Everything is national security now

Safeguard Treasury bonds. Secure the cloud. Undermine China’s race for influence across the global South.

Companies across disparate sectors — cryptocurrency, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and energy — are hitching their agendas to the Trump administration’s. Deals of all stripes are being recast as national security imperatives, which executives hope will steer them past a mercurial White House whose regulatory priorities remain unclear.

Take Tether: The crypto giant is on a charm tour in Washington, where it is pushing stablecoin legislation and trying to assuage concerns that its products are used by criminals and terrorists. CEO Paolo Ardoino has pitched his company’s product as a way to keep America’s ballooning debt out of unfriendly or unstable hands. Tether said it is the 7th-largest buyer in the world of Treasury bonds, which it holds as collateral backing its coins.

“There will be a huge attempt to de-dollarize the world” led by BRIC nations including China, Ardoino told Semafor this week, echoing his message to officials during his recent trip to DC. “And Tether is the only company that is trying to slow down that event.”

China has halved its holdings of US Treasuries since 2013 as it and other BRIC members stock up on gold and prepare to launch a digital currency divorced from the greenback. Ardoino pitched Tether as a solution that aids US national security interests.

“In China, they have one single decision-maker. They press a button and decide to sell,” he said. “But what if instead, you can find 3 billion people, each one holding $10,000 in [Tether backed by Treasury bonds]? They will never wake up all together one morning saying, ‘let’s sell all the T-bills.’”

Google framed its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, which needs antitrust approval, as literally helping to safeguard national security. “Organizations of all sizes — from startups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations — can use Wiz to protect” against cyberattacks, Google wrote in its deal announcement. It was a not-so-subtle nudge to staffers at the departments of Treasury, State, and Commerce — all of which have been infiltrated by Chinese hackers.

HPE and Juniper Networks have cast their $14 billion merger, which Trump’s Justice Department has sued to block as anticompetitive, as creating a bulwark against China’s Huawei in the battle for global 5G dominance. The combined company could “compete even more holistically and more successfully with these large global, including Chinese, technology players,” Juniper CEO Rami Rahim told Semafor. “I think that is very much aligned with the national security interests of this country and of President Trump’s administration.”

Chevron tried a version of that argument in an effort to salvage its drilling concessions in Venezuela. After the White House in February revoked an exemption that had allowed Chevron to pay millions of dollars to the sanctioned Maduro regime, CEO Mike Wirth privately warned Trump that US adversaries could quickly step in and replace Chevron, The Wall Street Journal reported.

China’s state-owned offshore driller, CNOOC, and Iran’s national oil company both operate in Venezuela, which has borrowed billions of dollars from Chinese banks and bought arms from Beijing.

It hasn’t worked — Treasury told Chevron to wind down its Venezuela operations on Tuesday — but it shows that companies from the Republican-leaning oil patch to San Francisco’s historically liberal tech scene are retooling their corporate priorities to speak the language of this administration. BlackRock’s $23 billion deal earlier this month for a portfolio of global ports, including two that sandwich the Panama Canal, won Trump’s blessing, a key asset for BlackRock as it maneuvers out of the ESG limelight.