump to do what he’s doing — policy is really bad when you leave critical national security interests in the hands of individual plutocrats.

So we did learn that public outcry appears to matter. It’s not that these guys are going to do whatever they’re going to do regardless. So by all means,keep up the pressure now, but the solution in the end has to be this cannot be an independent private enterprise. Maybe it can be run by somebody under contract, but the decisions about how Starlink is used — or many other technologies — the decision about how these are used to represent U.S. interests has to be a public decision. No more foreign policy, national security policy by billionaires.