Welcome to the era of the non-state actor

WE CAN no longer hold out hope that it was an artificial intelligence-generated deepfake. Last autumn, Rishi Sunak really did interview Elon Musk on stage. To repeat, a serving head of government took the junior role to a businessman at a public event. As piercing and Socratic as his questions were (“What is it that you are particularly excited about?”), Sunak demeaned his office.

But, he was also going with the grain of world events. Musk is a mostly benign example of a wider trend: the bleeding of power from the state. He has a larger space programme than all but a few national governments. He has had a thumb on the scales of the war in Ukraine through his Starlink satellites.

The darker side of this phenomenon is on show in the Middle East.