We Created A Monster: Ex-Blackwater CEO Erik Prince Is Going Neocolonial With China [View all]

[n2doc]

What happens when America outsources its craziest security assignments to a private contractor, then throws him under the bus?

Answer: an object lesson in the craziness that awaits when he makes his next big move.

The Wall Street Journal sat down — in Hong Kong — with Erik Prince, former CEO of the notorious Blackwater firm. Guess what he’s doing there?

Now, sitting in a boardroom above Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, he explains his newest title, acquired this month: chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China’s largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. Beijing has titanic ambitions to tap Africa’s resources—including $1 trillion in planned spending on roads, railways and airports by 2025—and Mr. Prince wants in.

Once, policymakers traded blame for “losing China.” Will anyone ask who lost Erik Prince?

Prince himself is clear about what sent him packing. Though the ordeal of falling out with the federal government was intense — Prince claims he was the top target of IRS auditors — that’s all in the past. It’s America’s future that has Prince turning to China. “”I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa,” he told the Journal, “than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next.” While America has lost its stomach for massive adventures, China “has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.”

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2014/01/25/ex-blackwater-ceo-erik-prince-africa-neocolonial-with-china/