Erik Prince, former CEO of Blackwater, is unsure he wants to remain an American citizen. After years of being reviled by the Left, attacked by Congress, audited by the IRS, hounded by the press, and sued, Prince now looks forward to, as he sees it, a worrisome future of America’s international decline and internal rot. His interview with National Review Online is over on the home page:
“Uh . . . for the record, for now I plan on retaining my U.S. citizenship, but I am very, very worried about the direction of America right now,” he told me on November 18, the day before Civilian Warriors, his book about his time at the helm of Blackwater, was released. . . .
“You can’t spend yourself off a cliff. You can’t make decisions leading almost to self-immolation and expect the country is going to go on the way it always has,” he said. “America is held in lower regard today wherever I go in the world. It’s not respected. It’s not trusted as a partner. The repeated blunderings of the U.S. ever since the Arab Spring have lowered America’s stock.”
Far more worrisome than America’s standing abroad, says Prince, is the growth of the U.S. government. “I believe unfortunately that the greatest threat to American liberty is becoming the U.S. government,” he told me. “It’s not a foreign enemy any more. It’s the growth and bloat of the U.S. government itself.”
For a look at Prince’s new book and more on the history of Blackwater and its former CEO read the full story.