How American Foreign Policy Became a Corporate Power Play

Why CEOs like Elon Musk are now unofficial diplomats & what it says about who really runs the U.S.

When Air Force One touched down in Riyadh this week, it wasn’t just President Trump stepping onto the tarmac. Flanking him were Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Larry Fink, three titans of tech and finance, each commanding more capital and influence than most countries. Their presence drew headlines and speculation, but to be honest, it wasn’t all that surprising. In fact, it makes perfect sense, just not for the reasons we’re usually told. What might once have seemed like an eyebrow-raising blurring of lines between public service and private gain now reads as something closer to routine. That, perhaps, is the real story.

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How It Became Normal

This kind of partnership between political leadership and private enterprise didn’t begin with this administration or even this century. In the decades following World War II, U.S. presidents quietly leaned on business leaders to support diplomatic efforts, particularly in rebuilding Europe and extending American economic influence during the Cold War.

However, under Ronald Reagan, the collaboration moved out of the back rooms and onto the tarmac. CEOs were no longer just economic advisors or allies; they became fixtures of state visits, trade missions, and bilateral summits.

By the 1990s, this fusion of public diplomacy and private capital had become routine, recast as a pragmatic, even patriotic gesture. Clinton’s trade missions often included executives from Boeing, GE, and Motorola, with trips to China framed as economic diplomacy at its most effective.

Obama’s 2016 visit to Cuba brought along leaders from Airbnb and other tech firms eager to stake their claim in newly opening markets.

While Reagan opened the door, both parties have embraced the model. Democratic and Republican presidents have brought executives abroad as symbols of American innovation and strength, rarely questioning what that symbolism might cost.

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The Sales Pitch: Jobs, Growth, Innovation

The reasoning offered is familiar, perhaps even reassuring: securing foreign investment, promoting innovation, and creating jobs back home. It’s framed as a win-win. America gets stronger, the economy grows, and everyone benefits.

However, that framing depends on a series of assumptions rarely examined. Do the profits from these foreign deals really stay in the U.S.? Are the jobs they create good, stable ones, or are they outsourced and automated the moment they become cheaper? When executives secure favorable conditions abroad, are they serving the national interest, or simply expanding their own empires with the help of government leverage?

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What Really Happens When They Show Up

Take Walmart and Amazon, two of the most visible symbols of American economic might, often showcased in foreign policy and praised as engines of job creation. But what happens after the ribbon cutting?

Walmart’s arrival in a community is frequently followed by the slow collapse of local businesses. A study in Chicago found that within a four-mile radius of a new Walmart, nearly a quarter of small businesses closed.

Amazon’s expansion has had a similarly disruptive effect, dominating markets, undercutting competitors, and concentrating power in a way that has made many local economies dependent on a single logistics chain.

While both companies boast about job creation, their pay scales often leave workers reliant on public assistance to meet basic needs. In effect, the public subsidizes workers' survival while shareholders reap the profits.

And the products they move are largely imported, produced by low-wage labor overseas, not by American workers. Once examined closely, the “job creation” story looks a lot more like a wealth extraction machine.

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From Symbolism to Control

Over time, corporate leaders' presence on diplomatic trips has evolved from symbolic to substantive. These aren’t just photo ops; they’re opportunities to influence trade terms, shape regulatory environments, and sidestep the usual guardrails of public accountability.

Many of these CEOs lead companies that are not only dominant in their sectors but also deeply embedded in government contracts and critical infrastructure. Their influence doesn’t stop at the border. At home, they help write the rules they’re supposed to follow, lobby against oversight mechanisms, and work to weaken antitrust enforcement.

What was once soft power has hardened into something more entrenched, a system where corporate access becomes corporate authority. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in 2017, the delegation included top executives from defense contractors and energy giants like Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil. And each of these companies saw immediate benefit from multi-billion-dollar arms and infrastructure deals signed during the visit.

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National Security Is On the Line

The deeper concern isn’t just influence. It’s vulnerability.

When CEOs with federal contracts and access to sensitive systems build deep financial relationships with foreign states, the question of allegiance becomes more than theoretical. A billion-dollar investment from a foreign government isn’t just a business deal. It’s leverage.

When those same CEOs sit on advisory boards, meet with national security officials, or play informal roles in shaping federal policy, the lines blur quickly. Who are they accountable to? What interests are being prioritized behind closed doors?

In a time when data, defense technology, and AI infrastructure are central to global power, treating these entanglements as routine business risks misses the far more dangerous reality: We’ve invited strategic compromise into the executive branch and call it efficiency.

Consider Google’s development of Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine for use in China, while still under contract with U.S. intelligence agencies. Or Elon Musk, whose growing influence spans transportation, AI, satellite communications, and defense infrastructure, with both foreign investors and U.S. military contracts in play.

These aren’t just conflicts of interest—they’re invitations to strategic compromise.

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The Rise of Shadow Governance

The influence doesn’t end with advisory roles or international deals. Increasingly, these same executives or their proxies find their way into the administrations they once lobbied, former lobbyists are named to oversee the industries they came from, and corporate boardroom regulars are tapped for policy councils.

In some cases, like Elon Musk’s unofficial role leading the Department of Government Efficiency, these figures don’t even need formal titles to exert power. They operate as insiders with outsized influence.

The effect is a quiet, pervasive form of shadow governance: policies shaped by those with the most to gain from deregulation, enforcement stalled by those who once fought it, and an entire apparatus calibrated to preserve access rather than pursue accountability.

Under Trump, Scott Pruitt, a long-time ally of fossil fuel interests, was appointed to lead the EPA, where he dismantled environmental protections opposed by his former donors. Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, led the FCC’s rollback of net neutrality, despite overwhelming public opposition. These appointments weren’t aberrations; they were blueprints.

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Other Countries Do This Differently

To be clear, the fusion of corporate power and state diplomacy isn’t uniquely American. Other countries, such as China, Germany, and Japan, also bring business leaders into foreign policy conversations.

However, where many states manage this relationship through formal industrial strategies or state-owned enterprises, the U.S. has embraced a different model: spectacle capitalism. Here, CEOs don’t just advise from behind the scenes. They take the stage, often shaping the message as much as the mission. There’s little pretense of separation. When American presidents travel abroad with tech moguls and investment titans, it’s not just a show of economic strength. It’s a signal that private capital isn’t just adjacent to policy. It is policy.

In contrast, China’s Huawei operates as a state-guided enterprise, advancing geopolitical goals in tandem with economic ones. Germany, meanwhile, formally integrates labor unions and industrial leaders into its economic planning, a stark difference from the U.S. model, where CEOs dominate and labor is sidelined.

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We Could Have Stopped This

What makes this arrangement so enduring isn’t just its power. It’s the near-total absence of resistance. The tools to prevent this kind of entanglement exist: Conflict-of-interest rules, oversight committees, and transparency mandates. But over the decades, those tools have been blunted by neglect, evasion, and political convenience. We’ve seen it before, such as in the failure to enforce the Emoluments Clause, where clear constitutional prohibitions against foreign influence were shrugged off in real time.

See our recent article here:

From Peanut Farms to Private Jets: How Trump Burned the Emoluments Rulebook

The result is a system that seems unable to say no to power, even when it should, not because it lacks authority but because it lacks will.

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Fixing It Won’t Be Easy, But It’s Necessary

There’s no single reform that can unwind a system this embedded, and no simple line between private success and public service. Business will always play a role in diplomacy, and in some cases, that role can be productive. But what we’re living through now isn’t collaboration. It’s consolidation. And reversing it will take more than better ethics guidelines or a few principled appointees. It requires something deeper: a recommitment to the idea that public institutions should serve the public, not those with the most access, the largest platforms, or the deepest pockets.

Some of those steps are straightforward or even obvious. Others will take sustained political will. But all of them point in the same direction, toward a government that remembers who it’s supposed to work for.

• Enforce antitrust laws with real teeth. Break up or regulate monopolies that distort not only markets, but policymaking itself.

• Ban foreign lobbying by companies with federal contracts. If you take taxpayer money, you shouldn’t also be shaping foreign policy behind closed doors.

• Mandate transparency for all corporate involvement in diplomacy. No CEO should attend a state visit or international summit without public disclosure of their role and interests.

• Prohibit recent lobbyists from leading agencies they once influenced. A chemical lobbyist running the EPA, or a telecom executive directing the FCC, isn’t regulation. It’s sabotage. These agencies were built to protect the public, not serve political donors or corporate agendas.

• Reinforce conflict-of-interest rules and actually use them. We don’t need new laws so much as the courage to enforce the ones we already have.

• Elevate public interest voices in policy formation. Labor, environmental advocates, and consumer protection groups are the stakeholders too often excluded from the rooms where decisions are made.

• Rebuild and firewall independent watchdogs. Agencies like the EPA, FTC, and the Office of Government Ethics need more than new leadership. They need structural protections: guaranteed funding, independent oversight boards, and legal safeguards to prevent future administrations from quietly gutting their authority.

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What You Can Do

We didn’t arrive here by accident and won’t get out of it with outrage alone. This system, where private power quietly hijacks public purpose, survives because too few people in positions of authority are ever forced to confront it. That’s where we come in. Not just to name what’s broken, but to demand what’s possible.

Here are four concrete ways to act:

1. Call Your Elected Officials

Why it matters: Direct pressure works. Elected officials don’t act unless they know you’re paying attention.

Tell them:

“I’m calling to ask that you support legislation to ban lobbyists from leading the agencies they once influenced, and to restore independent oversight to our regulatory system. I also want Congress to mandate transparency for corporate involvement in foreign policy. These aren’t partisan issues—they’re democratic ones.”

Find your representative: house.gov
Find your senators: senate.gov

2. Support Unions and Worker Organizing

Why it matters: The best counterweight to corporate power is collective power.

• Support or join a union in your workplace.

• Donate to organizing drives at Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and others.

• Follow and amplify labor organizers on social media.

• Use tools like laborlab.us to connect with worker-led campaigns.

3. Educate, Share, Mobilize

Why it matters: These issues stay entrenched when we face them alone. Change grows in the community.

• Share this article with someone who still trusts “efficiency” more than democracy.

• Host a discussion, union meeting, or community teach-in.

• Speak up during public comment periods or local hearings. Your voice goes on the record.

4. Build Local Power

Why it matters: Real change begins at the level where corporate influence often goes unchecked: your backyard.

• Support local candidates who fight for labor rights, transparency, and antitrust reform.

• Attend city council meetings and ask hard questions.

• Push for local policies that resist corporate encroachment and protect the public interest.

Because if we don’t reclaim the levers of public power, someone else will—quietly, efficiently, and entirely in their own interest.

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