Does every company need its own State Department, Pentagon, and CIA?

In the months leading up to the outbreak of civil war in Syria, I led a State Department delegation to Syria that included a sit-down with its president, Bashar al-Assad.

Our goal? To muscle the Syrian dictator on a series of tech-related security issues, using both economic and political pressure. Syria had begun to weaponize widely available consumer technology, making it easier to surveil its citizens, spread disinformation, and both develop and destroy political movements.

The delegation I led was unique, though. It did not include diplomats or officials from the Pentagon or CIA. Instead, it was made up of senior executives from U.S. tech companies.

Why business leaders? We reasoned that the executives had both the power and the expertise to be especially persuasive on these issues. They had the intelligence capabilities - digital analytics - that you might associate with an intelligence agency like the CIA. They had the defense capabilities – in cyber security – that evoked the Pentagon. And they had the ability to negotiate on these issues that recalled the diplomacy of a State Department.

It’s not unusual for companies to get involved in acts that might be referred to as corporate patriotism. During World War II, Allied and Axis nations alike tapped into their private sectors to wage war, and the fate of the war hinged on their industrial powers.

In the United States, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler stopped assembling cars and started building tanks, airplanes, guns, and ammunition. The Lionel toy train company built compasses for warships. The Mattatuck Manufacturing Company went from producing tacks to making rifle clips. General Motors president William Knudsen, who became the government’s wartime production chief, summed up the expectations of the business community in a 1941 speech to industry executives: “Gentleman, we must out-build Hitler.”

Meanwhile, the German private sector worked to help Hitler outbuild the Allies. Daimler-Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen supplied the Nazis with cars, motorcycles, and airplanes. IG Farben, then the world’s largest chemical company, manufactured synthetic rubber, fuel, plastics, and the poison gas Zyklon B. On the Pacific front, massive corporate conglomerates known as zaibatsu provided the war materiel for imperial Japan.

The know-how of the world’s most powerful companies is only growing in importance as they try to navigate an increasingly complicated world. When the Cold War ended, the simpler binary world of U.S.-sponsored democracy and capitalism competing with Soviet-sponsored communism came to an end. Companies were now free to work on a 196-country chess board. This accelerated globalization, along with the need for companies to develop their own capabilities in areas we normally associate with government, for both good and bad.

Take the example of cyber-attacks, which demands corporate involvement. When missiles are shot at citizens or their institutions, the government responds. But in a cyber-attack, companies must be able to defend themselves, even if it is a government-sponsored attack. Any company that handles valuable information is a potential target of digital attacks, whether it is a defense contractor or a dating app. And they need to work proactively to protect that information from falling into the wrong hands.

Expanding into new global markets in a world of shifting regulations, tariffs and geopolitical considerations require the skills of diplomacy. Executives need to work as diplomats, negotiating the best deals for their shareholders. And different cultures require different business strategies, different customer experiences, and different government relations. If companies do not learn how to do business in different cultural contexts, they will fail.

Now that business is being turned on its head by developments outside of what we usually think of as “the market,” ranging from climate and migration to global health and political risk, multinational companies must also develop an intelligence apparatus to help them see around the corner. A hurricane in one part of the world can freeze supply chains 15,000 miles away.

Sometimes defense, intelligence and diplomacy challenges can converge on a single company all at once.

In 2016, a Chinese gaming company called Beijing Kunlun Tech paid $93 million to acquire a 60 percent stake in Grindr, a popular dating app for gay men. But three years later, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States ordered Beijing Kunlun Tech to sell its stake in the app. The reason? Its data could be used to blackmail American national security officials.

If you were to open Grindr in Washington, DC, odds are you would stumble upon profiles of intelligence analysts, members of the military, and government officials and contractors who hold security clearances. Those profiles include your standard online dating details—age, height, personal interests, and location—but also more sensitive information, like sexual orientation, HIV status, unusually precise location data (down to the foot), and whether the user is in the closet. Combine that information with a few personal photos (sometimes with minimal clothing), and you can build a potentially compromising dossier.

Given the close ties between China’s government and private sector, U.S. national security officials feared that Grindr data would ultimately pass from Beijing Kunlun Tech to the hands of the Chinese government, which could use it to blackmail U.S. officials. The risk was especially great for people who are not open about their sexuality.

“We know there’s plenty of people who aren’t honest and open about who they love,” one thirty-year-old intelligence analyst who uses Grindr told me. “The risk of personal trauma or losing your career, losing your job, losing your family—people will do a lot to protect that, which is something adversaries know full and well.”

Grindr is not a physical U.S. security asset. It does not explode or fly or sail, like the technologies developed by defense contractors during the Cold War. It does not power nuclear reactors or control sophisticated fighter jets or support critical infrastructure. What Grindr does is generate valuable data. And because of that data, Grindr’s majority shareholders were forced to sell.

In the end, my State Department delegation of tech executives did not persuade Assad, and his use of technology had deadly consequences.

The Assad regime followed digital organizing on open social media platforms and then targeted its attacks at the protest locations that were listed online. When they detained people, they would take their mobile phones and then make a kill-or-let-live decision based on who was in the person’s contact list. The Syrian government used an Android app that outwardly appeared to be a temperature-taking tool to address the COVID pandemic. The app also served as powerful spyware, giving the regime access to users’ data, texts, contact lists, and location. All of these tools were developed by private companies, in these cases, Russian companies.

And in many ways, these companies end up serving as proxies for their home states. This reminded me of the competition between Russia and the United States during the Cold War, when American consumers drove Chevys, drank Budweiser, and smoked Marlboros and their Russian counterparts drove Ladas, drank Zhigulevskoye, and smoked Belomorkanals. Companies are going to remain at the center of conflict and competition around the world, but this time with some new, occasionally deadly twists.

What are some of the things we should take from this? For starters, I don’t see the world getting any less complicated. So, business leaders managing teams and selling across borders, will need to dial up their investment in their “foreign policy team,” the folks who gather and analyze intelligence, conduct diplomacy, and focus on cyber defense. We will also need to keep the lines between government and business open on tech issues. It’s been 10 years since I led that State Department delegation into Syria, leveraging the private sector’s expertise in technology. And sadly, the gap between tech expertise inside and outside of government is just as wide as it was back then. I bet my son’s high school class has more tech savvy than all but a handful of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress.

Finally, we all need to think about what patriotism means in this decade, which I call the Raging 2020s. Does it mean being patriotic to your country in the traditional sense and doing whatever you’re asked by the government of your home country, even if you work all over the globe? Does it mean being patriotic to your shareholders and working to maximize their returns? Does it mean developing your own “foreign policy” rooted in the company’s values and then responding to requests from government based on how the request lines up with those values and priorities? We live in a world where many of our multinational companies are as powerful as countries. With that power comes responsibility.

This article is adapted from Alec Ross's new book THE RAGING 2020s and will be the basis for the BIG IDEAS BOOK CLUB which Ross will moderate. Please join the group and discussion