The New Belt and Road
MAGA-Style Economic Coercion
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when access to a billionaire's satellite internet becomes the cost of avoiding trade punishment from the U.S. president, the lines between private power, public policy, and authoritarian leverage have collapsed.
A pattern has emerged with stunning clarity, yet insufficient alarm: Nations facing punitive Trump tariffs are suddenly finding ways to approve Elon Musk's Starlink satellite service, according to internal State Department cables obtained by the Washington Post. These aren't coincidental business developments but deliberate “goodwill gestures” during trade negotiations, explicitly characterized as such by the governments involved.
The mechanics of this arrangement are breathtaking in their naked fusion of personal profit and governmental power. Trump announces sweeping tariffs—50% on tiny Lesotho, 49% on Cambodia, significant penalties on India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and others. Within days, many of these same governments begin fast-tracking regulatory approvals for Starlink, in some cases for the first time ever. As a cable from Lesotho noted, the country hoped licensing Starlink would demonstrate “goodwill and intent to welcome U.S. businesses” during trade negotiations.
This creates a triangular power structure that undermines both legitimate market competition and democratic governance. At one vertex sits Elon Musk: mega-donor ($277 million to Trump and Republicans), federal appointee (DOGE Service), and CEO of Starlink. At another sits Trump: imposing tariffs, pushing for deals, and allowing embassies to promote Starlink's access. At the third sit foreign governments, who understand that regulatory friction for Starlink may result in economic retaliation—or favor if they comply.
The result isn't market competition but geopolitical coercion. The market doesn't decide who gets Starlink. Compliance with MAGA policy preferences does.
The State Department attempts to justify this system as “competing with China” in space infrastructure. But this isn't just geostrategy—it's privatized influence wielded through nationalist optics. Instead of U.S. state capacity rising to counter Chinese infrastructure development, it's Musk's private network being substituted for national public capacity. The administration's spokesperson claimed “any patriotic American should want to see an American company's success on the global stage,” but patriotism doesn't require confusing a billionaire's business interests with the national interest.
This is no longer “free market capitalism.” It's neo-feudal economic discipline. Tariffs are weaponized until nations concede monopolistic access to infrastructure controlled by Musk. In effect, Musk becomes an instrument of U.S. power, and U.S. power becomes a tool for Musk's expansion.
The moral collapse is unmistakable. The Trump administration claims it “would not abide conflicts of interest,” yet the entire structure is one massive conflict—a billionaire donor receives governmental assistance in pressuring foreign nations to approve his business, while simultaneously serving in the administration exerting that pressure. This isn't subtle. It's brazen.
What makes this particularly alarming is how it transforms international relations from state-to-state diplomacy into private empire-building under national colors. As W. Gyude Moore of the Center for Global Development noted, for foreign officials “it'd be very difficult to separate” U.S. government demands from Musk's private business interests. “They can see their life might be a lot easier if seen or perceived as getting along with Elon Musk.”
Voters were promised American greatness. What they got is corporate leverage masquerading as diplomacy. It's not America first. It's Musk first, enforced by trade war.
You don't negotiate with America anymore. You negotiate with Elon.
This fusion of private and public power into an instrument of international coercion represents exactly the kind of corruption that constitutional checks and balances were designed to prevent.
This is the very corruption constitutional checks were built to prevent.
It transforms foreign policy from promoting national interests to serving the financial interests of those closest to power. The scramble of nations to approve Starlink is not evidence of American strength but of a system where policy is shaped by proximity to the powerful rather than by principle.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And a system that lets a billionaire's company become a condition for escaping punishment from the president isn't strategy—it's submission.
The center must be held. Not by choosing sides between China and Musk, but by defending the very idea that infrastructure should serve publics—not oligarchs. What we're witnessing isn't American leadership reasserted but its replacement with something far more dangerous: rule by those with the president's ear rather than governance under constitutional constraints.
The president makes the threat. The billionaire makes the deal.
And democracy becomes the silent partner.
This isn't just corruption. It's a system. And systems don't break until someone names them.
The Name of the Game.
In my early years in medicine, I had a shocking experience relevant to Mike’s commentary, "The New Belt and Road.” Ethel Wilson was a middle-aged African-American woman with metastatic breast cancer that was under my care in 1975, coming to my office in Los Angeles once a week for chemotherapy. I was examining Ethel on one of these visits when she told me another doctor’s office called her and asked her to come to their office. It seems, Ethel related to me, that one of her friends was diagnosed with TB, and this doctor’s office felt obligated to run tests on Ethel. Note that the usual procedure or protocol would be for the MD to call me and relate the pertinent history, and for me, Ethel’s key MD, to decide what to do. Instead, Ethel informed me, they ran blood tests, skin tests, X-rays, and an ECG (electrocardiogram). Ethel did not have to pay for this since she was on Medicare, and I believe she had co-insurance like Medicaid.
I could not believe that another MD would do something like this, so I called Dr. Corday, a now deceased cardiologist, and asked him, “Why didn’t you call me and allow me to decide what was pertinent testing for Ethel?” She has had a recent chest x-ray, and there is no indication that an ECG will help in ruling in or out an infectious disease like TB. Moreover, none of the blood tests you ordered are indicated. And along with all of this, you never informed me or sent me the results of what you did.
Corday’s response was truth-telling. It sheds light on the behavior of what Mike talks about, and what Dee Hock, founder of VISA, wrote about in The Birth of the Chaordic Age. Hock called them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Ego, Envy, Avarice, Ambition
Corday’s glib reply to my asking, “Why did you do this?” was,
“Dr. Strum, you don't know the name of the game.”
PS. I have never compromised my principles. I have never positioned physician income as a higher priority than patient outcome. I have been able to have a well-led life, and I never financially raped a patient.
What we have with Trump is a rapist. He is a rapist of women, of the people and the planet. And we are so fucking naive that we have not learned to know a person by the company they keep. We have not learned that the acorn does not fall far from the tree. We have not learned that we know a man or a woman by their deeds, not their spiel.
And now, our nation, and it seems a lot of the world, has fallen prey to the wisdom of the adage:
We get too soon old and to late smart.
Of deep concern is the potential to take this capacity to unimaginable reaches, with computer capacity to track /control choices and actions of individual citizens…. Way beyond what Hitler was able to accomplish.