A famed German education obviously greatly suffered lately. Gone is the gymnast and sometime Foreign Minister of the Bundesrepublik, Annalena Baerbock with her "360 degrees turn of policies" and "defenses of hundreds of thousands kilometers from the German borders". But, militaristic imperialist in the Willhelmian (i.e. colonial Victorianism on steroids) tradition Karp with a PhD in philosophy from a German university suffers from severe logic deficiency.
His justification of the European colonial expansion is based on a diagram showing the mean proportions of population and GDP of the "backward" and Western nations, who, in view of Karp and another cited colonialist Churchill, enjoyed democratic elections instead of tyranny and dictatorship. First, before the 17th century, i.e. the century when poor but war-proficient Europeans began to pillage the world for earnest, the most of the world's GDP was produced by China and India (see P. Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"). Second, most current GDP of the Western nations is centered around "financial services". Not to speak of Denmark or Holland, UK's share of the real economy in its GDP (mining, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation) is hardly 5%. What is the magic of the City of London and Canary Wharf, 2.5 square miles or so, where 20% of the British GDP is produced? Third, to consider even the then British Empire a democracy is a gross misstatement. Barely 10-15% of the population of the British Empire enjoyed any semblance of political rights, with even Canada, Australia and New Zealand having no control of the their foreign and defense policy until approximately WWII. Before, aristocratic English generals generously spilled blood of its colonial subjects in the fields of Gallipoli and Flanders. Other "Western" nations had even more limited suffrage, and foreign, defense and financial policies were largely excluded from any parliamentary control.
Another oddity is his irony that the most powerful politicians and the civil servants earn a tiny amount of his and his tech- and private equity bros incomes. Earning a PhD from a German University and not knowing that salaries for the civil servants is a relative innovation? Till the end of the XIX century, the applicant for the British Foreign Office position had to prove a sufficient independent income. Most of the human history, politics, military commands and civil service were unpaid occupations, which aristocracies and patricians performed out of civic duty. The ones who absconded these duties for the private enrichment and/or pleasures of the harem/slave quarters were called "idiots" in Greek. His reasoning suffers not only from historic ignorance but from the lack of logic. Police officers occasionally have to arrest drug lords for whom their salaries are a small change. Should their salaries also be raised by a few orders of magnitude? Obviously, greed -- and not even fear -- is an only motivator for the tech bros but, for simpler people, it can be different.
Only when the middle classes became the backbone of the modern society, and bureaucracies had multiplied in size, the idea of government service as a paid profession proliferated. The demise of the political and economic significance of the middle class in the West and the rise of billionaire oligarchies (like Karp himself) resulted in the return of the "Ancien Regime"-type governments. There ambitious gentlemen knowing nothing in particular -- Oxbridge of XVII and XVIII century was described not as a "Cathedral of Learning" but as a place were gentlemen went drunk -- presided over civil services of their minions and sycophants.
What Karp proposes as the future of humanity is the rule by "philosopher kings" of the tech industry in the West and merciless colonial exploitation of its periphery by its armed might. Not so different from the "Beautiful garden vs. the Jungle" of the former EU Foreign Policy chief Borrell. I am too old and feeble to work that this future never comes. But the younger people may.
