²¹ And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. ²² The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.

Leviticus 16:21-22

While the wandering Semite tribes were camped at the base of Mount Sinai, Moses instituted a plan to solve the collective sin problem of the wayward Israelites. The “escape goat” reflected the goat's function: it was not killed by the priest but was sent away alive into the wilderness, symbolically carrying the sins of the people away from the community. The Israelites "escaped" their sins by appointing someone (some goat) to bear the blame for others.

This consolidation of sin by one goat, one priesthood, one congregation, and collective sins driven into one wilderness is efficient as long as there is an exclusive arrangement. If three priests load three different goats with three different sin-lists and drive them into three wildernesses, no one experiences atonement, because atonement requires the whole community to agree that the sins went out with that goat. Competing scapegoats don't divide the atonement among themselves — they cancel it entirely. Blame that isn't consolidated provides no absolution, no atonement and the goats run wild.

In a rheopolitical age, goats are no longer merely psychological symbols. They identify the supposed blockage in the global flow. Every faction names a different obstruction to circulation. The four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class have no shortage of scapegoats. In fact there is a surplus, a herd of goats, dispersed in all directions, and the sins never leave the camp.

Gramsci’s Goat

In Gramscian terms, the hegemon uses mass culture and media to transform legitimate economic and social grievances (caused by the system itself) into psychological or cultural problems. By scapegoating specific groups, usually minorities, immigrants, or dissidents, the ruling elite deflects blame away from the structural failures of capitalism or their own leadership. Unlike the biblical ritual which removes sin to purify the community, the Gramscian scapegoat is used to preserve a corrupt order. It is a tool of passive revolution, where the elite absorb or deflect revolutionary energy to maintain dominance without addressing the root causes of the crisis.

A state or ruling class that has full cultural authority and material legitimacy has no need of goats because it delivers safety, security and prosperity — the trains run on time and the possibility of upward mobility exists. It may perform a goat ritual as needed because it holds a monopoly on blame, but it can function without resorting to the goat-blaming game. A decaying hegemon with some cultural authority but fading legitimacy needs a goat to blame for its failures. Although it maintains a voice in the media and academia — it can still sing in Yarvin’s Cathedral, but the trains are late, the cost of living is high, and the youth horizon is bleak.

(We will discuss the youth horizon in a forthcoming chapter. For now, it is defined as the future outlook of a society’s young people, especially the young intelligentsia: Do they see prosperity on the horizon?)

The ability to maintain a scapegoat isn't an aberration of ruling class power, it’s one of its key elements: only a ruling class that still holds cultural authority can say "this is the source of our woes" and everyone nods in agreement. A unified ruling class can either consolidate blame or dispense with scapegoats entirely, because it can deliver legitimacy via material prosperity instead.

A unified hegemon only needs one explanation for social failure. A fractured ruling class requires multiple explanations because each faction must redirect blame away from itself and toward its rivals. The number of competing scapegoats measures the fragmentation of elite legitimacy. The equation is legitimacy is inversely proportional to the number of scapegoats.

Exceptionalism Meets Decline

The American Empire is in decline, the rules-based order has ruptured and three of the four factions are rooted in the faltering Empire — a hegemon struggling with its cultural authority and failing to provide material legitimacy. America’s exceptionalism took root in the Puritan’s City on a Hill theology — John Winthrop’s sermon in 1630 framed the New England settlement as a divinely chosen model for the world. America’s civil religion cannot easily explain decline. Therefore decline requires an enemy.

The Nazis provided the Jews as a source for all of Germany’s woes. Germany in 1933 is what happens when one faction wins the ritual outright — one goat is blamed — a resolution the fractured American elite cannot achieve: immigrants are to blame, Jews are to blame, the deep state is to blame. The Democrats blame the Republicans and the Republicans blame the Democrats — all Americans are pointing fingers.

The conspiratorial commentariat points the finger inwards. A significant percentage of Americans could not fathom that nineteen Saudi Arabians with box cutters could take down the Twin Towers, so a suitable explanation was achieved with a conspiracy theory of controlled demolition. The CIA, Mossad and the nefarious cabal were to blame.

Similarly, during COVID, the factional war revealed itself: One congregation loaded up the scapegoat with the unvaccinated, the maskless, the superspreader — “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” passports, firings, exclusion from restaurants and family tables. The other congregation loaded up Fauci, Bill Gates, the lab, the pharma companies, the public-health establishment itself. Two priesthoods, two goats, two wildernesses — running in parallel, each side serving as the other side’s goat.

Load Your Own Goat

However, it is not just the American ruling class who are fractured and producing goats. One size goat fits all is not possible with the civil war within the Transnational Capitalist Class — the four factions are each adamant in their rhetoric of blame.

Imperial Nationalists transfer the sins of the nation onto the heads of immigrants. ICE is fully funded and militarized, rounding up the sinners and shipping them off to detention centers (in the wilderness) for deportation to their home countries. This is literal and metaphorical scapegoating.

The State Capitalists, primarily China, blame the imperial West, specifically the USA who are creeping inside China and fomenting color revolutions. In May 2026, China’s Ministry of State Security explicitly blamed "hostile foreign forces" (didui shili) for funding influencers and promoting the "lying flat" movement among Chinese youth, whose youth horizon is bleak. “Young people are China’s future and have also become a primary target for ideological infiltration by hostile anti-China forces abroad,” claimed the press release.

As Russia faces GDP contraction, high inflation, and a budget crisis in 2026, the Kremlin attributes these issues to "unfriendly" Western sanctions and alleged sabotage by foreign intelligence services. State media narratives claim that Western countries are deliberately destabilizing the global economy to hurt Russia, thereby deflecting blame from domestic mismanagement, excessive military spending, and the structural flaws of a war economy.

“There is a war going on, this is a real war. Do you know why it’s a war? Because it all started as a special military operation. It continues as a war because behind Kyiv stand Berlin, Paris, The Hague, Oslo, and, unfortunately, Washington,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with VGTRK correspondent Pavel Zarubin on July 5, 2026.

The Davos World Economic Forum continues to publish threat reports that list disinformation, populism itself as existential threats. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026, misinformation, disinformation and societal polarization are among the most severe short-term threats to global stability, driven largely by the rise of populism and AI-enabled narrative attacks. Its number one threat, however is “geoeconomic confrontation”, a euphemism for the weaponization of economic tools such as sanctions and export controls by the Trump administration.

The Munich Security Report 2026, titled Under Destruction, identifies U.S. President Donald Trump as the most prominent “demolition man” actively dismantling the post-1945 international order. The report characterizes the current global era as one of “wrecking-ball politics,” where leaders prioritize the destruction of existing institutions over reform, leading to “a world shaped by transactional deals rather than principled cooperation.”

Silicon Valley’s Stampede of Goats

Silicon Valley offers up a plethora of goats, a veritable stampede. Balaji Srinivasan, the Network State visionary identifies the "Paper Belt"— the alliance of Washington D.C. (regulation), Boston (higher education), Los Angeles (entertainment), and New York City (media/finance) — as the primary internal drag on America. He blames China for dismantling America's industrial base and manufacturing supply chain, leaving the U.S. militarily and economically vulnerable. He further argues the Internet and crypto have destroyed the revenue models of legacy media and finance. Simultaneously, he argues the populist right has turned against immigration and globalism, cutting off the flow of talent (H-1B visas) that built Silicon Valley.

Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, and founder of the Seasteading Institute blames “government monopoly”, “folk activism” as well as zoning, regulation and the education system.

Anduril weapons manufacturer Palmer Luckey scapegoats “Davos elites”, globalists and Silicon Valley elites who have captured “the Uniparty” or “mono-party” to serve the corporatocracy.

Peter Thiel, Palantir founder, identifies universities as the root cause of American stagnation. He argues that elite institutions like Stanford and Harvard have become "bubbles" of political correctness and conformity that suppress independent thought and innovation, including the brainwashing of Silicon Valley. Thiel views the federal government as a "senile, central-left regime" paralyzed by rules and regulations.

Ironically, Thiel’s philosophical mentor is René Girard, the man who wrote the book on the scapegoat mechanism, which is how a society operates to prevent total self-destruction, by spontaneously and unanimously redirecting accumulated violence onto a single individual or minority group — the scapegoat. The man who learned from Girard that societies survive by unanimously designating scapegoats now participates in a stampede where designating goats is never unanimous.

Curtis Yarvin, house philosopher of Silicon Valley blames elite universities, mainstream media, and democracy itself which he sees as an inefficient, "malignant" system that inevitably leads to chaos and mob rule.

Seen from above, a herd of goats is a necessary narrative. Seen from below, a herd of goats is elite fracture with no unified cultural hegemony, no shared theodicy, and no material legitimacy to present to the disconnected, extracted and mortgaged classes who increasingly view the TCC as a money-hoarding parasitical class.

Invisible Killer Goats

The conspiratorial commentariat are similarly chaotic and incoherent, although they are unanimous on the theory that there is a secret herd hiding in the wilderness, preying on mankind. They not only blame the goats — they insist they are invisible killer goats.

However, they are radically splintered over the question of what kind of goats they are — Vatican, Jews, aliens, communists, freemasons, WEF, deep state or all of the above. Interchangeable killer goats is evidence of a speculative theory hardening into dogma. Interchangeability proves the blank slot precedes the evidence — the conspiracist does not reason from evidence to the Freemasons; he or she inherits a conspiracy demanding a cabal and auditions candidates.

For a deep dive:

The factions presented in this book are not interchangeable. Each faction is anchored in a specific set of physical and institutional assets, things that exist in the real world, own or operate infrastructure, employ people, and can be pointed to — rather than in an ideology, a mood, or a Bilderberg attendee list.

We cannot swap out the Imperial Nationalists for Davos because Davos's underlying layer is the settlement and rule-making machinery — SWIFT, Basel, central banks, asset managers, the regulatory apparatus of market access. The Imperial Nationalists' layer is the hard power state — the defense contractors, overseas bases, the security services, the carrier groups. Silicon Valley's is the compute stack — data centers, chips, platforms, launch capacity. The State Capitalists' is the party-state fusion — SOEs, CIPS, the industrial base, the Belt and Road infrastructure.

In each case the faction is its asset base before it is its worldview; the worldview is downstream of what the assets need. Each faction’s model of capitalism is combined with its material ability to deny the others. That's why the faction test works the way it does — denial capacity requires something material to deny with.

In contrast, the cabal of the conspiracist’s dark imagination has no underlying layer. It isn't defined by controlling ports or clearing systems or fabs; it's defined purely by intention — a malevolent will floating free of any particular machinery. That is why the occupant of the slot can rotate from Jesuits to Jews to lizards to the WEF without the theory needing revision: pure agents are interchangeable because there's nothing underneath them that would have to match.

Everybody’s Got a Goat

Left-wing scholars generally view the Transnational Capitalist Class as a unified blob of Western elites. The TCC itself becomes the scapegoat to blame for its sins of capitalism, but the capitalist goat needs to be unified to serve as the enemy. William Robinson argues that global capitalism is no longer driven by competing national capital and imperialism, but by a unified transnational elite that controls the Transnational State (TNS) apparatus through international financial organizations such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The left target fascism and its operating arm of racism as the ultimate evil. This is itself a theodicy to explain the existence of evil — a single malevolent group with a unifying fascist ideology that causes global crises and manipulates these crises for its own advantage.

Robinson is aware of the scapegoating tactics of the Imperial Nationalists: “Trump’s global business empire could not flourish without capitalist globalization... His electoral promise to deport 10 millions undocumented immigrants... is, on the one hand, an attempt to convert the immigrant population into a scapegoat for the crisis and to channel the fear and insecurity among the (majority white) working class against the immigrant community rather than against the system … What 20th and 21st century fascism share is the need that the fascist mobilization has for scapegoats. The fascist project seeks to channel that social anxiety ... towards scapegoating communities.”

Yet Robinson, Sklair et al are scapegoating the TCC itself. Everybody’s got a goat.

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The Clown Effect

A fractured ruling class produces a herd of goats. Blame is dispersed in every direction and the elite — with no remaining strategy except endless goat rituals —gradually exhausts its cultural authority and material legitimacy. This produces the clown effect. The population no longer views its rulers with fear, admiration, or respect, but with mockery. Politics ceases to resemble statecraft and begins to resemble theatre. The governing class becomes a travelling circus performing for an increasingly cynical audience.

Ridicule becomes the dominant political language of a society that has lost faith in its institutions. Memes replace manifestos. Satire replaces persuasion. Every speech becomes a punchline before it becomes a policy. Influencers, comedians, dissidents, politicians, activists, and anonymous users all compete to produce the next viral humiliation. The objective is no longer to persuade one’s opponents but to make them appear ridiculous. Laughter becomes a weapon in the struggle for legitimacy.

Even the ruling class joins the performance. At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Elon Musk joked about Donald Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace,” saying, "I heard about the formation of the peace summit, and I was like, is that p-i-e-c-e? You know, a little piece of Greenland, a little piece of Venezuela." Around the same time, Iranian creators produced AI-generated Lego animations lampooning the American government and Trump in particular. The targets differ, but the political function is identical: authority is converted into comedy.

This ridicule is not merely entertainment. It is a symptom of declining hegemony. A confident and secure ruling class can absorb ridicule; a fractured one is defined by ridicule. A fractured ruling class cannot speak with one voice. Each faction attempts to discredit the others, and in doing so erodes confidence in the elite as a whole. Every joke that wounds a rival also diminishes the collective prestige of the ruling class itself.

The clown effect therefore signals something deeper than polarization. It marks the collapse of a shared political theatre in which rulers could still command deference. When no faction possesses sufficient cultural authority to define reality, every faction becomes fair game for ridicule. The public no longer sees competing statesmen offering rival visions of the future; it sees competing clowns chasing each other in a circus.

In a rheopolitical age, memes move faster than legislation. Ridicule spreads through the same global communication infrastructure that carries finance, intelligence, and commerce. Political legitimacy itself has become another flow. Once a ruler becomes a meme, authority begins to circulate away from them.

Counter-elites and Counter-goats

Peter Turchin argues that elite overproduction — where more credentialed aspirants exist than available positions of power — creates a surplus of frustrated elites who become counter-elites. These counter-elites do not necessarily represent the poor but rather ambitious individuals blocked from traditional status who mobilize popular resentment and mass grievances as a weapon to challenge the established ruling class.

This dynamic leads to intense intra-elite competition, where rival factions of counter-elites form opposing coalitions by appealing to different segments of the disgruntled populace. Rather than a unified revolution, this results in deep political polarization and disintegration, as various counter-elite groups compete to harness different forms of popular anger to seize power.

Convergence, and ultimately coordination, is what happens when one faction wins; permanent finger-pointing and scapegoating is what it looks like when no one can. The four factions are counter-elites of the now defunct rules-based order. They load up counter-goats to blame for the rupture.

A vast herd of counter-goats stampeding in all directions is evidence of counter-elite confusion and chaos. Everyone is guilty of sins. A multitude of priests load multiple goats. The congregation itself is splintered and sect-divided. Sins are not atoned for, redemption doesn’t come. All are lost in a permanent state of capitalist sinfulness.

In previous centuries, revolution meant capturing the palace. Today every faction loads a different goat because none controls the valves of the global system. No faction can seize the valves while the others hold their own — so the goats multiply without end. The proliferation of scapegoats is therefore not merely a symptom of political polarization. It is evidence that no faction has achieved rheopolitical supremacy.

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About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Globalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

CHAPTER 17: Mortgaged, Extracted, Disconnected

CHAPTER 18: Permanent Planetary Turbulence

CHAPTER 19: Two Wings of the Same Imperial Nationalist Bird

Military strategy is usually portrayed as the product of abstract strategic reasoning. Yet strategies also create demand for particular industries, procurement systems, and revenue models. Different doctrines sustain different forms of capital. The debate between the Primacy and America First wings is therefore not simply a disagreement over how the United States should use power; it is also a contest over which defense economy will dominate the twenty-first century.

The Primacy wing emerged as the dominant strategic tradition after the Cold War. It argues that American security depends upon preserving a U.S.-led international order built around forward military deployments, permanent overseas bases, alliance management, and institutions such as NATO. Its objective is to prevent the emergence of any peer competitor capable of dominating Eurasia or displacing the United States as the world’s leading military power.

Its intellectual foundations can be found in the leaked 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which argued that U.S. strategy should prevent “the reemergence of a new rival”; the Project for the New American Century (PNAC); Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard; and the Joint Chiefs’ doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance articulated in Joint Vision 2020.

Together these documents describe a strategy of maintaining overwhelming American military superiority across every operational domain while embedding allies within an American-led security architecture.

The America First wing shares the objective of preserving American power but rejects the assumption that global leadership requires permanent global management. It argues that decades of globalization, interventionism, and expansive alliance commitments weakened the United States by hollowing out its industrial base, encouraging endless wars, and shifting resources away from domestic renewal. Rather than sustaining the post-1945 order, it emphasizes rebuilding American manufacturing, securing the border, restoring energy independence, compelling allies to shoulder more of their own defense costs, and employing military force selectively in pursuit of narrowly defined national interests.

The distinction is not one between hawks and doves. Both wings support maintaining overwhelming American military superiority, preserving the dollar-centered international financial system, containing China and Russia, and guaranteeing freedom of navigation across the world’s oceans. Nor is it reflected in defense spending. The annual U.S. defense budget exceeded one trillion dollars in 2026 with overwhelming bipartisan support. The disagreement concerns not whether America should remain powerful, but what kind of military power it should finance.

The Primacy wing prefers permanent presence: overseas garrisons, alliance networks, rotational deployments, and long-term commitments that bind allied militaries to American logistics and industrial supply chains. The America First wing prefers punitive spectacle followed by withdrawal: maximal force, minimal duration, burden-shifted alliances, and military commitments concentrated primarily in the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific.

One favors the fortress abroad.

The other the raiding party.

These differences are commonly described as competing schools of strategic thought. Yet beneath the military doctrines lie two portfolios of defense capital with fundamentally different supply-and-demand structures.

Two Portfolios of Defense Capital

The Primacy wing represents the capital constituency of America’s global military footprint. Its economic foundation rests upon the legacy defense prime contractors — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose business models depend less upon individual wars than upon the infrastructure required to sustain a permanent international military presence.

Their revenues are generated through overseas bases, aircraft carriers, maintenance contracts, logistics, training, software upgrades, spare parts, and Foreign Military Sales extending over decades. A modern weapons platform is not simply sold once; it creates a continuous stream of maintenance, servicing, modernization, and replacement contracts that can endure for half a century.

An aircraft carrier group is therefore not merely a weapon. It is a fifty-year revenue stream beginning in the shipyard and ending at the scrapyard. The Gerald R. Ford-class carrier costs more than US$13 billion to construct, while lifetime ownership costs may exceed US$20 billion once operations, maintenance, modernization, and personnel are included. Every overseas deployment generates additional demand for logistics, fuel, repair facilities, contractor support, intelligence systems, communications infrastructure, and replacement parts.

Foreign Military Sales reinforce this model by embedding allied militaries within American industrial ecosystems. Once a country standardizes around American platforms such as the F-35, Patriot missile systems, or Aegis missile defense, switching suppliers becomes technically complex, economically costly, and strategically disruptive — virtually impossible. Compatible logistics, software, training, maintenance, and munitions create long-term industrial dependence. What Warren Buffett calls a “durable competitive moat” becomes, in geopolitical terms, an alliance structure reinforced by industrial lock-in.

Behind the defense contractors stands another beneficiary: the dollar-security nexus. America’s alliance network encourages governments, investors, and central banks to hold dollar-denominated assets while reinforcing confidence in the broader U.S.-led financial system. Security commitments and financial power therefore reinforce one another.

Primacy is not simply a strategic doctrine adopted by this constellation of capital. It is its business model.

The America First wing is organized around a different portfolio. Its core constituency lies in domestic manufacturing capital weakened by decades of offshoring, energy producers seeking expanded export markets, border-security contractors, and a new generation of venture-capital-backed defense technology firms.

The border-security industry illustrates this model most clearly because immigration enforcement is one of the movement’s defining political priorities. Companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic generate revenue through immigration detention facilities operated under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their fortunes rise with detention capacity, deportation targets, and expanded border enforcement.

Around this detention infrastructure has emerged an expanding ecosystem of surveillance technologies. Elbit Systems supplies fixed surveillance towers along the southern border. General Atomics supplies MQ-9 Reaper drones adapted for border surveillance. Software companies provide biometric identification, case management, predictive analytics, and targeting systems. Charter airlines profit from deportation flights.

The border itself becomes an integrated security market.

The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 dramatically expanded this sector by increasing immigration enforcement funding and significantly enlarging ICE’s operational capacity. For border-security capital, this legislation played a role analogous to NATO enlargement for the traditional defense primes: it created a durable expansion of demand.

The most disruptive agents, however, are the venture-funded defense startups. Anduril Industries began not by building weapons for overseas wars but by developing autonomous surveillance towers for the U.S.–Mexico border before expanding into drones, autonomous systems, and loitering munitions. Palantir followed a similar trajectory, developing data integration and case-management systems for immigration enforcement before becoming a major supplier of military intelligence and battlefield targeting software.

These firms challenge not simply the products of the legacy contractors but their underlying business model. Founder Palmer Luckey has repeatedly argued that traditional defense procurement is too slow, too expensive, and overly dependent upon decades-long cost-plus contracts. Venture-backed firms instead seek rapid development, fixed-price contracts, continuous software updates, and scalable autonomous systems.

The contrast between the two portfolios is therefore more than technological. It is time-based: The legacy primes sell permanence. Their ideal customer is an alliance that lasts generations, sustained by overseas bases, carrier groups, and continuous modernization programs.

Anduril and Palantir sell events — raiding parties. Their ideal customer is a government seeking rapid procurement, autonomous weapons, border security, or a short, high-intensity conflict requiring immediate technological advantage rather than permanent occupation.

One portfolio profits from the garrison. The other profits from the raid. Military doctrine follows naturally. Capital whose revenues depend upon Ramstein Air Base will support doctrines built around permanent forward deployment. Capital whose revenues depend upon autonomous drones, border surveillance, and rapid procurement will favor doctrines emphasizing swift coercion, limited commitments, and technological disruption.

The strategists themselves may genuinely believe their respective visions. Robert Kagan sincerely advocates American primacy. Elbridge Colby sincerely argues for a strategy of denial. Palmer Luckey sincerely believes Silicon Valley can transform defense procurement and make him very rich. Their convictions need not be insincere. But sincerity should not be confused with causality. The deeper division lies not between ideas alone, but between competing structures of capital whose economic interests are sustained by different forms of American power.

Entangling Alliances: The Origins of the Split

Although the contemporary divide appears modern, its roots stretch back more than a century.

The first major rupture emerged after the First World War during the Senate debate over the Treaty of Versailles and the proposed League of Nations. President Woodrow Wilson argued that American security required participation in a permanent system of collective security. His opponents feared precisely the opposite: that international commitments would entangle the United States in conflicts beyond its control.

The most uncompromising opponents became known as the Irreconcilables, led by Senator William Borah. Borah argued that joining the League would abandon the American tradition of avoiding “entangling alliances” that Thomas Jefferson warned of in his inaugural address. Between them stood the Reservationists, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who supported international cooperation but sought constitutional limits on American obligations.

The Senate ultimately rejected the treaty, preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations and exposing a strategic divide that has reappeared throughout modern American history. The debate established two competing traditions: one believing American security depended upon active engagement in shaping the international order, the other insisting that lasting security required freedom from permanent foreign commitments.

Throughout the 1930s that divide hardened.

Senator Borah became one of the principal architects of American non-interventionism, helping shape the Neutrality Acts, legislation intended to prevent the United States from drifting into another European war. When war again threatened Europe, the America First Committee, founded in 1940 and supported by figures including Charles Lindbergh, Senator Robert Taft, and Henry Ford, argued that America’s security depended upon remaining outside another European conflict. Franklin Roosevelt’s supporters reached the opposite conclusion, believing American security required active engagement before hostile powers could dominate Europe.

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor ended that debate politically in 1941, but not intellectually. The isolationist coalition disappeared as an organization, yet many of its underlying assumptions survived within American conservatism: skepticism toward foreign entanglements, concern over executive war powers, opposition to permanent alliances, and a preference for rebuilding national strength before attempting to shape events abroad.

The Cold War temporarily suppressed these disagreements. Containing the Soviet Union required a permanent military establishment, overseas alliances, forward deployments, and a global network of bases. Republicans and Democrats largely converged around this strategy for nearly half a century. Only after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 did the old argument return.

Victory in the Cold War presented the United States with an unprecedented question: What should America do with unrivalled global power?

Two competing answers emerged. One became today’s Primacy wing. The other evolved into today’s America First wing.

The Primacy tradition found its clearest expression in the early 1990s. The documents described above were its product, that advocated overwhelming military superiority, alliance leadership, and active American engagement across the globe. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard supplied the geopolitical rationale, arguing that preventing any rival from dominating Eurasia remained the central requirement of American strategy.

Although Brzezinski was neither a neoconservative nor a Republican, his geopolitical realism complemented the broader primacist project. Together these works became the intellectual architecture of the post-Cold War order.

Ideas alone do not explain why this century-old debate repeatedly returns. Each strategic tradition gradually became attached to different sectors of American capital. As the Cold War military-industrial complex expanded, permanent alliances, overseas bases, and long-term procurement increasingly aligned with the interests of the legacy defense contractors. The post-Cold War backlash against globalization, by contrast, became intertwined with domestic manufacturing interests, border-security industries, energy producers, and, more recently, venture-backed defense technology firms. The ideological divide persisted because it came to rest upon different economic foundations.

Resistance emerged almost immediately. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Patrick Buchanan challenged the Republican foreign-policy establishment by arguing that America should revive the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine — protecting the Western Hemisphere while rebuilding domestic manufacturing, controlling immigration, restoring national sovereignty, and avoiding unnecessary foreign interventions. This position lost the battle inside Republican foreign-policy circles during the 1990s.

Yet it never disappeared.

Opposition to globalization, dissatisfaction with free trade, resentment over deindustrialization, and growing skepticism toward the Iraq War steadily rebuilt the coalition. Donald Trump did not invent America First. He inherited a political tradition stretching back through Buchanan, Robert Taft, and William Borah before transforming it into the dominant movement within the Republican Party.

Viewed through this historical lens, the contemporary struggle within the Imperial Nationalist faction is not primarily a contest between Republicans and Democrats. It is a struggle over the purpose of American power.

The Primacy wing argues that American security depends upon managing the international system through alliances, overseas deployments, and global leadership.

The America First wing argues that American power must first be restored at home through industrial renewal, border security, economic nationalism, and more selective military commitments abroad.

Both seek to preserve American predominance. They disagree over whether that predominance is sustained by governing the international order or by strengthening the American nation-state itself.

Two Wings, Shared Assumptions

Although the Primacy and America First wings frequently appear to be in conflict, they share several fundamental assumptions. Both regard the United States as the indispensable military power, support maintaining overwhelming technological superiority, seek to preserve the dollar-centered international financial system, view China as the principal long-term strategic competitor, and support maintaining freedom of navigation across the world’s oceans.

Their disagreement lies primarily in how American power should be exercised rather than whether it should remain dominant. The documentary record, however, is asymmetrical.

The Primacy wing spent three decades producing strategic doctrine. The Defense Planning Guidance, the Project for the New American Century, Joint Vision 2020, and later concepts such as Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) all describe variations of the same ambition: preserving American military superiority through permanent alliances, technological dominance, and integrated global command systems.

The America First wing produced no comparable body of doctrine. It emerged instead through speeches, campaigns, and political movements rather than military white papers. Its closest equivalent is Robert O’Brien’s essay, “The Return of Peace Through Strength,” which argues for rebuilding American military power while reducing unnecessary foreign commitments. Beyond that, America First is less a doctrine than a posture: selective engagement, burden-sharing within alliances, domestic industrial renewal, border security, and restoring the defense industrial base.

One wing is an establishment with literature.

The other is an insurgency with a slogan.

That asymmetry is itself revealing. It reflects which wing controlled the institutions of American foreign policy during the three decades following the Cold War.

Geopolitics and Rheopolitics

The distinction between the two wings also illustrates the broader argument of The Capitalist Civil War. Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard remains a geopolitical work. It is concerned with territory, alliances, military positioning, and preventing rival powers from dominating Eurasia. Geography remains the principal arena of competition.

Rheopolitics shifts the emphasis.

In the twenty-first century, power increasingly rests not only upon controlling territory but upon controlling the infrastructure through which civilization flows: payment systems, reserve currencies, semiconductors, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, satellites, logistics networks, undersea cables, energy infrastructure, and digital platforms.

The two wings seek control over different parts of that infrastructure. The Primacy wing emphasizes the valves of global military integration: overseas bases, logistics, alliance interoperability, maritime chokepoints, and long-term industrial dependence through Foreign Military Sales. The America First wing emphasizes domestic valves: borders and immigration control. Neither abandons rheopolitical power. They simply prioritize different valves.

Iran: The Raiding Party

The June 2025 conflict with Iran illustrates the America First approach to military power. In June 2019 Donald Trump cancelled planned airstrikes against Iran with aircraft reportedly already airborne before later dismissing National Security Advisor John Bolton, who had consistently advocated a more expansive military confrontation.

The contrast is instructive. For Bolton, military action formed part of a longer strategic project aimed at permanently reshaping the Middle East. For Trump, military force functioned as a raiding party — the objective was not occupation, regime change, or nation-building. It was overwhelming violence followed by rapid disengagement. The same temporal logic characterized the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani. America First was never anti-war. It was anti-commitment.

Six years later, in February 2026, Trump authorized strikes against Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility before almost immediately pivoting toward ceasefire negotiations and declaring the operation complete. This time, however, the raiding party met with a much different Iranian strategy, shutting down Hormuz, a key maritime chokepoint, throttling the world’s oil supply.

Military force remained acceptable provided it produced decisive political leverage without evolving into another Iraq or Afghanistan. The conflict nevertheless revealed the limits of this approach. Although American forces demonstrated overwhelming conventional superiority, they could not by themselves reopen shipping lanes, stabilize insurance markets, restore commercial confidence, or compel a regional political settlement. Those outcomes depended upon cooperation — or at least acquiescence — from multiple actors beyond Washington’s direct control.

The Strait of Hormuz therefore became more than a geographic chokepoint. It became a rheopolitical valve. The episode illustrated a central argument of this book: military superiority alone cannot guarantee control over the global flows of energy, finance, shipping, and information upon which modern civilization depends.

The raid also served as an unintentional audit of the Primacy wing's capital. When Iranian missiles struck Al Udeid in the opening days — disabling the command center that had run American air campaigns across the region for two decades — and did $5 billion in damage to installations from Bahrain to Jordan, the America First wing's short war had demonstrated, on satellite imagery, that the Primacy wing's entire asset class of fixed forward bases are vulnerable targets within Iran’s missile range. The Pentagon's own conclusion — disperse, network, go underground, abandon the large centralized headquarters — was a procurement brief written for the raid wing's portfolio of cheap, distributed, autonomous systems rather than the garrison wing's carriers and bases: one wing's signature war had degraded the other wing's capital and generated demand for its own.

Ukraine: Two Objectives, One War

The war in Ukraine exposed the strategic divide between the two wings with unusual clarity. Both regarded Russia as a strategic competitor. Both opposed a decisive Russian victory, yet they pursued different objectives.

For the Primacy wing, Ukraine became a test of the post-Cold War security architecture. Military assistance to Kyiv reinforced NATO credibility, strengthened American leadership in Europe, and demonstrated that territorial revisionism would impose severe strategic costs.

For the America First wing, Ukraine represented a different problem. Many supported helping Ukraine resist Russian aggression while questioning whether an open-ended proxy war served American national interests. Their preference was to establish military leverage quickly, negotiate from a position of strength, and avoid an indefinite commitment consuming American industrial capacity, fiscal resources, and political attention.

The disagreement therefore concerned duration rather than destination. One wing viewed prolonged alliance management as a strategic investment. The other viewed prolonged commitment as a strategic liability.

The war also revealed why the Davos faction often aligned with the Primacy wing while remaining analytically distinct. For Primacy, Ukraine concerned geopolitical leadership. For Davos, it concerned preserving the institutional, financial, and economic architecture of globalization: sanctions coordination, central bank cooperation, energy diversification, multinational investment, reconstruction finance, and the stability of international markets.

Watch what happened to Russia’s money after the invasion, because it shows the factions fighting in broad daylight. When Russia invaded, the West froze about €300 billion of its central-bank reserves — and the largest piece, roughly €180 billion, has been sitting ever since in a single Belgian institution called Euroclear. The consensus was it should stay frozen but nobody can agree on what to do with it. And in December 2025, the disagreement split cleanly along factional lines. Europe’s plan was to keep the money in European hands and use it to back a loan to Ukraine — leverage held in reserve until Russia pays for the war. At their December summit, European leaders couldn’t even pass that; Belgium, which holds the cash and would face lawsuits, said no, and they fell back to simply keeping it frozen.

Washington had a different plan entirely — and it wasn’t Europe’s. Trump’s proposed peace framework would have pulled the money out of European control, unfrozen it, sent much of it back toward Russia, and turned roughly $100 billion of it into a fund run by American firms to rebuild Ukraine — with future profits split fifty-fifty between the United States and Ukraine. Confiscated Russian wealth, managed by American capital, for an American cut.

The real picture isn’t a secret cabal or a coordinated class dividing the spoils of war — it’s the opposite. The Europeans hold the cash and fear the fallout of spending it. The Americans want to unfreeze it and route the contents to their own contractors. The Russians own it and can’t touch it, but can retaliate — and already have, seizing Western companies’ assets inside Russia and suing Euroclear. That is what this whole book means by a civil war among the powerful: not men in a room agreeing, but factions with incompatible plans, feuding over money, land and resources.

This demonstrates factional divergence and it shows convergence on certain issues, not coordination of agendas. The Primacist and Davos positions are complementary but not identical. The Primacy wing’s organizing principle is American geopolitical leadership — alliances, deterrence, and military power. The Davos faction’s organizing principle is systemic stability — maintaining the institutional, financial, and economic infrastructure of globalization. They often support similar policies in cases like Ukraine, but for different strategic reasons.

Capital Writes Strategy

Ideas do not emerge in an economic vacuum. Different doctrines sustain different procurement systems. Different procurement systems sustain different industries. Different industries generate different political coalitions.

The Primacy wing’s doctrine supports permanent alliances, overseas bases, long procurement cycles, and the industrial ecosystems of the legacy defense contractors. The America First wing’s doctrine supports border security, domestic manufacturing, energy production, venture-backed defense technology, autonomous weapons, and rapid procurement.

Neither doctrine is reducible to economics alone. But neither can be fully understood without examining the structures of capital upon which it rests. Military strategy does not merely reflect geopolitical thought. It also reflects competing political economies of American power.

The two wings beat against one another, but they remain attached to the same imperial body. They share the same assumptions about American military superiority, the dollar-centered financial order, maritime supremacy, and denying China’s rise.

One wing finances the garrison.

The other finances the raid.

Both seek to preserve the empire.

Only the business model differs.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

CHAPTER 17: Mortgaged, Extracted, Disconnected

CHAPTER 18: Permanent Planetary Turbulence

However, Marx and subsequent Marxist scholars acknowledged the existence of additional classes and social strata during his time, including the petite bourgeoisie (small business owners and self-employed artisans who own some means of production but do not exploit wage labor); the lumpenproletariat (a “ragged” proletariat consisting of unemployed, criminals, and those outside the traditional labor market); and landowners, whose income derived from ground-rent rather than industrial capital.

In reality, the petite bourgeoisie and the landowners were the middle class of the time period. Marx’s class stratification was ordered around capital’s relation to labor. The rheopolitical model is the relation of power and capital to flows. The Transnational Capitalist Class exercises denial authority over flows; the subordinate upper classes and Transnational Broker Class service and broker flows; the middle class depends on salary flows, and the working class depend on wage flows; the disconnected precariat have an intermittent access to flows; and lastly, the dispossessed homeless are expelled from the circuits entirely.

Since Marx’s time period, the social stratification has increased, widened and expanded into seven observable classes who are stratified based on their relation to the rheopolitical board.

The Transnational Capitalist Class is a slim spectrum of humanity. Below the four factions, the world’s population is distributed across a class structure that the globalization of power and capital has dramatically reshaped:

1. DENIAL AUTHORITY — the TCC itself. The defining relation isn’t owning the most; it’s holding denial authority over a chokepoint. This is why the faction leaders are the top of the ladder, and also why the ladder connects to the rheopolitical board: the top stratum is defined by the same criterion as the war itself. Control = denial, not ownership, all the way down from the geopolitical to the class level.

2. OPERATIONS — who operate the flows. The personnel who run the infrastructure without holding denial authority over it: senior asset managers, central bank staff, compliance architects, platform executives. They can throttle locally but not deny globally. Their loyalty is to the continuity of the system because their position is the system’s operation. This is also the recruitment pool for the Transnational Broker Class, who operate in between the top three classes.

3. MAINTENANCE — the technocratic professional layer: lawyers, academics, doctors, IT professionals. They don’t operate the infrastructure; they maintain and serve the human and institutional conditions for it — credentialing, adjudicating, educating, legitimating. Salaried security purchased with dependence on the establishment.

4. MORTGAGED — secured, collateralized, revocable access to flows. The middle class proper: stable salary or small-proprietor income, mortgaged into the system, holding just enough assets to fear disruption. Their defining relation is secured access — and that security is precisely what’s eroding in the West, which is what makes them volatile — they have become unstable due to the upward cash flow, cost of living increase and housing crisis. The middle class that could afford a home after WW2 are increasingly unable to now, and are thus dropping down into the lower classes.

5. EXTRACTED — the working class: wage labor whose defining relation is that the flows extract from them more than they draw. De-industrialized in the West, newly incorporated in the East — rural farm workers, factory workers, retail workers, steady wage earners.

6. DISCONNECTED — Those with intermittent, tenuous access — the precariat. Not low income but unsecured relation: gig contracts, algorithmic scheduling, no institutional membership. They touch the flows daily and can be disconnected from them without notice. Intermittency, not poverty, is the category — which is why it produces a distinct political psychology. Urban ghettoized barrio dwellers are one step away from homelessness.

7. EXPELLED — Those expelled from the circuits. Non-persons. The defining relation is that no faction extracts from them, services them, or courts them. Not the bottom of the ladder but removed from the ladder altogether. During the Christian medieval period, it was impossible for Christians to exist without being a member of the Church. Excommunicates were treated as pariahs; they were forbidden from trading, eating, or conversing with other Christians, effectively cutting them off from community life and legal standing.

The best census anyone has managed of the DENIAL AUTHORITY (TCC) is based on income level, because money is what leaves an empirical trace. The World Inequality Report 2026 puts the figure at fewer than 60,000 people — the top 0.001% of the world’s adults, the number of people that would fit in a football stadium — holding roughly 6% of global wealth, three times the holdings of the bottom half of humanity, a share that has climbed steadily from 4% since 1995.

The cut off level for the football stadium attendance is $100 million; at the top of the Forbes 500 there are only a few dozen individuals averaging $50 billion each. These numbers sketch out the outer boundary of the Transnational Capitalist Class, and they are as close as the typical survey of the class can get — because wealth is what the surveys measure.

But this does not reveal an accurate picture about the division that matters. A centi-millionaire fund manager and a platform owner with kill-switch authority over payments infrastructure hold similar portfolios and categorically different power: one operates the flows, the other can stop them. The wealth table cannot see the difference between having and denying — and denying is the standard in the capitalist civil war. The football stadium holds perhaps sixty thousand, but Denial Authority belongs to a fraction of them, roughly 10 percent, with the caveat that this number is an educated guess, because there are no accurate studies done to map out the Denial Authority. The football stadium is the combined Denial Authority and Operations classes.

The civil war at the top is only possible because there is no organized force from below capable of resolving it. The labor movement that once forced the capitalist class toward internal compromise has been dismantled. The socialist alternative that once provided an external challenge has collapsed. The contradictions that used to be managed through class compromise are now imploding within the ruling class itself.

Mortgaged, Extracted and Disconnected

The principal object of competition is not the poor or the rich but the economically insecure majority: the mortgaged, extracted and disconnected whose political allegiance can determine elections, shape legitimacy, and provide the social base for competing visions of economic and political order.

Guy Standing, who coined the term precariat in his book of the same name, claims the precariat is a “dangerous class” not because its members are inherently violent or criminal, but because their chronic economic insecurity and lack of agency make them susceptible to political extremism and prone to destabilizing society.

Standing argues that the precariat lives with pervasive uncertainty regarding income, housing, and rights. This constant stress generates frustration, anger, and anxiety. Unlike the traditional proletariat, the precariat lacks a collective occupational identity or union representation to channel these grievances constructively. Consequently, they feel detached from mainstream society and democracy, creating a volatile political vacuum.

The core danger lies in the precariat’s tendency to vote emotionally rather than rationally. Standing warned in a 2018 lecture that “unless the insecurities, and the fears, and the aspirations of the precariat were addressed as a matter of urgency, we would see the emergence of a political monster“ — a prediction he linked to the rise of populist leaders like Donald Trump and various far-right movements in Europe.

Without a “politics of paradise” (such as Universal Basic Income) to restore security, the precariat risks driving society toward a “politics of inferno” characterized by polarization and extremism. Its eventual political direction may determine whether the Capitalist Civil War ends in a new settlement — or in something far worse.

However, the 2016 election of Standing’s monster revealed a different story: Trump’s primary voters were demographically above median household income, over-indexed on small proprietors, older homeowners, the petty bourgeois — and the often-cited 2018 study by Diana Mutz found perceived status threat a stronger predictor than material hardship. The monster’s voters came disproportionately from the mortgaged under stress — people with something to lose — at least as much as from the disconnected precariat as Standing predicted.

Combined with the mortgaged and extracted, the disconnected represent a political base that is increasingly under stress and thus, they are inclined toward political dysfunction and voter dissatisfaction. The end result is civil unrest and mass protest movements that have already reared their heads: leaderless youth uprisings cascaded across eleven countries and shook governments in 2025 — Bangladesh in 2024 is widely cited as the first Gen Z revolution, followed by Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya’s Finance Bill protests, then Madagascar, Morocco, and a “Gen Z march” in Lima, with leaders falling in Nepal, Madagascar and Bulgaria and continuations into 2026 in Iran and Tanzania.

The root causes varied widely across countries — utilities in Madagascar, pensions in Peru, World Cup spending in Morocco, censorship in Nepal — yet the shared themes of inequality, declining standards of living, corruption and democratic backsliding were all apparent.

Two Monsters

The ballot box and the street uprising are now two monsters that the four factions of the TCC will need to reckon with, sooner or later. The four factions face the same population and have reached four different conclusions about what it is. This is usually described as competition for the allegiance of the voting public, as if four rivals were courting one prize. Only one of them is courting.

The Imperial Nationalists are the populist whisperers, speaking from political pulpits to the mortgaged, extracted and disconnected in nationalist terms. The rally, the slogan, the tariff wrapped in a flag sold as a jobs program, the border sold as wage protection — a patriotic sermon, that the deep state or the globalists or the socialists abandoned you, but we see you. Whether the offer is ever honoured is beside the point; the sales pitch is real, and it has delivered ballots. This is the one faction whose political model actually requires the dissatisfied’s active allegiance — its route to power runs through elections, and elections run through the angry and the insecure.

Silicon Valley does not court the mortgaged, extracted, disconnected. It manufactures it, and recruits from its own product. The gig platform is not a policy toward precarity — it is precarity, given an interface: algorithmic scheduling, no institutional membership, disconnection without notice. From this population the faction recruits a slice, often framed in libertarian Ayn Randian terms. It appeals to the downwardly mobile youth, mostly male, who should be upwardly mobile. The Network State offers exit rather than security, but only to the chosen few. Bitcoin is offered instead of the pension, the social media influencer instead of the credential, the promise that the institutions which failed you were never worth joining. The best they can offer is Universal Basic Income, a severance package, to a class slowly replaced by algorithms, AI and robots. The unemployed can always drive Uber.

Davos does not address the mortgaged, extracted, disconnected, other than vague references in McKinsey risk reports. Davos’ audience is governments, shareholders, and itself. Reskilling initiatives, social safety nets, inclusive capitalism: the programs are real, but the Davos vocabulary is third person, that looks at spreadsheets not persons. No one at the WEF forum asks the disconnected, the extracted and mortgaged for anything, because the faction needs nothing from it except quiet acceptance and compliance. Reporters are allowed inside the annual WEF conclave creating a false transparency — the real meetings are behind closed doors, and the press is loitering in the lobby. The goal is to manage the volatile population so it doesn’t destabilize the systems the faction operates. Keep the capital flowing. Davos prefers risk management to public debate. The mortgaged, extracted, disconnected are a systemic risk.

The State Capitalists have no courtship problem, because they have no allegiance to win. There is no election campaign or ballot to prepare speeches and raise funds. The state’s relation to their own mortgaged, extracted, disconnected — the migrant workforce, the delivery riders, and the surplus young graduates lying flat without motivation or options — has been strained. A notable development came in April 2026, when China’s Ministry of State Security released a video arguing that promotion of “lying flat” represented ideological infiltration by hostile foreign forces seeking to weaken Chinese youth and national cohesion. This marked a shift from treating the phenomenon mainly as a social trend toward framing it partly as a national security issue.

The announcement kicked off widespread social media ridicule, even normally pro-government nationalist commenters and netizens asking: “Is being unable to find work, buy housing, or afford children is also caused by overseas forces?” China attempts to deal with socio-economic issues by enforcing state programs: employment provided, infrastructure built, surveillance extended, while independent organizations are suppressed on social media and groups dismantled. Stability is not offered; it is imposed.

The four factions have unique solutions to domestic crisis: courted, recruited, managed, administered. A voter, a user base, a risk, a subject. The factions do not merely offer different answers to the insecurity of the lower classes — they disagree about what kind of problem it is. Just like their fundamental disagreements on power, capital and time, the four factions’ disagreement on social crises is the fracture itself, visible at the level of class. A unified ruling class would have settled on one relation. Four incompatible relations is what a civil war looks like from below.

And this is why none of the strategies can succeed. Winning over the mortgaged, extracted, disconnected would mean ending its precarity — and precarity is load-bearing in all four accumulation models. The Imperial Nationalists need the social unrest; resolve it and the rallies empty, the flags are rolled, the political sermon loses its passion. Silicon Valley’s margins are made of the flexibility it would have to abolish because the gig economy is the model. Davos requires the labor-market fluidity its safety nets are designed to make tolerable rather than to end. The State Capitalists’ growth model runs on low wage-earners’ duty to keep quiet and go to work. Each faction courts, recruits, manages, or administers a condition it cannot afford to cure. The turbulence at the bottom is increasingly mirrored at the top because the TCC is collectively manufacturing its own instability by feeding off the instability at the bottom.

Wealth concentration flows toward Denial Authority, to the four factions, without coordination — wealth transfer is systemic, not intentional. Operations is a loyalty mechanism, the outer class circle protecting the Denial Authority. Maintenance increasingly isn’t able to trade loyalty for advancement. The Maintenance rung is itself sliding — higher academic institutions are replacing tenured staff with lower wage part time staff to save costs; junior-lawyers are suffering proletarianization turning them into wage-earners; and tech layoffs — as of July 2026, the tech sector remains the epicenter of workforce reductions, with over 165,000 jobs announced globally by mid-2026.

The system from top to bottom is unstable, insecure and volatile. The gradient of insecurity is creeping up the ladder, not just churning at the bottom. Although their extreme wealth has insulated them from much of the turbulence, they are aware that popular uprisings may overthrow national regimes, but the infrastructure stays untouched. The storms can rock the boat but they have secure quarters, behind gated communities, tucked away on private ranches in Wyoming and Hawaii.

New Zealand has emerged as a premier bolthole for wealthy Americans, particularly Silicon Valley tech elites and financiers, who view remote properties as “apocalypse insurance” against geopolitical instability, pandemics, or societal collapse. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is a notable figure in this trend, having purchased extensive land on the South Island and received citizenship after only 12 days in the country, citing it as a “utopia” aligned with his views.

The Transnational Capitalist Class keeps lavish quarters on the upper decks of a ship. Below decks, the second-class cabins, the steerage, the cargo hold and the engine room where the stokers feed a raging furnace. There is no port of call on the passengers’ tickets. The expelled passengers were tossed overboard, adrift in open water. No horn sounds, no boats lower, no search is mounted. The ship does not slow. The wake closes.

On the bridge, four officers fight over the helm. There was never a captain — only a stretch of calm water, years ago, when the officers agreed on a heading and mistook their agreement for a map. Each is now convinced the others will run her aground. None can throw the others overboard; none dares leave the bridge, because a hand off the wheel is a hand ceded.

And the storm does not pass, because it is not weather. It is the sea itself now.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

CHAPTER 17: Permanent Planetary Turbulence

Wolfgang Streeck is a German political economist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. His major work Buying Time (2014), and especially How Will Capitalism End? (2016) make the argument that capitalism is in a terminal crisis — not collapsing in a revolutionary moment, but running down over a long period because the institutions that stabilised it (the postwar settlement, the welfare state, embedded liberalism) are exhausted and there is no successor system being built.

"Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way."

Streeck’s specific contribution to the interregnum debate is this: he rejects the assumption — built into most Marxist and liberal frameworks — that a dying order must produce a new order. The Gramscian formula (”the old is dying and the new cannot be born”) implies the new order will eventually be born. Streeck says: maybe not. "What comes after capitalism in its final crisis... is... a lasting interregnum... a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder."

Maybe what happens instead is a prolonged period of systemic disintegration without replacement. He calls this the long winter, the interregnum that doesn’t end, the entropy of capitalism rather than its transcendence — over the postwar period, capitalism exhausted its capacity to deliver three things simultaneously — economic growth, social stability, and democratic legitimacy. The neoliberal era was an attempt to preserve the first by sacrificing the second and third. That bargain called the rules-based order is itself now breaking down.

But no successor system has the social base, institutional architecture, or hegemonic vision to replace it. So what happens is not a new system — what happens is a slow, multi-decade decomposition, during which the formal institutions of capitalism continue to exist, but progressively lose their coordinating function. Markets become more rigged, states become more captured, infrastructure decays, expert authority collapses, governance fragments. The system doesn’t end; it slowly unravels.

One of Streeck’s key ideas is that the system is without opposition — meaning capitalism has defeated all its organised alternatives, but in doing so has lost the disciplining pressure that made it functional. However, Streeck wrote the long winter argument in 2016 from inside the assumption that capitalism was still a single system in crisis. The rules-based order was cracking but still whole. Now it has factionalised. The decomposition Streeck described is now being driven by four rival capitalist projects, each of which is trying to manage the disintegration on its own terms, and none of which can build a successor.

Streeck explains the season; the rheopolitical framework explains the reason. The “long winter” describes the historical condition of late capitalism — a prolonged era in which the system cannot renew itself. Rheopolitics explains one mechanism sustaining that condition: rival infrastructural factions possess sufficient power to block one another but insufficient power to establish a new hegemonic order. The result is not collapse or transformation, but prolonged strategic paralysis.

The standard frame for great-power competition assumes the actors can leave the system. A multipolar world contains the possibility of new alignments, defections, exit. The current situation of rival factions is what happens when no faction can exit — because each controls something the others cannot function without, and any attempt to head out the door invites the rest to slam the door shut.

2. Nobody Can Exit

Davos cannot exit because it has no state apparatus of its own. Mark Carney, who has become the unofficial point man of Davos, is advocating that “the international order be rebuilt out of Europe.” His middle-powers coalition means Davos is retreating into fixed European borders in the wake of the failure of the Great Reset and the resignation of Klaus Schwab. Carney is attempting to build a multi-state coalition to give Davos military-industrial hard power.

Carney admitted as much, to the Australian parliament on March 4, 2026, that “great powers can compel, but middle powers can convene … Canada is choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience. We’ve adopted a new framework for engaging the world — variable geometry —creating different coalitions for different issues.”

The National Imperialists cannot exit because their domestic political base depends on the spectacle of confronting the other factions. Without the narrative that Trump is draining the swamp and taking out the deep state, his militant attempts at expanding the US-Israel empire are exposed. Netanyahu’s narrative that Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists dissolved when Jared Kushner revealed that Gaza was a proposed condo haven, not a war zone. Starting a war with Iran, under the pretext that Iran is providing weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, is revealed to be an attempt to weaken the China-Russia-Iran axis and crush the State Capitalist coalition.

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns cannot exit because their supply chains, capital sources, and markets are all controlled by factions they ideologically oppose. Silicon Valley cannot fabricate chips without rare earth metals from China or the fabrication plants in Taiwan. And they cannot sell chips without the regulatory rubber stamp of Brussels and export controls from the Imperial Nationalist faction.

The State Capitalists cannot exit because they need access to Western consumer demand, Western technology, and Western financial infrastructure to keep producing. Roughly 25-30% of China’s export trade is directed toward the United States and Europe. China is technologically dependent on western-made advanced microchips in order to compete in the AI market. US chips from Nvidia and AMD still offer superior performance for training large-scale AI models, compared to China’s homegrown versions.

Each faction is structurally pinned by its dependencies on the others. The trap is not quicksand but mutual hostage taking. Every faction holds a lever on every other, and the one act that pulls all those levers at once is the attempt to leave. So no one leaves. But no one rests either: each keeps testing its own grip and probing the others' — tightening here, threatening there — and that ceaseless testing of leverage produces turbulence.

This is a fluid, dynamic conflict rather than a rigid war. Factions frequently form temporary, fragile alliances to defeat a mutual rival, only to turn on each other the moment the immediate threat is neutralized, and this is the deeper analytical reason why the quadripolar order is structurally unable to resolve. It’s not just that the four factions are evenly matched. It’s that the underlying system they are fighting over no longer has the institutional reserves to produce a new equilibrium. Even if one faction “won,” it would inherit a capitalism that has lost the capacity to reproduce its own conditions.

Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” is metaphorically true — the symptoms are morbid not because they predict rebirth, but because the rebirth isn’t coming. The interregnum is the new normal. Capitalism cannot re-invent itself.

Fukuyama’s end of history thesis assumes the plateau is desirable but capitalism’s defeat of all its rivals means it has lost the discipline its rivals once imposed on it. It now fights only itself, and the fight has no end state. The world has virtually zero replacement strategy for capitalism.

Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism is often summarized by his most famous line: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” His argument is not that capitalism is healthy or universally accepted. Rather, it has become the horizon of political imagination. Even those who criticize it tend to assume there is no viable alternative. Politics therefore becomes managerial rather than transformational.

Fisher explains the crisis of imagination (culture). Streeck explains the crisis of accumulation and governance (political economy). Rheopolitics explains the crisis of elite coordination (power).

Streeck’s long winter says capitalism has lost the systemic capacity to reproduce itself. Streeck and Fisher explain the deadlock: a system that cannot reproduce itself, occupied by a population that cannot imagine its replacement. Gramsci’s hegemon of common sense says this is how the world views the ruling class and capitalism. The four factions are fighting inside that cultural and systemic exhaustion. None of them can win because none of them can construct a politically legitimate alternative — they can only manage the decomposition.

3. Historical Parallels

Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Europe contained multiple competing centers of power: The Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, a host of independent kingdoms (England, France, Castile, etc.) and merchant republics like Venice and Genoa all were vying for supremacy.

None could destroy the others, and more importantly, none could leave Latin Christendom itself. Everyone depended upon church legitimacy, trade routes, banking families, Latin literacy, canon law and the diplomatic norms of the times. Kings fought wars while continuing to rely on the Church for legitimacy and administration. When the Pope excommunicated a king, he was not destroying the system; he was weaponizing shared infrastructure. This resembles the modern Western sanctions that function as a modern form of excommunication.

The Holy Roman Empire was famously described by Voltaire, as neither holy, nor Roman, nor truly an empire. It consisted of hundreds of overlapping jurisdictions — princes, bishops, free cities, electors, and the elected emperor — none of whom exercised complete sovereignty. Authority was fragmented, negotiated, and constantly contested. Rival powers fought, formed alliances, and obstructed one another while remaining embedded in the same legal, economic, and religious framework.

The modern global order exhibits a similar structural logic. Sovereignty is fragmented across states, multinational corporations, financial institutions, technology platforms, and international organizations. No single actor possesses sufficient power to dominate the whole, yet none can exit the shared infrastructure on which they all rely. The result is not a stable hierarchy but a condition of permanent strategic rivalry inside a common system. There is also no elected emperor to coordinate the system.

The Italian Renaissance City-State System of Florence, the Concert of Europe (1814-1815) and the Cold War all displayed similar banking networks, merchant routes, diplomatic institutions and the same balance-of-power system. Victory by one threatened everyone. Complete destruction of the system meant economic collapse. Competition therefore became permanent rather than decisive.

After the Congress of Vienna, the great powers (Britain, Russia, Austria Prussia, and France) all competed intensely. Yet all feared another continent-wide revolution like the French Revolution or another Napoleon Bonaparte. They therefore maintained a common diplomatic order while simultaneously trying to improve their own positions.

The United States and the Soviet Union competed across every domain during the Cold War, yet both depended on nuclear deterrence, international finance, maritime trade, telecommunications and diplomatic rules. Neither side could actually “win” without risking mutual assured destruction.

The Cold War became a managed rivalry. Today’s system differs because there are not two blocs but multiple elite coalitions embedded in many of the same corporate, financial, and technological networks. The system is based on mutual asymmetric denial.

4. Trapped Inside a Planetary Infrastructure

In every historical example above, someone could eventually conquer the system. Today, the infrastructure itself has become global. The four factions may fight over dollar finance, semiconductor supply chains, AI models, satellites, cloud infrastructure, undersea cables, payment systems and logistics — but none can simply build an entirely separate world.

The Imperial Nationalists need global manufacturing. The Beijing bloc still depends on access to global markets and technology. Silicon Valley needs states to enforce property rights, build energy infrastructure, and provide security. The Davos-oriented institutions depend on the prosperity generated by states and corporations.

History has seen competing elites before, but today’s transnational ruling class is the first to be trapped inside a single, planetary infrastructure from which no faction can fully withdraw. It is less like a traditional empire than a global version of the Holy Roman Empire — except that its common territory is not Europe, but the world’s interconnected financial, technological, and logistical networks.

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5. Threshold of Factionhood

The four factions are not fixed forever. Beneath them lie subordinate and emerging factions that increasingly possess strategic autonomy. India, Brazil, and the Gulf states are no longer merely regional powers. They are accumulating ownership over critical infrastructure — manufacturing, energy, logistics, finance, rare earth processing, sovereign wealth, digital payments, AI, or strategic geography. Should they acquire sufficient control over infrastructure that the existing four cannot easily circumvent, they cease being swing states and become factions in their own right. A faction is defined not by ideology or GDP, but by its ability to deny others access to something indispensable.

This also gives a clean definition of what separates a state from a faction.

A state exercises sovereignty over territory.

A faction exercises sovereignty over infrastructure.

We thus have a threshold of factionhood. A polity crosses that threshold when it satisfies three conditions:

1. Infrastructure ownership — it controls an indispensable network, technology, resource, financial architecture, or logistical corridor.

2. Denial capability — it can withhold or restrict that infrastructure from rivals.

3. Strategic autonomy — it cannot itself be easily coerced or excluded by any one existing faction.

By those criteria: India is approaching factionhood through semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, digital public infrastructure, manufacturing, and its ability to balance among competing powers. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council are approaching it through sovereign wealth, energy, logistics, AI investment, and control of key maritime chokepoints. Brazil possesses significant agricultural, mineral, energy, and environmental leverage, though it has less denial power over global infrastructure than India or the Gulf states.

The globe is currently in a quadripolar world order, but that could change. New factions may emerge as they acquire pieces of the global operating system. The question is no longer, Who has the largest army? but rather, Who can deny everyone else access to something they cannot function without?

The number of factions is not fixed. Four is not a law of history — it is a snapshot of the present balance of rheopolitical power. Future decades could see five, six, or more factions if new actors accumulate enough ownership and denial capability to become indispensable participants in the global system.

6. Permanent Planetary Turbulence

The transnational capitalist class is not a coherent elite. It has fractured into rival factions, each attempting to reorganize global capitalism according to its own vision. Yet none possesses enough infrastructural power to impose that vision, and none can withdraw from the global infrastructure they all share.

That creates what might be called a hegemonic stalemate, but more accurately it is akin to a four-way bad marriage, where the four partners divorced due to irreconcilable differences, yet still live in the same house because they all own the house and the mortgage needs to be paid.

Each faction can block the others:

• the Imperial Nationalists can weaponize the dollar and military alliances;

• the Beijing bloc can leverage manufacturing capacity and critical supply chains;

• Silicon Valley can control essential digital platforms, AI, and cloud infrastructure;

• Davos-oriented institutions retain influence through finance, multilateral governance, and regulatory coordination.

But none can construct a complete alternative system without relying, at least in part, on the infrastructure controlled by its rivals.

Streeck’s metaphor of a “long winter” conveys duration, but it doesn’t fully convey acceleration. The crises are not simply persisting; they are interacting with one another, amplifying one another, closer to a complex adaptive system continually approaching critical mass but never resolving.

Each of these pressures would be destabilizing on its own:

• AI and technological competition accelerating economic and military rivalry.

• Nuclear deterrence raising the stakes of geopolitical confrontation.

• Climate change, the energy transition, and fossil fuel dependence creating competing imperatives rather than a single policy solution.

• Expanding surveillance capabilities increasing both state capacity and public distrust.

• Housing unaffordability, wealth concentration, stagnant wages, and cost-of-living pressures fueling populist backlash and declining political legitimacy.

The crucial point is that these are not independent variables. They reinforce one another. AI changes military competition. Military competition accelerates semiconductor rivalry. Semiconductor rivalry reshapes supply chains. Climate policy affects energy security. Energy security affects geopolitics. Economic insecurity fuels populism, which in turn constrains governments’ ability to cooperate internationally.

In a fragmented elite system, no faction can address these problems comprehensively because every proposed solution benefits one coalition while disadvantaging another. Consequently, crises are displaced rather than resolved.

If Streeck’s “long winter” describes the historical season of late capitalism, it is a winter in which atmospheric pressure is continually falling. Storm fronts accumulate faster than they dissipate. Rather than moving toward equilibrium, the system moves toward a condition of permanent turbulence, where each crisis interacts with the others, producing compound instability and permanent planetary turbulence.

The civil war between the factions does not freeze history; it supercharges it. Because no faction can impose a durable settlement, every technological breakthrough, geopolitical conflict, ecological constraint, and social crisis becomes another force acting upon the same shared infrastructure. AI, nuclear deterrence, climate change, surveillance, demographic pressures, and popular discontent do not merely coexist. They interact within a globally integrated system whose governing factions lack the capacity to produce a common political settlement. The result is not collapse, nor equilibrium, but a condition of continual turbulence.

Late stage capitalism produces not stagnation, but perpetual, compounding crisis without resolution.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

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Consider SWIFT.

A sovereign state, domestically sound with its borders protected can be rendered impotent if it is unable to transact. Being excluded from SWIFT, by those who are able to exclude, is a far more deadly and cost effective weapon than tanks and artillery. A nation can be undefeated on land and sea, but destroyed by sanctions.

Exclusion from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) effectively disconnects a nation’s banks from the global financial system, preventing the nation from securely sending or receiving payment instructions. This sanction is often described as the “nuclear option” of financial penalties because it paralyzes international trade and finance by freezing a bank’s ability to execute cross-border transactions, meet foreign obligations, or receive payments for exports.

Immediate consequences for Russia in 2022, after SWIFT sanctions, included severe currency depreciation, such as the 30% tumble of the ruble, and the necessity for central banks to double interest rates and impose capital controls to stabilize the economy. Iran and North Korea have long been cut off from SWIFT, since 2012 and 2017 respectively.

The Rheo Core

We introduced the term, rheopolitics, in a previous chapter: from the Greek rheo, meaning stream, river, flow, and thus, by extension, circuit. In contrast to geopolitics, the study of geography and power, rheopolitics has emerged due to the advent of the digital age — the study of circuits and power. The power of the flows, and the power to deny another actor access to the flows.

Rheopolitics is the study of power exercised through the governance, regulation, and denial of the material and digital flows upon which modern civilization depends.

The highest form of rheopolitical power is not the ability to move flows, but the ability to deny them.

In geopolitics, power comes from controlling territory. In rheopolitics, power comes from controlling circulation. Rheopolitical power is the third axis of power, the third grand chessboard — the first being Mackinder’s Eurasian board, followed by the Maritime-Space Commons board, currently dominated by the United States. The Mackinder board is territory that is held; the Commons board is controlled by navies and satellites; and the rheopolitical board is routed. Flow is a separate board because it can be denied without territory held or sea controlled — the chokepoint that isn't a place. Rheopolitics does not replace geopolitics. The first two chessboards remain:

Traditional geopolitics asks Who controls the territory? Rheopolitics asks Who controls the circulation through the territory?

Rheopolitics does not replace geopolitics because states became less important. It emerged because civilization itself became more integrated. A medieval kingdom could survive without global finance or instantaneous communication. A twenty-first century economy cannot. The more interconnected civilization becomes, the more power shifts from territory itself to the infrastructure that allows territory to communicate, trade, compute, finance, and exchange information.

For centuries, rivers mattered because they carried trade. Today, fiber-optic cables are rivers. Financial messaging networks are rivers. Cloud data centers and internet servers are reservoirs, full of data, waiting to be sent down the river. Semiconductor fabs are springs. AI inference clusters are pumping stations.

AI models are cargo. Payments are currents. Protocols are locks. Routers are sluice gates.

The flows are digital circuits, engineered by computer scientists and software specialists who have created the global digital grid. Rheopolitical power is thus control of routing. The grid does not have a single manager, however, but multiple actors who are dominated by four factions.

Rheopolitics describes a shift in the locus of power itself. Traditional geopolitics begins with territory. Rheopolitics begins with circulation. In classical geopolitics, following thinkers like Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman, power comes from controlling physical geography, such as land, sea lanes, chokepoints, resources, and populations.

Land power, sea power, Heartland, rimland.

If no faction can monopolize the global grid, then none can exercise absolute sovereignty. Instead, they compete over specific points of denial within a shared infrastructure. The struggle is less about conquering territory than about controlling the switches, protocols, standards, and chokepoints that allow — or prevent — the circulation of capital, data, computation, and materials. That shifts the central question of international politics from "Who rules the world?" to "Who can stop the world from flowing?"

Political philosopher Carl Schmitt defined political power in his 1922 work Political Theology with the famous dictum: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” This means that true sovereign power is not defined by the routine application of legal norms, but by the absolute authority to suspend the existing legal order during a state of emergency or crisis. In rheopolitics, the “exception” becomes denial. The perfect example was the Reichstag fire, that allowed the Nazis to suspend civil liberties, arrest their opponents and centralize power.

Manuel Castells argues that modern society is organized around networks rather than hierarchies or territories, creating a network society where power is decentralized and flows through electronically processed information networks.

Castells emphasizes that control is exercised by switchers (who connect networks) and programmers (who set network goals), making the ability to link and direct information flows the primary source of power. Castells locates power in the switcher who connects. Rheopolitics locates it in whoever can disconnect.

For the theory of rheopolitics, denial inside the networks is the true exercise of power, not the flow itself, not the ability to connect and direct flows. Castells correctly identifies the emergence of the network society. Rheopolitics accepts this insight but locates sovereign power elsewhere. Networks create circulation. Denial determines sovereignty.

Every modern economy depends upon continuous circulation. Money must flow. Data must flow. Electricity must flow. GPS signals must flow. Software updates must flow. AI models must flow. Cloud authentication must flow. Supply chains must flow.

Medieval Europe possessed its own form of rheopolitics. The Church controlled the institutional circuits of Christendom much as today's financial institutions control the circuits of global commerce. Excommunication functioned as the medieval equivalent of sanctions: not the conquest of territory, but exclusion from the network upon which political legitimacy, diplomacy, and commerce depended.

When Pope Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV in 1076, or when Pope Innocent III excommunicated King John and placed England under interdict in 1208, the objective was not military victory but political isolation. Their realms remained intact, yet their capacity to govern was profoundly weakened because they had been cut off from the prevailing order. Modern sanctions operate according to the same structural logic. They seek not to occupy a nation, but to deny it participation in the networks through which power and prosperity flow.

The Layered Rheopolitical Stack

The rheopolitical board has layers, and denial works differently at each level. The layers ascend from the undersea cables at the bottom of the ocean to the satellites above the stratosphere.

The physical layer is at the base: submarine fiber optic cables on the seabed, the internet exchanges where they land, the energy grids and pipelines, the satellite hardware in orbit. This is the river at its most literal — glass and copper and high-tension wire, water that must run downhill through something built to channel it. Denial here is literal: actors can sever undersea cables, and they have on occasion; the landing stations where the cables connect can be bombed.

Physical denial is an act of war: this is the layer where the rheopolitical board touches both Mackinder’s board and the Maritime-Space Commons board. To cut the cable you must first command the waters above it, whether by navy or airstrike, or terrorist acts of sabotage.

Above the physical layer sits the protocol layer: the conventions that route, which need no physical mass at all. SWIFT and the dollar clearing CHIPS (SWIFT sends the message, while CHIPS moves the money.) The central-bank BIS network and the standards and compliance regimes that decide what counts as certified. These are not objects but agreements — primarily the Basel Accords and a banking directory (SWIFT). Sanctions can also freeze an individual’s assets by being added to a list, controlled by the EU and the United Nations.

The protocol layer splits into two factions: multilateral standards, the Basel Accords are Davos; SWIFT-exclusion-as-weapon and dollar-jurisdiction are Imperial Nationalist domain. The factions are not a clear-cut club, cult or cabal. It is worth repeating they are a fractured class. Overlap and agreement on many issues does not translate into coordination and a hidden-hand agenda.

Denial here is exclusion from SWIFT, and it is the cleanest weapon on the board. Nothing is touched and no shot is fired. A national bank is removed from a list; a bank that was solvent on Monday cannot transact on Tuesday. Exclusion teaches every observer that the directory is a weapon, and sanctions are tools of deniability. To freeze one nation out of the dollar is to inform all the others that the dollar can freeze — which is how the protocol layer created its own competitors, like China and the BRICS who are opting out and creating their own system (CIPS/mBridge).

We can also say that rheopolitical power is the ability to route around the chokepoint. This means denial isn’t absolute. It is only temporary, which contributes to the instability of the global system.

Every denial creates an incentive to build another route.

Above the protocol layer lies the compute layer: not message and not cable, but the advanced chip design and fabrication, the lithography chokepoint, the GPUs and hyperscale data centres, and the critical minerals that feed them. Denial here is neither cut nor exclusion, but something stranger and slower — the denial of future capacity. An export control does not stop a flow today; it withholds the means to build the flows of a decade later — it is slow strangulation over years.

This is the layer where ownership and denial-authority come apart most visibly: the design IP is held in one faction’s hands while the lever that withholds it is pulled by another’s state. The compute layer is where denial becomes time-based, and where the chokepoint captured today is suffered tomorrow.

For a closer look at this layer:

Above the compute layer sits the interface layer, where the factions stop fighting each other and face the people the rheopolitical board routes — the software, the platforms, the accounts, the feeds through which the 99% encounter a world built without them. The lower three layers are horizontal: they are weapons the factions aim at each other. At the interface, the question is no longer which faction can deny another faction, but which can deny the user, the consumer, the average citizen who pays for an internet connection and buys a laptop at Walmart with a debit card.

The 99% are not parties to the Capitalist Civil War but the ground it is fought over, and an account suspended or a payment declined is not a strike in the horizontal war — it is the management of the governed. Three layers where the factions deny each other; one where they deny everyone else.

Physical Layer
↓
Protocol Layer
↓
Compute Layer
↓
Interface Layer

Four layers, three of them are factions denying each other, and the fourth interface layer is where the factions are denying the general population. The rheopolitical board does not offer a single form of power. It offers a menu.

Mutual Asymmetric Denial

This gives us a simple matrix.

Notice something interesting. None of these require territorial conquest. They merely require control over one critical node. Each faction can hurt the others but none can hurt all of them, because denial runs in every direction but unevenly, and this asymmetry is why the Capitalist Civil War is a stalemate rather than a victory.

The argument developed throughout this chapter can be summarized as a set of first principles. or rheopolitical laws. If geopolitics has its Heartland Theory and sea power doctrines, then rheopolitics has its own foundational laws.

The Valve

The fundamental unit of rheopolitical power is the valve: the point at which a flow can be permitted, redirected, or denied. Every modern civilization depends upon continuous flows of capital, data, energy, computation, materials, and information. These flows move through physical infrastructure, digital networks, financial protocols, and software systems. Wherever a flow can be interrupted, a valve exists. Control of the valve — not ownership of the entire network — is the essence of rheopolitical power.

The First Law of Rheopolitics

The first law of rheopolitics is that power lies not in owning the network, but in possessing indispensable points of denial. Networks create circulation, but sovereignty is exercised at the moment a flow can be interrupted. The actor capable of withholding chips, excluding banks from payment systems, restricting critical minerals, or severing communications possesses power, not because it owns the entire system, but because it controls a valve within it.

The Second Law of Rheopolitics

The second law of rheopolitics is that no actor controls the entire network; every actor controls only particular valves. The global grid is governed by multiple competing centres of power. State Capitalists dominate strategic materials and manufacturing, Imperial Nationalists command financial and legal instruments of coercion, Silicon Valley controls critical digital infrastructure and advanced computing, while Davos Globalists exercise influence through international institutions and regulatory standards. Each possesses unique denial capabilities, yet each remains dependent upon valves controlled by the others. Absolute sovereignty therefore gives way to mutual asymmetric dependence.

The Third Law of Rheopolitics

The third law of rheopolitics is that the effectiveness of denial is proportional to dependency. Not all flows possess equal strategic value. The more essential a society becomes to a particular technology, financial system, supply chain, or communications network, the greater the power of those who can interrupt it. Denial derives its force not from coercion alone, but from the degree to which the denied actor lacks a viable alternative.

The Fourth Law of Rheopolitics

The fourth law of rheopolitics is that every successful denial creates an incentive to route around the chokepoint. Denial is never static. Sanctions encourage alternative payment systems, export controls accelerate domestic manufacturing, and technological embargoes stimulate indigenous innovation. Every exercise of rheopolitical power encourages the construction of new routes that bypass existing valves. The struggle for power therefore becomes a continual contest between the creation of chokepoints and the effort to escape them.

The four rheopolitical laws summarized:

1. Power lies in denial, not merely in connection.

2. No faction controls the whole network; each controls different valves.

3. Dependency determines the effectiveness of denial.

4. Every denial encourages the creation of alternative routes.

Geopolitics never disappeared. Armies still occupy territory. Navies still patrol oceans. Air forces still command the skies. But beneath those visible contests over geography, another struggle has emerged. Civilization now depends upon an infrastructure of continuous circulation — of data, finance, energy, software, and computation. The central political question is therefore no longer simply who controls territory, but who controls the valves through which civilization flows. That is the domain of rheopolitics. The future belongs not to those who rule the map, but to those who control the flows across it.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

Many conspiracy theories perform a similar function in our secular age. They reject randomness and contingency, and assume a hidden hand or secret society behind major events. This is the attempt to resolve a chaotic and complex world by assigning a simplistic intentional group of actors.

This provides a morally satisfying explanation for suffering, the decline of the West, or injustice. It is much easier to identify globalist villains who orchestrate and manipulate events. The alternative explanation of anarchy, randomness and chaos does not offer a complete or soothing worldview.

Conspiracy theories often answer the modern question: “If no God governs history, why is the world so broken?”

Their answer is: “Because secret actors are controlling the world.”

The hidden cabal theory replaces divine providence as the explanatory force.

Think of it this way: Where the believer holds that God has a hidden plan, the theorist holds that the cabal does. Religion says evil serves a larger purpose; the conspiracist says events serve a hidden agenda. Scriptures give the faithful possess special insight; but the awake possess special insight into political reality. Revelation discloses the truth, but so does the leak. And where heretics refuse the revealed word, the normie refuses the red pill.

Immanentizing the Eschaton

The political philosopher Eric Voegelin argued that many modern ideologies “immanentize” religious structures, bringing transcendent explanations into secular politics. Similarly, Michael Barkun describes conspiracy beliefs as systems that seek to explain all significant events through hidden intentional forces. William F. Buckley popularized the slogan — Don’t immanentize the eschaton — and circulated buttons and bumper stickers. To immanentize the eschaton is to attempt to bring about the eschaton — the transcendent, divine end of history or "Kingdom of God" — within the immanent world of human history and experience. In simpler terms, it is the effort to create heaven on earth through human political action, rather than waiting for divine intervention.

That does not mean that every conspiracy theory is a theodicy. Some conspiracies turn out to be real. The Watergate scandal, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and aspects of the Iran-Contra affair involved genuine secret coordination. Investigating hidden power is not inherently conspiratorial in the pejorative sense.

Conspiracy theory is a secular theodicy: an attempt to explain evil, suffering, and historical complexity through the actions of hidden, malevolent agents. Where religious societies explained evil through demons, sin, and divine mystery, secular theodicy explains it through conspiracies, hidden networks, and secret elites.

The strongest part of the analogy is not the existence of hidden actors; it is the psychological need to believe that someone is in control, even if the someone is a cabal of evil and secretive billionaires. A theodicy preserves faith in a meaningful cosmos. A conspiracy theory preserves faith in a meaningful history. Both are often easier to accept than the possibility that no one is fully in charge and that many large outcomes emerge from the interaction of countless competing actors.

A reader of this book may suspect it of the very error described here — four factions is, after all, a small number of hands. The distinction is the whole of a forthcoming chapter; for now it is enough to say that convergence is not conspiracy, and the secret meetings never happened. Karl Popper explained that the cabal needs an author, and there is none. Convergent interest requires no meeting. That argument is the next chapter’s; this one only clears the ground for it.

Popper coined and defined the conspiracy theory of society in a 1948 lecture collected in Conjectures and Refutations. He wrote: “The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything.” This is the view that whatever happens in society, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages — are the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.

The conspiratorial commentariat is all yin and no yang. If conspiracy theory functions as a secularized theodicy, then it often lacks something that traditional religious theodicies possess: a positive metaphysical counterweight to evil.

In Christianity, evil is real, but it is not ultimate. Satan exists, but God is sovereign. Sin exists, but so does grace, redemption, and salvation. History has a direction that ultimately leans toward reconciliation. The believer can suffer without concluding that evil has won. In Christian theology, ultimately good wins, but in secular theodicy, evil always has the upper hand.

Many conspiracy theories are remarkably asymmetrical: There is a hidden evil. The evil is extraordinarily powerful. The evil controls institutions. The evil controls media. The evil controls finance. The evil controls politics. The evil controls culture.

Yet there is often no corresponding source of good with comparable power, which results in a cosmology of near-total defeat. The believer may possess knowledge, but not agency. They are “awake,” but awakening changes little because the adversary is presumed to control everything.

That said, conspiracy theory is a political religion. The conspiratorial commentariat that posts online in feverish, often fanatical tones portrays a world of ultimate doom, often oscillating between apocalyptic despair (”Everything is rigged,”) and millenarian hope (”The Great Awakening is coming.”)

The Great Awakening is an attempt to reintroduce a missing religious element: redemption. If the conspiracy worldview remained purely secular and purely pessimistic, it would be psychologically difficult to inhabit for long. Eventually it tends to generate some equivalent of salvation—a reckoning, disclosure, revolution, awakening, collapse of the cabal, etc.

This may be why many conspiracy movements gradually acquire quasi-religious features. The structure begins to resemble religion because humans need more than an explanation for evil; they need an explanation for the possibility of good.

The worldview has its prophets — Icke, Jones, Q — who interpret rather than report. It has revelation in the leak and the dump, and the language of conversion to go with it: wake up, red pill, disclosure. It has scripture, a canon of drops and screenshots read with the intensity of exegesis. It has an always-imminent eschatology — the Storm, the Great Reset, collapse is one crisis away. It has its elect, the Awake against the sheep, alienation turned to dissident status, self-identifying heroes fighting valiantly against the deep state or the globalists. And it has judgment: the tribunals, the reckoning, the day the hidden evil is finally exposed. What assembles itself out of these parts is not a theory. It is a secular religion that has misplaced or lost its God.

This may explain why conspiracy thinking can become socially corrosive and personally destructive. If every institution is captured, every leader compromised, every expert lying, and every event manipulated, then trust is irrational. The world becomes populated almost entirely by villains, dupes, and victims.

Doom is inevitable. Resistance is futile. Orwell was right.

Ironically, this is where many conspiracy theories become less realistic than the world they are trying to explain. Actual political and economic systems are usually messier, a labyrinth of corruption and a tragedy of errors. They contain selfish actors, altruistic actors, competent actors, incompetent actors, competing factions, accidents, unintended consequences, and genuine disagreements. The world often contains both more good and more chaos than conspiracy theories allow.

A conspiracy theory is a secular theodicy without grace. The conspiratorial commentariat act as its priest-class, an online panel of daily commentators who explain events, politicians in the context of the revealed scriptures.

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Why This Structure Emerges

The deeper question is why these similarities keep appearing — both religion and conspiracy theory are attempting to answer the same existential questions about the problem of evil. Religion answers these questions through God, angels, sin, salvation, and judgment. Conspiracy theory answers them through elites, secret networks, hidden plans, disclosure, and exposure. The sociologist Peter Berger argued that humans require a “sacred canopy”—a framework that makes reality intelligible. When traditional religious belief weakens, the need for a coherent explanatory framework does not disappear.

A traditional religion usually balances evil and good, judgment and mercy, corruption and redemption, but the conspiracy worldview preserves the first half but struggles with the second. They explain evil very effectively, but often have difficulty explaining grace, forgiveness, creativity, love, beauty, or genuine moral progress.

That is why conspiracy movements often drift toward apocalyptic expectation. Once evil becomes the organizing principle of history, some dramatic revelation or judgment is needed to restore hope.

In that sense, conspiracy theories are not merely alternative explanations of politics. They can become alternative cosmology and modern mythology — stories about the hidden structure, purpose, and destiny of the world. The more comprehensive they become, the more they begin to resemble the religious systems they implicitly replace.

Karl Popper named this error. Most large social outcomes are nobody’s plan. They emerge from unintended consequences, institutional momentum, competing interests, feedback, accident. Nothing, as Popper put it, ever comes off as intended. History is rarely a series of orchestrated events. It is almost always: many people pursuing their own goals and the results are often something no one chose.

Conspiracy theory cannot tolerate that. It installs a cabal where God used to sit. Karl Popper wrote that the conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning god and then asking who is in his place. It is, in his phrase, a secularization of a religious superstition. An authored world — even a malevolent one — is easier to endure than an unauthored one. But the throne it fights over is the earthly one, the seat of historical control, and that seat is empty. No hidden hand or secret puppeteers direct the wreckage of human actions.

Whatever one believes about the cosmic order, the worldly order has no author — and the world runs anyway, chaotically, alternately producing more good and more chaos than any conspiracy allows. That is the more difficult thought, and the one neither the believer nor the awake will hold: not that the wrong hand is pulling the strings, but that no human actors are pulling the strings.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

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Since the end of the Cold War, strategists have repeatedly produced plans for American primacy. The question behind all of them is the same: what would it actually take to rule the world?

In 2026, the answer is surprisingly simple.

Any contender would need to:

make the chips
clear the money
guard the sea
build the board

Four tasks, on three grand chessboards, two of them are physical geography. The third, the rheopolitical board carries two of the four — make the chips, clear the money — which is why it is the most contested.

For a deep dive into the three grand chessboards:

2. The Empty Throne

The throne does exist but only disassembled, because the four pieces don’t combine, scattered among enemies. Like an IKEA purchase that came in a box, unassembled — you read the instructions and realize it’s a bookshelf, a bed, a desk and a lamp, and there is no possible way to put all four together into one product, even with the instruction manual included.

Power on the world stage is no longer strictly geopolitical, and there are four power centers, each one with a different piece of the map.

For example, Taiwan owns the fabrication plant to build the B200 AI chip, but China and USA are in an armed truce contesting the island. The chip itself has multiple supply chain and manufacturing requirements that make it alternately impossible for any one faction to take control. Meanwhile, Brussels has created regulatory rules about chips.

3. How to make the chips, clear the money, guard the sea and build the board.

The Imperial Nationalists hold the sea and the dollar’s hard power. They need the chips and Mackinder’s board. But their method is hard power denial — tariffs, export bans, sanctions, walls, guns and wars — and denial strangles chip supply and de-industrializes the home base. To get the missing two pieces, they’d have to reopen the flows their nationalism exists to close. They can only do that by becoming Davos and creating an Umbrella State, that everyone huddles under to keep dry.

The Umbrella State would open diplomatic channels to all nations, cease hostile tariffs and bombing campaigns, and partner with Davos to create multi-stakeholder summits and conferences on American soil.

MAGA does Davos.

Tariffs, export controls turned inward, and the hollowing of domestic fabrication all point toward the same contradiction: the Imperial Nationalists require open flows to obtain the pieces they lack, but their ideology is built on restricting flows. Trump is currently burning bridges for this in a great fire called MAGA. Instead of building an umbrella, Trump is actively burning it to the ground. Trump's tariff regime is disrupting the trade flows required for advanced semiconductor production.

Secondly, China is already building Mackinder’s board: The Belt and Road Initiative is well underway. America’s remaining options are either more extreme hard power: blow it up — or join forces with the Chinese, to finance and build the project.

Not going to happen.

Davos. Clears the money through SWIFT, BIS, IMF, WORLD BANK and the ECB, and its regulatory legitimacy — the dollar’s other half, the trust hard power can’t manufacture. The globalist faction — organized at the World Economic Forum every year — owns the legitimacy story.

Davos has no hard power. It needs guns, chips and Mackinder’s board. It has no coercive layer at all. The instant it picks up a weapon to enforce anything, the neutrality story dies and the money it clears splinters into rival rails. Davos can only win by becoming the Imperial Nationalists — at which point it clears only America’s money, not everyone’s. Mark Carney’s middle powers coalition is Davos’ attempt to acquire a state and build a military-industrial complex to challenge the Imperial Nationalists and the State Capitalists simultaneously.

Davos is having an existential crisis, well-documented at the Munich Security summit in February. A brutal, scathing and one-sided document was published in the run-up to the summit, entitled Under Destruction.

The Munich Security Report 2026, edited by Tobias Bunde and Sophie Eisentraut, pulled no punches in its thesis: the world has entered “wrecking-ball politics,” and the US-led post-1945 order is being demolished from within, with Trump named as “the most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions.”

Silicon Valley. Designs the chips it can’t fabricate, and privatized a slice of the sky. Needs sea, money, and a state — but it can’t do any because all three require the one thing the network-state faction is built to escape: sovereign force and a recognized currency. You can’t enforce a sanction from orbit, no one clears their savings in a coin backed by a man rather than an army, you can’t build a city from a server. They can only do any of this by becoming a state — which negates the exit that defines it.

The Network State is the attempt to bypass the state by building Special Economic Zones, piggy backing on an existing state. The Network State is not responsible for roads, sewers, traffic laws, electrical grid and they escape state taxation — thus reaping the benefits of the state without the headache. Even if Network States succeeded technically, the most-cited real-world attempt, Próspera in Honduras, had its legal foundation repealed in 2022 and ruled unconstitutional from inception by the Honduran Supreme Court in 2024; it now survives mainly through a multi-billion-dollar arbitration claim against the very state that revoked it. Even assuming it could expand beyond its small footprint on Roatán, it would take decades to build a collective nation that is both physical and digital — and that is the parasite-on-the-state problem in its purest form: the zone outlives the host’s consent only by suing.

A network of global city-states bunkered on existing state property, interconnected by the internet, seems more of a science fiction fantasy than a realistic plan. For the foreseeable future, the Network State vision seems destined to either flop entirely or exist as a parasite on the state. The only other option is to infiltrate the existing order, and dismantle it, such as Elon Musk’s DOGE fiasco, or Peter Thiel’s Palantir project.

Palantir’s leadership, including CEO Alex Karp and CTO Shyam Sankar, has positioned the company as something like the software backbone and central operating system for defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies.

The structural concern doesn’t need a conspiracy frame to land. In 2025, thirteen former Palantir employees — engineers, managers, and a member of the company’s own privacy team — signed an open letter, shared with NPR, warning that the guardrails meant to prevent discrimination and abuse of power were being violated and rapidly dismantled. A firm built to fuse with the state, and insiders saying the brakes are coming off: that is the switchboard becoming the operating system, described without a single hidden hand.

Reviewing the Imperial Nationalists, Davos and Silicon Valley: in all three, the faction’s defining strength is the direct cause of its fatal gap. There is no plausible path forward for any of these three factions to even attempt a global coup.

4. The One That Almost Works

China is the only real contender for global domination, because it holds three of the four things necessary to rule the world.

The only faction that fuses the boards by design — party and capital are in one hand. China builds the board (BRI), guards the sea (growing blue-water navy capability, BeiDou), clears its own money (CIPS, mBridge, digital yuan). Three of four, and the only player even attempting all of them, with the caveat that China possesses a credible pathway toward maritime control, not current supremacy, and clearing your own money is not the same as clearing the world’s reserve currency.

China can’t make the chips. Leading-edge fabrication still routes through TSMC and ASML, inside the Western denial perimeter. This is precisely what the export-control regime is for.

China currently bypasses Western hardware restrictions through massive state subsidies and software optimizations, even though its local fabrication capabilities remain physically restricted. Because strict export bans prevent domestic foundries from acquiring cutting-edge Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, manufacturers like SMIC are repurposing older Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) equipment. While this multi-patterning technique suffers from low manufacturing yields and high production costs, heavy government funding is targeting — by Bloomberg’s reporting — up to 1.6 million total AI chip dies in 2026, including 600,000 units of the premier Ascend 910C. These are production targets, not shipped totals: the binding constraint is high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and without foreign HBM, analysts doubt Huawei clears even a million units.

While an individual Chinese chip delivers only about 60% of the inference performance of an older Nvidia H100, China may be able to bridge this hardware gap using advanced clustering and software workarounds. A Huawei-led team claims — via a Shenzhen government announcement, with no published benchmarks — that it completed full-parameter post-training on DeepSeek’s 1.6-trillion-parameter V4-Pro model using a cluster of 1,000 Ascend 910C processors. (Post-training is the lighter job; the heavier pre-training run almost certainly still ran on Nvidia hardware.) Furthermore, by building software links to standard global frameworks like PyTorch and utilizing highly optimized FP8 mathematical formats, Chinese AI laboratories are effectively running frontier-class models on local, less advanced hardware.

China does not own the money. A reserve currency requires that strangers believe you’ll let them take their money out. A party-state whose entire advantage is total control cannot credibly promise not to use that control. The fusion that lets China play three boards with one hand is the exact thing that disqualifies its currency from the fourth. To make the yuan trusted, the Party would have to relinquish control of capital — stop being the State Capitalist faction.

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5. The Law of the Empty Throne

The stalemate is not that the factions are evenly matched — evenly-matched players still produce winners on a lucky break. The factions have mutual asymmetric denial. It’s structural: victory requires self-annihilation. The closer a faction gets to commanding the world, the more it stops being itself. The missing piece is always behind a door that opens only if you become the faction you’re trying to defeat.

The great difference between the world that prompted Mackinder to give his speech in 1904 to the Royal Geographical Society in London was that control of the world was possible through strictly geographical means. The world had an empty throne, but still an attainable throne, because power was concentrated on a physical space. Our modern world has four pieces of one throne that won’t assemble, centered on three different chessboards: two are physical geographic boards, and the other is the rheopolitical board made of chips, data, financial clearing and messaging systems.

6. Why Nobody Can

If China can build premium AI chips as good as or better than Blackwell B200 chips, and continue building the Belt and Road, expand its CIPS/mBridge clearing system and expand its navy beyond the South China Sea, it would have a slim, but possible chance to rule the world.

But…

The blowback against Chinese dominance would be astronomical. A defeated, dejected and morally bankrupt United States, that is simultaneously at war with the Davos globalists and at odds with its Silicon Valley allies (who are alternately partnering with the American state and attempting to capture it) would not end the stalemate.

Capturing every chokepoint — compute, clearing, sea lanes, land routes, materials, energy — doesn’t make China the supreme combatant. It makes China the terrain. And terrain doesn’t win wars; it’s the surface wars are fought across. The moment one faction owns the entire grid, it stops being a player with leverage and becomes the thing everyone else must deny, route around, or break.

Davos is the only faction that needs everyone else’s cooperation to function, and this dependence is its structural weakness. Full-stack capture hands that exact weakness to China at planetary scale. The grid only has value while it’s used and it requires others to stay on it. Weaponizing any node to win the war empties that node. You cannot run the world’s clearing system and weaponize it in the same gesture — the first defection begins the instant the system is revealed to be a weapon.

This is exactly what happened with American sanctions against Iran, Russia and others — China saw this and reacted by creating an alternate payment system, and forming an eco-alliance with the BRICS project.

Concentration is fragility, not only power. Every piece in the set is also a target, and the more complete the set, the higher the payoff for breaking any single link. A monopoly on fabricating B200 chips is the most valuable kinetic and embargo target on earth — owning the one thing everyone needs is an invitation to war, not a moat.

Rare-earth leverage depreciates the instant it’s exercised; squeeze processing and you fund Lynas Rare Earths plant, MP Materials, the Australian and North American mineral processing plants fire up and become financially viable. A chokepoint teaches the world to route around it the first time it’s used as a weapon. CIPS nodes are sanctionable, and rails are not reserve trust — mBridge gives you infrastructure but not the world’s willingness to hold your currency. Each chokepoint that is captured converts, on use, into a chokepoint suffered.

A Chinese frontier chip would not capture frontier-lab demand that sits inside the US security perimeter — it captures its own bloc plus the Global South. The Imperial Nationalist response to a Chinese B200 isn’t market surrender; it’s export control run in reverse, a hard compute-bloc partition. US would either put tariffs on the Chinese chips or ban them altogether.

The Strait of Hormuz is the single chokepoint the Imperial Nationalist faction is most organized to contest — the home game of the US-Israel axis. Securing oil through the most contestable waterway on the planet, via a sanctioned and internally fragile junior partner, is a dependency dressed as an asset. China’s actual energy-security posture runs overland — Russia, Central Asia, pipelines — precisely to exit Hormuz, not to plant a flag in it. Leaning on the Strait is strategically regressive: it accepts the one battle the other side most wants to fight.

So the blowback, stated cleanly: not the defeat of China, but the conversion of China from player to terrain. In the stalemate, China is a combatant with leverage — it can withhold, deny, route, and extract because no one owns the whole board. In closure, China owns the board and therefore is the board: the universal target, the thing armed against and routed around by a coalition that exists only because China completed the set. The stalemate is therefore the stronger position. Mutual asymmetric denial is mutual for a reason — the mutuality is what keeps China a combatant. Unilateral capture breaks it and hands the asymmetry to the other side. Now everyone denies China, and China, having become the grid, cannot deny back without degrading itself.

According to Sun Tzu: “Should the enemy strengthen his vanguard, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his vanguard... If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.”

Everywhere strong is everywhere weak.

The great powers of the twentieth century fought over a throne. The twenty-first century has an empty throne, split into four pieces. Every faction holds part of the set. Every faction can block the others. None can complete it.

The age of world domination did not end because the contenders became weaker.

It ended because power itself fragmented.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

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As the post-Cold War order fragmented into competing centers of power, a growing class of transnational intermediaries became essential to maintain the flow of capital, technology, information, and diplomacy across rival blocs. This intermediary social class — the Transnational Broker Class (TBC) — does not primarily own global infrastructure. They broker relationships between those who do.

The four factions are fighting over a shared global infrastructure, and the TBC serve an important function: they explain why the infrastructure hasn't broken apart despite increasing geopolitical conflict. They are the connective tissue that allows rival factions to compete without fully decoupling. That role gives them a potentially distinct set of interests, institutions, and loyalties that are different from any single faction.

The rise of institutions and professions whose value comes entirely from cross-system navigation — such as global consulting firms, sovereign wealth advisors, geopolitical risk analysts, international arbitration lawyers, regulatory specialists, ESG and compliance experts, sanctions specialists, AI governance professionals and cross-border investment managers — many of these occupations barely existed in their current form a generation ago. Their growth reflects increasing complexity and fragmentation. What unites these professions is not industry, nationality, or ideology. It is the source of their social power. Their status derives from their ability to translate, connect, and negotiate between otherwise disconnected systems. Their wealth is generated through intermediation itself.

Imagine a Gulf sovereign wealth fund. The monarch wants American security guarantees, Chinese infrastructure investment, access to Nvidia chips and access to global financial markets. None of the players fully trust one another. Someone has to negotiate. Someone has to structure the deals. Someone has to manage regulatory risk. Someone has to maintain relationships across all four camps.

Not as rulers or owners.

But as brokers.

The fragmentation of the post-Cold War order transformed a previously diffuse professional-managerial layer into a distinct transnational intermediary class whose primary function is managing relationships between rival centers of power. The classical comprador described by Baran, Frank and Amin depends on hierarchy. The transnational comprador depends on fragmentation. Under one master the comprador is a servant; under four competing buyers he’s a broker with options.

The 1990s assumption was that there would be one dominant system. One reserve currency, one security architecture, one internet, one set of institutions, one globalization project.

Whether people liked it or not, the expectation was convergence.

Instead we got divergence.

The broker class did not emerge out of nowhere, but it expanded, consolidated, and became more visible as a distinct class because of the fracturing of the system. This necessitates a transnational brokerage class. Just as money left the nation, so did the TBC leave the nation.

By Marx's measure, a class is defined by a group’s specific relationship to the means of production — they barely qualify, because they own nothing; but by Pierre Bourdieu's measure they qualify cleanly, because their capital is the network and the credential, not the factory.

Marx distinguished between a "class in itself" (a group sharing an economic position but lacking collective consciousness) and a "class for itself" (a group that has developed political organization and awareness of its shared interests). The TBC are a class permanently in-itself and never for-itself, because the moment the brokers organized as a self-conscious bloc they'd become a principle faction, and a faction can't broker.

Historically, global capitalism has always required intermediaries: Colonial trading companies had agents; the British Empire had compradors and merchant houses; the postwar American order had international bankers, diplomats, lawyers, consultants, and multilateral bureaucrats. Globalization after 1990 created armies of cross-border managers and technocrats.

The transnational broker class is the glue of the entire system — the layer that prevents the capitalist civil war from becoming a complete rupture. They are the diplomats, bankers, consultants, lawyers, fund managers, and intermediaries who continuously translate between rival power centers occupying the same global infrastructure. Classical compradors served a single empire. Transnational compradors broker among competing empires.

The fracture at the top manufactures leverage at the bottom. The transnational broker sits between a faction’s resources, routes, rails and external capital, and converts the first into export flows for the second. His leverage is that the buyers compete for the same deposit. The faction owns a chokepoint and can deny; the TBC only brokers access and can auction it. This is what keeps him below the line in the Layered Global Map we discussed in the last chapter:

Loyal to the System

They are loyal to the system before they are loyal to any faction.

The Imperial Nationalists want victory.

The Beijing faction wants victory.

Silicon Valley wants victory.

Davos wants victory.

The structural interests of the broker class favor continuity. Their influence expands when global flows remain open, when rival factions continue to interact, and when fragmentation remains manageable rather than absolute. Their nightmare is not that one faction wins. Their nightmare is that the system fragments so badly that brokerage itself becomes impossible. That gives them a distinct class interest separate from all four factions.

The Transnational Capitalist Class owns the infrastructure, (with the caveat that each faction only owns a segment). The broker class manages the relationships that allow that infrastructure to function across competing power centers. They become the diplomats, fund managers, consultants, lawyers, regulators, policy experts, and dealmakers whose primary allegiance is to the continued operation of the global system itself.

Unlike the Transnational Capitalist Class, the TBC rarely owns the infrastructure they manage. Their power derives not from ownership but from access, translation, and coordination.

The classical bourgeoisie are bound by ownership.

The working class are bound by labor.

The transnational brokers are bound by intermediation.

Their income, status, and power come from connecting networks that otherwise would not connect. They function as both diplomat and broker. The broker keeps systems connected, prevents collapse and maintains the flows. The broker is also an arbitrageur who profits from fragmentation itself, selling the same access to rival buyers.

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Modern Merchants of Venice

The merchants of Venice genuinely connected East and West. They facilitated trade, reduced transaction costs and moved information. They also became extraordinarily wealthy because East and West remained separate political systems. If Europe and the Ottoman world had become one unified political space, much of Venice’s brokerage premium would have disappeared.

Venice wasn’t causing fragmentation.

It was monetizing fragmentation.

You might think of the TBC as having two simultaneous conflicts of interests that require a continuous balancing act. They need to keep the system functioning, avoid trade collapse, financial collapse or total decoupling.

Global war is bad because it shuts off the parties, crushes trade and stops the negotiation process. De-coupling is bad because it cancels everything. De-risking is good because it keeps the players at the negotiation table. This is their public-facing technocratic mission. Their second-order interest is to prevent complete consolidation because consolidation eliminates brokerage.

If Beijing wins completely, Washington wins completely, Davos wins completely or Silicon Valley wins completely, then the need for intermediaries declines. Their market shrinks. Their leverage disappears.

They don’t want peace. They don’t want war. They thrive under tension. The broker class is not invested in victory, but in managed rivalry.

Profile of the Broker

The broker is credentialed at the institutions that issue transnational degrees — Harvard, the LSE, Sciences Po, Tsinghua, the National University of Singapore — but the degree only opens the door — what qualifies him is that he is trained to operate in systems rather than places, at home in all of them and native to none. The Abu Dhabi fund executive who studied in London, deals in Beijing, and banks in New York is not cosmopolitan as a matter of taste. He is cosmopolitan as a condition of employment.

His disposition follows from his function. He is a technocrat before he is a partisan — not because he lacks convictions but because conviction is a liability in his line of work. His question is never what is right but what is feasible. He is loyal to the deal closing, not to the side that wins. That makes him post-ideological in the only sense that matters: he is a hired gun for the nationalist, globalist, party-state or libertarian, because taking a side could cost him the other three clients.

Stability good, connectivity good, disruption bad — this is not a creed but the view from the broker’s seat, and it puts him permanently at odds with the populisms that want the board torn out.

Transnational brokers aren’t a blob — each sits on a different segment of the pipe.

The Davos rules based broker (Neoliberal Technocrats / “subaltern elites”) — finance ministers and central bankers who enforce the IMF/World Bank conditionality grid. They intermediate the regulatory-financial floor, the asset-floor machinery, on behalf of the institutionalist order.

The resource-layer broker (Resource Oligarchs) — magnates whose fortunes come from exporting raw resources rather than building domestic capacity. The terrain broker who extracts wealth by acting as the valve on the deposit.

Dot.compradors — Ashok Mitra’s 2007 article "Hour of the Comprador" argued that the surge in IT outsourcing was creating a new generation of information technology barons who served foreign interests, effectively transforming India into "impeccable comprador territory.” These tech barons sold low-cost labor into the global tech supply chain rather than building indigenous capacity.

Sanctions-Busting Intermediaries — traders and bankers in hub jurisdictions who move goods and money around the dollar-clearing chokepoint for excluded parties. The broker of the sanctions evasion edge of the financial pipe.

The data/sovereignty broker (new — the rheopolitical layer) — the local actor who brokers data-center land, off-grid energy, regulatory waiver, and access to a national digital population for the hyperscalers. This is the AI-era successor to the labor comprador. The dot.compradors sold labor into the pipe, this one sells the pipe’s foundations and the population’s data.

The offshore capital broker (new — the wealth-plumbing layer) — the lawyers, family offices, free-zone and offshore administrators who intermediate the movement and concealment of elite capital itself, not national resources. Distinct from the rule-layer (they don’t enforce conditionality) and from sanctions-busting (this is the legitimate-but-discreet plumbing, not state-defiance).

The Broker’s Leverage

Four buyers for one access point means the broker sets the terms rather than receives them. He is not a symptom of subjugation; he is a beneficiary of the war.

It’s anarchy at the top.

But the broker can’t climb. He has no governance project, no faction, no flag of his own — his only leverage is that the fighting continues. The day one faction wins, he reverts to servant. Factional division is the source of his power, so he is structurally invested in the stalemate, even as he insists he only wants stability.

The four factions fight. The Transnational Broker Class keeps the machinery running — presenting itself in public as a calming technocratic layer while quietly living off the fragmentation it claims to manage.

The broker’s leverage is the living proof there is no center. Brokers serve every empire; only competing ones let them set the price. Under a single hand he would still broker — as a servant. His power to name the terms is the measure of the vacuum above him. The broker class exists, and prospers, not despite the absence of a controlling hand but because of it.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Subscribe now

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

The global ruling class that controls, manages, or accesses capital at the billion-dollar level has genuinely fractured into factions while remaining a single cohesive class. Both halves of that sentence are true at once.

The class sticks together because of their shared financial glue — they share an asset base and depend on the same conditions for survival: asset-price inflation, low taxes, weak labour unions, and state bailouts in a crisis. William I. Robinson, who has written extensively on the Transnational Capitalist Class, commented on this in an interview, “The only thing that unifies the transnational capitalist class is that they pursue the same objective of making sure that the whole world is open and available for transnational corporate plunder."

The factions maintain intense debate about how capital should be governed and deployed; none of them contests that capital should dominate. Their disagreements, however vicious, are overruled by their mutual bondage to the global free market and this makes them factions of one class rather than rival classes.

What this cohesion does not require or retain is a steering committee. The class moves in tandem without central coordination — it does not need to conspire in secret meetings to act in parallel, because its members respond to the same incentives and protect the same assets, and they simultaneously compete over the same technological rollout.

There is anarchy at the top and no center to attack.

Tier One: The Main Players

We can say that a faction controls a segment of the financial data infrastructure that the others cannot route around. Its defining quality is denial — the ability to force or to block an outcome — and because each of the factions holds a different section of the pipe and a different chokepoint, no single one of them can dominate. They need one another’s inputs even as they fight, which is the pragmatic reason the war has no winner on the horizon.

There are four factions that we have identified in our earlier chapters. The Washington-Tel Aviv Consensus, or the Imperial Nationalists, meaning the American-Israeli state apparatus rather than any administration. It holds the dollar, and the clearing and sanctions systems built on it, the largest military, and the deepest capital market; its model is liberal-managerial, though this model is now undergoing rebellion from the Silicon Valley faction.

The Beijing-led bloc holds manufacturing, rare earths, and the industrial base, and is building alternative financial rails to escape the dollar; its model is developmental State Capitalism, directive and patient, with Russia attached as an extractive-disruptive client, and Iran emerging as a junior partner. The institutionalist bloc — Davos, Wall Street, and the City of London, Brussels, and the old-money industrial and luxury dynasties — holds the asset-floor machinery and the rules, the legal and regulatory layer of global finance, and works through institutions by temperament. And Silicon Valley, together with the wider compute axis, holds frontier computation, the platforms, the AI control layer, and now, through stablecoins, its own emerging financial rails; its model is insurgent and techno-libertarian, oriented around and against the institutions rather than through them.

What ties them together is not four factions fighting over four different things. They are four factions each holding a different segment of one continuous pipe — the financial and digital infrastructure — and the contest between them is over who controls the most load-bearing segment as the whole system digitizes.

Tier Two: Factions-in-Formation

Below the four factions sit the entities running explicit strategic-autonomy doctrines — courted rather than commanded, and trying to convert routes or resources into a chokepoint of their own.

India is the strongest contender, and the most consequential swing state on the entire map: a fifth faction-in-formation, combining national family-based industrial capital in the Ambani and Adani fortunes with a vast tech-services spine and real state ambition. India is playing every side — buying Russian oil while deepening American technology and defense ties, feuding with China on the Himalayan border, and sitting in BRICS and the Quad at the same time. It is the entity most likely to graduate from this tier into a genuine faction within a decade.

Why India fails the tests

A full factional combatant in this capitalist civil war must pass two tests. The first is autonomy: it must have its own project, its own will, and the independent means to fight for itself, rather than functioning as an organ of someone else’s project. The second is that it must be fighting for the pipe — actively contesting control of the financial and digital infrastructure, which is what makes this the capitalist civil war rather than ordinary geopolitics. Hard power and autonomy alone do not qualify an entity, because many states possess those.

In our study of rheopolitics, whoever can choke the network throttles the economy and India passes the first test but so far, fails the second — yet it is the only emerging entity that is actually building pipe rather than merely hedging.

Infrastructural self-reliance means building your own pipe so that no one can control you through it — a defensive capacity, and one India genuinely has, since its own rails, its own data regime, and its own deterrent mean it cannot be coerced through the pipe. This is the real basis of its credible deniability, its power to defect. Infrastructural power is the offensive version: controlling a segment that others must use, and could therefore be denied.

India does not yet have this. The others can route around India’s digital ecosystem, UPI (Unified Payments Interface) and the India Stack; no one can route around TSMC or the dollar. India, in short, is building its own pipe but not yet fighting for control of everyone else’s.

The test is then: Is the nation building infrastructure for itself, or infrastructure that others cannot avoid?

Its export of UPI into the region is the embryo of offensive power — the first step from sovereignty toward power — and the variable to watch is whether those rails scale from “India’s own, with some regional adopters” into rails that a meaningful share of the world must transact through. Several countries have expressed interest in adopting India Stack components. Sri Lanka, Morocco, the Philippines, Guinea, Ethiopia, and Togo have reportedly started using components. India Stack is a full identity-payment-data grid that India built and owns, and is now exporting — UPI is now live in over eight countries including the UAE, Singapore, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, France, Mauritius and Qatar.

If they do, India crosses from infrastructural sovereignty into infrastructural power and becomes a principal faction with deniability. Until then it remains the most advanced faction-in-formation, distinguished from every other emerging entity precisely because it is building pipe rather than merely hedging or supplying.

Europe and the EU are not the same actor

“Europe” is a civilization, a collection of nation-states, and a junior member of NATO, under the Washington umbrella. The “EU” is a specific institutional machine — the Commission, the single market, the regulatory apparatus headquartered in Brussels. Treating the two as one entity is why Europe looks like a faction-in-formation when it is not yet one.

Europe possesses regulatory chokepoints, but lacks a unified geopolitical project capable of converting them into independent strategic power.

The chokepoint power is real, and it belongs to the EU, not to Europe. Brussels writes rules the rest of the world adopts, because the cost of exclusion from the single market exceeds the cost of compliance — the Brussels Effect. The GDPR has established itself as the de facto global standard for data protection; the Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts now discipline the American platforms; the EU AI Act is the first serious attempt to write the rulebook for the technology the other factions are racing to build. This is genuine infrastructural power. It is also the only kind of power Europe has learned to project.

But the regulatory machine itself is not a faction. It is the most developed institutional organ of an existing one. The regulatory cosmopolitanism that radiates from the Commission — universal standards, rules-based order, the conviction that the world should converge on a single set of norms — is the Davos project rendered in statute.

The personnel confirm the wiring: a Commission and a central bank staffed from the same Atlanticist-technocratic bench that fills the Davos guest list, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — Bank of England, then Ottawa, board member of the WEF forum itself — as its clearest synthesizer. Brussels is not Europe’s instrument that happens to serve the Davos global order. It is the global order’s instrument that happens to be headquartered in Europe.

The Brussels Effect depends on everyone believing the rules apply to everyone; aim them at a named rival and they curdle into ordinary protectionism, and the voluntary global compliance — the actual source of the power — evaporates. So Europe fails the autonomy test for a deeper reason than indecision in the Council. Its one real instrument of power was built on behalf of a transnationalist project, which means it is autonomy-less by design. It is Davos soft power on European soil, not European power.

This completes the symmetry with India and inverts it cleanly. India has the autonomy and is building the pipe but has not reached chokepoint scale — it owns its rails and no one yet has to use them. Europe has the chokepoint, but no autonomous project to point it at — it commands rails the world does use, on behalf of an order rather than a state. The two fail the combatant test for opposite reasons: India is a will without a chokepoint; Europe is a chokepoint without a will.

Which is what makes Carney’s middle-powers project the variable to watch — and the reason it cannot be filed simply under “Europe.” A coalition of middle powers with its own industrial policy, defense coordination, and payment rails less hostage to Washington is the attempt to give the transnationalist Davos faction the one thing it has never possessed: a state apparatus of its own.

Note that this bloc is neither Europe nor the EU. It is transgeographic — Europe+Canada, and potentially the UK, Japan, Australia, but this would involve all three exiting the American orbit. But building such a perimeter would require Davos to become the thing it was founded to abolish — a coalition with its own military industrial project and its own financial data rails — a nation-state bloc, not a universalist summit held in the Alps every year.

Carney’s “variable geometry” — coalitions of the willing, multilateralism à la carte — reveals that Davos is drifting from its mandate set by Klaus Schwab fifty-five years ago. The WEF was originally called the European Management Forum, and it ran under the motto "Let's meet the American challenge", seeking to introduce European firms to American management practices — to help Europe compete with the US. In 1987, it expanded its name and focus to include resolving international conflicts and other global issues.

It seems Davos is going backwards. The rupture in the rules-based order is driving Europe into rejecting its subordinate role and pursuing independence.

Davos has spent a generation dissolving sovereignty upward. Its survival may now depend on reclaiming the very thing it was built to dissolve.

Neither Europe or India is a full faction — but they fail the test from opposite directions, and that asymmetry is exactly why India belongs in the war as the emerging fifth faction, while Europe belongs in it as contested ground and institutional weaponry.

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Tier Three: Neutral Funding/Resource Suppliers

The Gulf is not a faction. It is four swing states, UAE (Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, a capital reservoir with oil reserves, sitting beneath the main players. Despite all four being state capitalists models, the Gulf states are energy suppliers and logistical hubs — they fund the other factions.

Its capital is patrimonial rather than directive — ruler-controlled in the most literal sense, with Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) chairing Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Mansour bin Zayed (MBZ) chairing Mubadala, fusing sovereign wealth, national security, and the artificial-intelligence development in Abu Dhabi. The structure is the same fused capital-and-state form as China’s, but their foreign policy is positioned in neutrality, with no project to reshape the global order. The Gulf has influence without veto. It controls capital. It can fund, influence, accelerate, and convene but it cannot deny the others. That is the line between a faction and a faction-in-formation.

Saudi and the UAE are drifting towards a faction — they have national monarchs MBS and MBZ leading national transformation projects, and AI/infrastructure ambitions (PIF's domestic build, Stargate). Saudi Arabia and the UAE are driving regional development through massive infrastructure, green energy, and digital transformation initiatives underpinned by their respective Vision 2030 and UAE Centennial 2071 strategies.

Capital is mobile. If Abu Dhabi doesn't fund a project, someone else often can. If NVIDIA withholds chips, or the dollar system excludes a bank, it is much more difficult to find an alternative.

The four Gulf states are best understood as convergent rather than coordinated. They run the same foreign policy strategy — refusing exclusive alignment, taking American security while trading with China and funding the Valley. It appears as a coordinated foreign policy, but they each arrived at it independently and pursue it in competition with one another, racing to be the regional hub. The rivalry between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and the 2017 blockade of Qatar made this plain.

If there was ever a hard war between US and China, the Gulf states would side with US without flinching. CENTCOM provides the arms dependence that is the guarantee that's underwritten the al-Saud family since 1945. Qatar can't be neutral because the war would be run from its own soil: Al Udeid is the largest US base in the region and CENTCOM's forward headquarters.

They are not a bloc; their internal competition caps their collective power, and hands the advantage back to the very factions courting them. Their alignment, in the end, is with everyone and exclusively with no one — Washington for security, the one relationship they cannot replace, and with the rest, they are open for business. Their real power is that they are the most courted non-aligned capital in the system, increasingly the table at which the fractured factions transact rather than a player seated at it. And their trajectory is that of a reservoir attempting to convert capital into a genuine chokepoint of its own, most plausibly through AI infrastructure — an attempt that has not yet succeeded.

Tier Four: Contested Terrain

Beneath the formations that can fight, lies the resource-and-route base — the ground the factions extract from and contest, terrain rather than players, and terrain not for any lack of wealth or population but because these regions hold minerals and routes others can bypass rather than chokepoints. A resource or route can be routed around, so its holder can tilt but never deny; a resource or route hands its holder the power of denial, and that is what a chokepoint is.

Africa holds approximately 30% of the world’s critical mineral reserves, serving as the foundational resource base for the global AI and energy transition infrastructure, and it functions as the model’s natural experiment: the one place where all four faction-models compete head to head on the same ground. This will be the subject of an entire chapter soon forthcoming.

China leads with a developmental offer that comes without governance conditions — no regime change or ideological shift needed, just show me the money. The institutionalists are the incumbent in retreat, the Davos global monetary funding and Brussels regulatory grid have come into clashes with the Imperial Nationalists.

The Gulf is entering through ports, agriculture, and mining stakes; and Russia runs its characteristic extractive-disruptive game in the weak-state pockets, trading mercenary protection of a regime for gold and mining rights. Africa’s demographic weight makes it the long-game wildcard, the most plausible source of a future principal faction even though it is terrain today.

Latin America is contested terrain with a particular twist: it is Washington’s historical backyard, the Monroe-Doctrine sphere, now courted by Beijing, which has become the largest trading partner of much of South America and buys its way in through the lithium triangle and the soy and copper trade — inside the hemisphere the United States long treated as exclusively its own.

Its internal models vary, from the institutionalist-integrated and market-liberal economies of the Pacific coast (Chile and Peru) to the resource-nationalist cycles of Argentina and Bolivia and the extractive collapse of Venezuela. Brazil is the exception that rises above terrain, the regional heavyweight converting size into optionality through BRICS, and the one Latin American candidate for something more than ground to be fought over.

Brazil is building its own rails. It has successfully built a sovereign digital financial ecosystem led by the Central Bank of Brazil, anchored by three pillars: Pix, Drex, and Open Finance. Pix serves as the global benchmark for instant payments, processing over 78 billion transactions annually by late 2025 and reaching 91% of the adult population, effectively replacing cash and legacy payment methods. Building on this, Drex (the Digital Real) is launching in 2026 not as a retail currency, but as a centralized wholesale infrastructure for asset tokenization and collateral management, having pivoted away from blockchain to resolve privacy conflicts. Complementing these is a robust Open Finance framework that mandates data sharing across the financial sector, enabling hyper-personalized credit and fostering a "programmable finance" environment that integrates payments, assets, and data into a unified, state-governed network.

The Central Asian republics — the Stans — are the literal Mackinder Heartland, the classical pivot, now functioning as a multi-vector hedging zone and the overland route of China’s Eurasian Belt and Road Initiative. Central America and the Caribbean are fragmented client-terrain in the American sphere, tied to it by proximity and migration, and notable as one of the few places where the Taiwan-recognition contest is still actively bid for. And the rest of South Asia — Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal — is contested terrain caught in the India-China tug-of-war, the front line of Belt and Road encirclement, with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as both the flagship project and the overland route giving China access toward the Arabian Sea.

Tier Five: Clients and Thieves

At the base of the structure are the entities that hold neither chokepoint nor resources, and survive by alignment or by parasitism.

North Korea is the exception that defines the rule. It is not a model of capitalism at all, but a dynastic-militarist command state that tried harder than anyone to exit the global system entirely — and could not. It survives as a client of the Beijing bloc, increasingly as a supplier of arms and troops to Russia in exchange for cash, food, and technology, and as an infrastructure-layer parasite, running sanctions evasion and crypto-theft at a scale.

North Korea is running cryptocurrency theft at an industrial scale, treating it as a state-directed revenue system to fund its nuclear weapons program and evade international sanctions. In 2025 alone, North Korean hackers stole approximately $2.02 billion, accounting for nearly 60% of all global crypto theft that year.

A state locked out of the legitimate plumbing has turned to robbing it. North Korea shows what trying to leave the board actually looks like: you cannot, you can only become a client and a thief.

The Billionaire and the Thief

The entire structure, from the principals at the apex to the clients at the base, sorts on one axis: whether an entity controls a chokepoint the others cannot route around, supplies a replaceable resource or route, or holds neither. Faction principals hold chokepoints, and so command the power of denial. Suppliers and funders hold capital, resources, routes — and so can tilt but not block. Clients hold neither, and survive by alignment or by parasitism. The same logic that places the Gulf — whose capital is replaceable and bypassable, making it a supplier rather than a faction — also places Africa and the Stans as terrain — minerals and routes the system can source elsewhere — and North Korea as a client that robs the pipe because it is locked out of it.

No faction holds every segment — no one builds the chips, holds the rare earths, lays the cables, flies the satellites, and runs the data centres alone — so each is locked to the others by exactly the segment it cannot route around. They all want out; none can leave, because no one can build the whole pipe by themselves.

And therefore the conspiracy theorist has it exactly inverted. The elites are not building a world government. They are frantically trying to escape one — and they are constitutionally incapable of coordinating to build it.

The billionaire and the thief are trapped by the same system, and neither can escape it.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

If we trace the rheopolitical board down through fibre optic cables, internet connections, and software platforms, we eventually will arrive at its building blocks: the advanced semiconductor. Everything on the new grand chessboard in our study of rheopolitics — from rheo, meaning flow, stream, river — rests on a layer of computation that runs on chips only a handful of people on earth can make: the AI that coordinates the informational streams, the platforms that carry them, the models that increasingly run the financial and military machinery.

The advanced semiconductor is the equivalent of Mackinder’s Heartland — the landlocked pivot of central Asia that had to be fought over to command the world. The advanced semiconductor, and specifically the NVIDIA Blackwell B200 AI chip, confers control of everything downstream of it. Control the chips, control the world.

The Blackwell B200 is arguably the second most sophisticated technology ever built by human beings. The first is the machine that makes it. We’ll get to that.

The B200 is the new oil.

Sort of.

Because the metaphor breaks down in certain ways, and that is where the real danger lives. Oil is a fixed resource, conditioned by geology — it is where it is because of where it was formed, and there is nothing to be done about that. The chip is conditioned by knowledge: it is scarce not because the materials are rare — its raw substance is sand — but because it is fabricated by the most sophisticated industrial process ever devised. And that manufacturing process is controlled by several nations and factions.

It is a supply and fab chain — designed in the United States, fabricated by a Taiwanese company, on lithography machines from one company in the Netherlands, built with optics from another company in Germany, using materials and tools from Japan and South Korea. The new oil is not a reserve any nation owns. It is a fragile transnational sequence of supply chains, fabrication plants, chokepoints, and kill switches.

II. Anatomy of the New Oil

The Blackwell B200 is not built by a single company — NVIDIA is a fabless designer, it owns the architecture but depends on an intricate global ecosystem of specialists to physically build it.

The sequence begins in the Netherlands, where ASML builds the Twinscan lithography machines required to etch atomic-scale patterns. These ship to TSMC, which fabricates the core GPU silicon on a highly customised 4N / 4NP process node — a custom, NVIDIA-only variant of TSMC’s 4nm FinFET technology. To reach its speeds, the dies are paired with ultra-dense High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM3e) supplied by SK Hynix in South Korea.

The B200 is too complex to live on a single die, so the components travel to Taiwan, where TSMC fuses two GPU dies and eight memory stacks onto one substrate using its proprietary Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging — the substrate itself manufactured by Ibiden in Japan. Foxconn builds the boards and server trays; Supermicro and Dell integrate the rack-scale, liquid-cooled systems shipped to the cloud providers.

As of October 2025, the first Blackwell wafer was produced not in Taiwan but at TSMC’s Fab 21 in Phoenix, Arizona. The wafer has onshored. But the chip still has to fly back to Taiwan to be finished, because CoWoS packaging exists nowhere else. The Amkor packaging fab in Arizona meant to close the gap isn’t slated to begin production until around 2028.

III. The Machine That Makes the Machine

As promised: the ASML lithography machine is arguably the most sophisticated technology ever built by human beings — and it is the machine that makes the B200.

The tool that prints the B200’s transistors is ASML’s extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) scanner — the standard, 0.33-NA generation, priced at roughly $200 million. It is the size of a bus. Inside it, a high-power industrial laser vaporises some 50,000 microscopic droplets of molten tin per second, creating a plasma that emits EUV light at a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres. The light is focused by mirrors crafted by Germany’s ZEISS, polished to such atomic precision that if one were scaled to the size of the Earth, its largest imperfection would stand less than a millimetre high.

A newer, larger machine — ASML’s High-NA EUV, the $380-million class — is already arriving for the chips that will succeed Blackwell, though TSMC has so far chosen to push its standard tools further rather than adopt it. For now, the B200 is a standard-EUV chip.

And here is the first kill switch — a literal one. According to a 2024 Bloomberg report, ASML can remotely disable the EUV machines it services, rendering them inert should China seize TSMC’s fabs. The capability was reportedly added through the routine software updates the machines require to keep running; ASML, TSMC, and the Dutch government all declined to confirm it. It would not destroy the hardware — a disabled machine could in principle still be captured and reverse-engineered — but it would turn the most advanced fabrication line on earth into so much idle steel.

IV. The Weaponisation of the Chokepoint

Because ASML’s machines rest on a web of global patents — among them US-made Cymer lasers — the United States and its allies have weaponised export controls. By legally barring ASML from shipping advanced EUV systems to specific countries, China chief among them, the West holds a multi-year lead in AI and advanced military hardware. This is the denial ability of the Imperial Nationalist faction in plain sight.

But a chokepoint has two ends, and China holds the other one. If the West controls the frontier, China controls the foundation — the raw and refined materials the whole chain runs on before a single transistor is etched. China produced an estimated 98 to 99 percent of the world’s gallium in 2024, most of its germanium and antimony, and it dominates the processing of the world’s rare earths. The State Capitalists have the ability to deny the world.

Unlike the Western lever, a slow strategic squeeze that takes years before the pain is felt, China can instantly turn off the flow of rare earth metals, and it has done it before. The day after Washington blacklisted 140 Chinese chip firms in December 2024, Beijing banned the export of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States outright. In April 2025 it added seven heavy rare earths and in October it went further, issuing a licensing regime explicitly modelled on America’s own Foreign Direct Product Rule — any product, anywhere, carrying a trace of Chinese rare earth now requiring Beijing’s permission to ship. Then, in a November 2025 truce, it suspended the measures, through to late 2026, with the licensing discretion retained. The lever was not pulled back fully, just delayed.

Nor is China treating the frontier lockout as permanent. It is building a different road to the same place. Barred from EUV, its foundries pushed older deep-ultraviolet machines through multiple patterning to reach 7-nanometre chips and, reportedly, beyond — slower and costlier than EUV, but functional. And it is chasing EUV itself by a route ASML never took: a domestically developed light source, reportedly in trial at Huawei’s Dongguan facility, with the state setting a target of functional production by 2028. Whether it arrives on that timeline is unknown; the claims run well ahead of the verification, and the distance from a prototype to a working fab is measured in years. ASML took two decades to develop its machine.

So the standoff is not a checkmate, it’s a stalemate. It is two denials levelled at each other — the West withholding the future, China the present — and each side running a clock. The West races to finish building its stack before it no longer needs Taiwan; China races to finish its own stack before the lockout sets. Whoever crosses the line first redraws the board, and neither has crossed it. That is the stalemate: not an absence of weapons, but a surplus of them, each held to the other’s head.

V. Taiwan

This is where the Mackinder board, the Maritime-Space Commons, and the Rheopolitical Board meet on a single square. Taiwan is the place where the most advanced node of the post-Mackinder economy — the fabrication and finishing of the chips on which all three boards depend — happens to sit on the most dangerous fault line of the Mackinder continental board. The production of the B200 is tied to the ground, and the ground is contested. If there is a New Cold War, it is the stalemate between China and the United States over Taiwan, and thus over ultimate control of the semiconductor market.

Taiwan has been called “the most dangerous place on Earth” by multiple Western analysts, including the Economist:

”War would be a catastrophe, and not only because of the bloodshed in Taiwan and the risk of escalation between two nuclear powers. One reason is economic. The island lies at the heart of the semiconductor industry. TSMC, the world’s most valuable chipmaker, etches 84% of the most advanced chips. Were production at TSMC to stop, so would the global electronics industry, at incalculable cost. The firm’s technology and know-how are perhaps a decade ahead of its rivals’, and it will take many years of work before either America or China can hope to catch up.

The bigger reason is that Taiwan is an arena for the rivalry between China and America. Although the United States is not treaty-bound to defend Taiwan, a Chinese assault would be a test of America’s military might and its diplomatic and political resolve. If the Seventh Fleet failed to turn up, China would overnight become the dominant power in Asia. America’s allies around the world would know that they could not count on it. Pax Americana would collapse.”

The future of the Three Grand Chessboards runs through a question as old as Mackinder: who holds the territory? The most advanced thing our civilisation has built turns out to rest on the most ancient kind of vulnerability — a piece of land, and the ships and missiles ranged around it. Every thread of the new board, traced to its roots, arrives at this island in the South China Sea.

VI. The Silicon Shield

Taiwan manufactures roughly 80 to 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors — the nodes below 5nm — and a single company, TSMC, handles the vast majority of it. Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm have no near-term alternative foundry for their top-tier architecture.

Halt those factories and the damage is immediate. Bloomberg Economics has estimated that a major Taiwan conflict would erase some $10 trillion — roughly 10 percent of global GDP — exceeding the amount lost during the pandemic. Because a single modern car relies on a thousand chips or more, a disruption would trigger a global chip famine within weeks.

For decades this capability has been Taiwan’s “Silicon Shield” — the theory that the world cannot afford to let the island fall, and so must deter aggression against it. But the shield is double-edged: the same indispensability that protects Taiwan also makes it the most coveted ground on earth, and it has driven the West into a frantic, slow race to copy a thirty-year industrial ecosystem through the CHIPS Act.

And the geography compounds the stakes. The Taiwan Strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth: in 2022, some 44 percent of the world’s container fleet and 88 percent of its largest ships by tonnage passed through a channel as little as a hundred miles off the Chinese mainland.

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VII. Mutual Asymmetric Denial

What makes the rheopolitical map dangerous is that the kill switch has four levers, and each faction has a hand on one of them. Any of them can pull it, and ignite a global catastrophe.

Call this mutual asymmetric denial. Mutual, because the power runs both ways — each side can deny the other. Asymmetric, because the levers are not the same weapon mirrored: one withholds the future, the other the present, on different clocks and at different thresholds. And denial, because none of it is the power to build — only the power to stop. It is not mutual assured destruction. MAD is stable precisely because it is symmetrical, the same nuclear death promised to both. This is the opposite. Because the levers are unlike, they cannot be weighed against each other, cannot be deterred in mirror image, and they cannot freeze into a cold war of identical arsenals.

The Imperial Nationalists hold the licence — the coercive overlay, the sovereign power to forbid the sale. Through the Foreign Direct Product Rule and allied export controls, Washington and The Hague can bar ASML from shipping EUV systems to an adversary, or force NVIDIA to decrease or block specific exports outright. They do not design the chip; they hold the legal authority to stop it crossing a border. The literal kill switch — ASML’s reported ability to disable the machines from afar — shows how the levers run through one another: a Dutch company holds the physical means to brick the most important machine on earth, a capability reportedly installed under American pressure. The Imperial Nationalist lever reaches its hand through a Davos-coded instrument.

Silicon Valley holds the architecture. NVIDIA and the hyperscalers — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta — own the architecture, the software lock-in of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), and the physical data centres where Blackwell racks are deployed. As the primary buyers, they control who gets compute. If NVIDIA or a hyperscaler decides a startup, a sovereign, or a rival is a risk, it can deny allocation, revoke API access, or shut a customer out of the ecosystem entirely.

Davos holds the rule book. Its denial power is regulatory, not physical: the European Commission cannot build a chip or close a border, but it can block monetisation. Through antitrust enforcement and tech-sovereignty rules — the EU AI Act, data-sovereignty regulation — Brussels can threaten fines or ban non-sovereign cloud architectures on its soil, making Blackwell deployment commercially unviable across a major economic zone. EU competition law caps fines near 10 percent of global turnover; the Digital Markets Act regime rises to 10 percent, and then 20 percent for repeat breaches.

The State Capitalists hold the rare-earth and the Taiwan Strait. China controls the rare-earth and minor-metal inputs (gallium, germanium, antimony) the packaging depends on, and the maritime lanes around the island. It can choke the raw elements that feed the assembly, or blockade Taiwan and halt TSMC’s exports at a stroke. Its hand on the lever is the most physical of the four — and the most absolute.

None of these factions can act alone. Silicon Valley cannot build the chips without the Imperial Nationalists granting export licences. The Imperial Nationalists cannot finish the chips without the State Capitalists’ refined elements. The State Capitalists cannot use the technology if Davos and the Western hyperscalers cut them off from market integration and Western software. It is a multi-sided standoff in which every faction has a hand on the kill switch — and the reason no one pulls the lever is that the kill switch kills everybody.

But mutual asymmetric denial holds only while the four hands exist in a balance of power. If one faction concludes the clock is running against it, and that waiting will leave it weaker, then it may believe it must pull the lever now.

VIII. The Closing Window Danger Zone

There are two questions that will decide the game from here, and neither is one that either the Mackinder board or the Commons board could have posed.

The first: does the infrastructure stay a single contested pipe — one financial system, one internet, one compute base that everyone fights to control — or does it split into two rival stacks, a Western and a Chinese, forcing every unaligned nation to choose which to plug into?

The second: does the fabrication of the B200 stay concentrated on that one island, or does it disperse — to Arizona, to Japan, to Germany, to a Chinese industry racing to build its own — until the chokepoint dissolves and Taiwan loses both its value and its danger?

Take the second question first, because it is already being answered, and the answer is more dangerous than it looks. Die fabrication has begun to disperse: TSMC’s Fab 21 in Arizona is live, producing Blackwell wafers on American soil. But the chokepoint — packaging — has not moved. Amkor broke ground on a $7 billion packaging-and-test campus in Peoria in October 2025, purpose-built to finish the wafers the Arizona fab produces, but that campus is still under construction and isn’t slated to begin production until around 2028. Until it does, the finished chip still has to fly back to Taiwan. So the wafer is leaving the island; the packaging is not.

It would be comfortable to read that as de-escalation — the chokepoint dissolving, Taiwan softening into ordinary geography. It is the opposite. The Silicon Shield is a deterrent only because Taiwan is indispensable: the world cannot afford to lose it, so the world must defend it. De-escalation does not resolve the conflict because the invasion was never only about chips. It is about Chinese unification — the breakaway province returned to the homeland.

Arizona reduces the Western stake in Taiwan. It does not reduce China’s bid for unification. So the most dangerous moment is neither the one where Taiwan is irreplaceable nor the one where it is fully replaced — it is the long transition, where the shield has lost some of its deterrence, but capturing Taiwan is still tempting. Some analysts have stopped calling it a silicon shield, and started calling it a silicon trap.

The West can rebuild the stack in the open; China can only build a parallel one — slower, by a different road, and not yet finished. For now it is behind at the frontier, which is what makes the window close on Beijing rather than Washington. Every month the Western stack onshores, Taiwan becomes a weaker hostage and China's own road a longer shot.

A closing window is the most invasion-prone condition there is: it converts a deterrent into a deadline. Which means the Arizona timeline is not a peace clock. It is a countdown. The most dangerous power is rarely the strongest one. It is the one that believes it is still strong enough to act, certain it will be weaker later, and convinced that waiting forecloses its options. That conviction — that the future is worse than the present — sat behind the calendar in 1914 and behind Pearl Harbor. It is the logic the Arizona clock now hands to Beijing.

If the levers are ever pulled in earnest, TSMC is destroyed in the invasion — ASML bricks the machines, TSMC burns the factory to the ground. A much-cited US war paper, McKinney and Harris’s “Broken Nest,” argues Taiwan should pre-commit to demolishing TSMC to make itself unwantable. A war over the chip does not hand over the chip to China. It vaporises it, for everyone. The $10 trillion global GDP loss is not a transfer from one faction to another; it is a deadweight loss to the whole board. The kill switch, fully engaged, kills everyone.

And that is only the second question. The first is larger, and it can be answered without a single shot fired. The compute base can simply split in two — a Western stack and a Chinese stack, each unaligned nation forced to plug into one or the other, the contest hardening from a war inside one infrastructure into two sealed, incompatible infrastructures that no longer integrate. That is not a chokepoint dissolving. It is the terrain itself splitting in two. The danger is not only that Taiwan burns. It is that the world wires itself into two nervous systems that cannot speak to each other — and the Capitalist Civil War, which began as four factions fighting over one machine, ends with two of them building separate machines and calling it peace.

So the road forks, and neither branch is soft. On one side, the broken nest: the shield disintegrates, the window closes, and the island is taken or torched while it still matters. On the other, the world order splits in two: no shot is fired, the stack splits, and the single contested pipe becomes two.

The better path — a clean de-escalation, and Taiwan de-risked into irrelevance — is possible. But it is not a third road; it is a narrowing thread between the two, and to reach it the de-escalation must conclude before the window shuts. That race is already on. TSMC Fab 21 is live, Amkor is still pouring concrete, the export controls are hardening the second stack into being, and the pressure around the island is a present-tense pressure cooker, not a forecast. Every variable that decides which branch we take is already in motion — which is why the fork is not two years away.

We are standing in it now.

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About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

At noon today, Elon Musk became the first human being Forbes has ever tracked at a trillion dollars — and he did not get there by escaping the system. He got there by being crowned inside it. The loudest living evangelist preaching for exit — the network state, the founder-king, the man who sells escape from the managerial order — crossed the Rubicon through the Wall Street financial ritual: a public listing, underwritten, priced, and on the regulated stock exchange, and Musk rang the opening bell from Starbase.

SpaceX opened on the Nasdaq at $150 a share, valuing the company near $1.8 trillion and raising about $75 billion — the largest public offering in history, past Saudi Aramco’s in 2019.

The trillion dollar number is the headline. The mechanism is the story.

Inside the Cathedral

Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s house philosopher, gave the New Right its central image of power: the Cathedral. It is not a building and not a conspiracy. It is the loose alliance of “journalism plus academia” — institutions with no central command that nonetheless move as one, converging on a single line without anyone issuing the order. That is the whole point of the concept: its power is that it needs no coordinator. Convergence is enough.

Let’s sit with the irony. Yarvin built the term to indict the media-academic establishment Musk has spent a decade attacking.

“… the label is making a point. The Catholic Church is one institution—the cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one—literally, e pluribus unum—is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world.”

But the structure he described — many institutions behaving as singular, no conspiracy required, only shared interests pulling in the same direction — is the same Cathedral that crowned Musk today. The banks did not need to meet in secret. The Nasdaq exchange did not need an agenda. Capital converged on a single price and crowned one man, because that is what capital, left to its own logic, does. Musk did not beat the Cathedral. He was anointed in one of its main temples — the one made of money — and he took the sacrament willingly, proving he is not a heretic.

He loves the money.

Musk's faction — the Silicon Valley tech sovereigns, whose whole pitch is we are building the alternative to your order — just had that order bless him. He cannot be crowned without the financial order he claims to be leaving.

What the market repriced today was not a man but a layer of data infrastructure. SpaceX is rockets, satellites, and AI — Starlink and Starshield together form a communications grid that doubles as the plumbing of financial and data flow. The trillion-dollar tag is a price on single-owner control of the orbital layer — one man holding a tier of the board the rest of the system has to route through.

The Junction

The deal itself puts all four factions in a single transaction. Musk set the price — a flat $135, no book-building range, announced as fact before the bankers could test it — and walked out of the Wall Street establishment ritual having surrendered nothing: over 82% of the voting power stays with him, and the lockup bars him from selling a share for 366 days. He is a trillionaire who cannot spend it and a chairman who answers to no shareholder. Reuters called it, “the latest example of Musk executing the most-ballyhooed Wall Street debut on his own terms.”

Around that core, every faction takes its place. The syndicate steered an unusually large slice to retail — up to 30% of the deal, roughly $22.5 billion, the biggest direct-to-retail carve-out a mega-IPO has ever run, with more than $70 billion in small-investor orders behind it.

A populist gesture, stapled to a Davos vehicle — Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley stabilizing a twenty-one-bank syndicate — wrapped around a Silicon Valley asset, kept solvent by Imperial Nationalist defense money. This is the cleanest live picture you will ever get of Musk as the junction: not a member of a faction but the place where all four meet.

And the binding agent holds because each faction needs him. Starshield, his classified military-satellite unit, binds him to the Pentagon and the Imperial Nationalists. Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory — building a car roughly every forty seconds — binds him to the Chinese party-state. No single camp can fully claim him, which is exactly why none can expel him. He has made himself indispensable to all of them at once.

The Ultimate Exit

In February, SpaceX absorbed xAI and filed with the FCC to launch up to 1 million satellites as orbital data centers — compute lifted off the planet entirely, the literal exit from terrestrial limits. It is the network-state dream pushed to its edge: not a city that leaves the nation, but a server that leaves the Earth. And yet the exit routes straight back through the order it claims to escape — it needs FCC approval to fly, Pentagon contracts to pay, a public market to fund. The Mars colony is the front-of-house; the back-of-house is infrastructure the state has every reason to underwrite.

Exit, in the end, is something the system grants.

Strip the science fiction and what’s left is a defense contractor building the next missile-defense system. Starshield, SpaceX’s classified military unit — distinct from commercial Starlink — handles secure communications, missile tracking, and reconnaissance, and its SDA satellites form the sensor-and-tracking layer of a missile-defense architecture. The architecture’s own planners are candid about where it leads. Mike Griffin, who ran the program, has said that since Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative the technology has advanced enough that putting “both sensors and shooters in space” is no longer hard — only a matter of will. The orbital layer that crunches data for AI is the same layer being wired for war.

A Dark Day for Democracy

Then the trillion dollar number — for what it says about the terrain, not the man. Oxfam put it starkly: one person now worth more than the poorest 46% of humanity combined, 3.8 billion people, his fortune up half a trillion in a year. They called it “a dark day for democracy.” Read it not as a moral indictment but as a map of the future. The factions do not fight over populations; they fight across them. Those 3.8 billion are not parties to this war. They are the terrain it is fought on.

Oxfam is right that it is a dark day — but not quite for the reason it names. The danger is not the size of the fortune. A trillion dollars in cash would be grotesque and inert; you could tax it, or seize it, and the world would turn as before. What Musk holds is not cash. It is title — deeded, ratified, legally blessed control of a layer of infrastructure the rest of the system has to route through. The listing did not make him rich. It notarized his ownership of the board.

That is the attack on democracy. You can vote on a tax rate. You cannot vote on who holds the deed to the orbital layer — because the establishment already granted it, its own underwriters and exchange and regulators pressing their seal onto private control of a public necessity. A piece of the commons moved, in an afternoon, off the ballot and onto a title document with one name on it. The order did not lose to Musk. It reproduced itself by deeding a tier of the planet to its strongest member.

Is that good or bad? Neither, exactly — it is a transfer, and transfers have terms. The goods are real: the connectivity, the launch, the compute, delivered faster than any state or committee could manage, precisely because one man holds the title and answers to no vote. But what a deed-holder grants, a deed-holder can revoke. The 3.8 billion people on the planet are not simply poorer than he is. They are tenants now, on ground they will never hold the title to.

So read the trillion dollars correctly. It is not what one man seized; it is a price the establishment placed on him — on private control of the orbital layer, and on the ground beneath it. The coronation resolved nothing about where Musk stands among the four factions. It capitalized it. A trillion dollars is not a victory. It is a deed — and the first name on it belongs to the only man standing on all four corners at once.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

The pandemic accelerated a shift toward independent journalism and newsletter platforms like Substack, which saw its active writers and revenue double in the first three months of the outbreak. With legacy media suffering over 30,000 job cuts in the U.S. in 2020, journalists sought financial and editorial freedom by bypassing traditional algorithms and editors to build direct reader relationships.

As mainstream platforms began de-platforming accounts violating health and safety guidelines, Substack emerged as a primary sanctuary for these voices due to its minimalist content moderation stance. The pandemic acted as a “turbocharger” for conspiracy ecosystems, with figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leveraging the crisis to expand their reach. Kennedy’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, saw its website traffic explode from 119,000 visits in late 2019 to nearly 4.7 million at its peak in 2021. While not exclusively on Substack, this surge mirrored the broader trend of conspiracy content finding fertile ground in independent newsletter formats.

Prominent conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine advocates, including Joseph Mercola, Mike Adams and Alex Berenson moved their operations to Substack. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that in 2022, the top five anti-vaccine authors on the platform generated approximately $2.5 million annually in revenue for the site.

Substack faced further criticism from the Atlantic in November 2023, claiming Substack had a “nazi problem” by allowing its platform to be used by white nationalists, Nazis, and antisemites. In an open letter, more than 100 Substack creators threatened to leave the platform and asked Substack's leadership if “Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success?”

However, none of the critics of the conspiratorial commentariat addressed the central issues that were amplified during COVID: the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the billionaire class and the creeping totalitarianism promoted through increasing digital surveillance, data collection and social media censorship and emergent global digital authoritarianism.

The conspiratorial commentariat is not paranoid about the central facts — a transnational capitalist class does exist, it is a small percentage of the world’s population and it operates through a vast multitude of organizations, such as Davos, Bilderberg, the CFR, the UN, IMF, World Bank, and many other orgs, societies, NGOs and foundations.

Hats off to the conspiratorial commentariat. While the legacy press was shedding 30,000 jobs and looking the other way, the commentariat built something out of nothing — a live information war waged from laptops and newsletters, funded by readers instead of advertisers, run on stamina and conviction. They did the work. They followed the money when the salaried press wouldn't, sat through the hearings no one covered, read the filings and the foundation reports and the Davos agendas line by line.

And they were right about the thing that matters most: the people have no say. The ruling class is deaf to the people, indifferent to the wreckage of its own policies, and accountable to no electorate. That is not paranoia. That is also the finding of one of the most cited studies in modern political science, and the commentariat reached it on their own, from the outside, without the credentials or the grant money. They earned the right to be taken seriously. This chapter takes them seriously enough to offer a public debate.

Gilens and Page (2014) published a study that argued “economic elites and business interest groups exert strong influence on US government policy while average citizens have virtually no influence at all.” This influential study, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, argued that economic elites and business interest groups have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens have little or no independent influence.

The study tested four theories of American politics using data on 1,779 policy issues from 1981 to 2002, finding support for Economic Elite Domination and Biased Pluralism. The authors concluded that the United States functions as a “democracy by coincidence,” where policy outcomes align with public preference only when those preferences happen to coincide with the views of the wealthy.

The conspiratorial commentariat have inferred that because the public doesn’t decide → therefore a unified body does. And secondly, because the Transnational Capitalist Class is such a small group, a mere few thousand individuals, there must be a coordinated agenda. After all, they get together at Davos every year, and appear to share a similar unanimous worldview, so that too, proves coordination.

However, the conspiracy theorists are under-reading their own evidence, and they have stopped one step short of finding conclusions and analysis that cuts closer to the bone.

II. Class or Cabal?

Conspiracy requires a unitary will. There must be a philosophical center where intentions form, an organization through which they travel, and a regimented army of agents that carries out the directives and promotes the dogma. Remove any of the three and the cabal dissolves into something else.

If there is a coordinated plan, then there must be a planner; an agenda presupposes an author; the outcome is the intention, realized. This is what the conspiratorial theory is at the root — a claim about agency. Somewhere, someone meant for this to happen, then made it happen, and the world is the shape of their planning. Famous conspiracist, G. Edward Griffin reiterated this in his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, “Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception.”

A cult and a club are softer versions of the same theory. A cult needs a leader, a doctrine and dogmas, and the submission of its members to both. Commentators like David Icke claim the ruling class is a cult. In his 1999 work The Biggest Secret, he describes tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, who hide in underground bases and plot the destruction of humanity.

Theories like this have done enormous damage to the credibility of the conspiratorial commentariat.

Cults are defined as high-control groups led by a charismatic, authoritarian leader who demands absolute loyalty and claims exclusive access to truth. What absolute truth are the billionaire class advocating other than market realism and the unrestricted flow of capital?

When the coordination looks regimented, it’s a cabal; when it looks like dogma, it’s a cult; when it looks merely exclusive, then it’s a club. What stays the same is the underlying assumption underneath all three: there must be a who.

Conspiracy theory is the ultimate detective story: a vast multitude of facts, a labyrinth of history, nasty villains and the smoking gun — whatever bad thing happens, it must be the cabal, because the cabal is the root of all evil, the ultimate Satan, the bogeyman hiding under every bed.

A class requires none of this. It is not a body that acts; it is a social position governed by wealth that many bodies occupy. What unites a class, especially the billionaire class, is not a plan but its relationship to capital, to the means by which wealth is acquired and held. The Transnational Capitalist Class is characterized by unprecedented economic influence, political power, and asset concentration.

The billionaire class represents the top 0.001% of the population.

Two billionaires who have never met, who would never return each other’s calls, who are trying to ruin one another, can at the same time both oppose a wealth tax, both prefer weak labor law, both want money to move across borders faster than regulation can follow. Not because they are coordinated, but because they are in the same financial boat.

The conspiracist sees the billionaires all doing similar things and believes it is coordination. Shared behavior is what a class produces — automatically, without a memo, without a meeting. That it looks authored is an illusion of scale. The pattern is real. The conspiracy is not.

III. The Club That Was Never a Cabal

Sooner or later, anyone arguing about secret world government points out the Club of Rome, one of the conspiratorial commentariat’s favorite proofs.

The line that is invariably quoted — the real enemy is humanity itself — comes from The First Global Revolution, a 1991 report by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, issued, openly, by a New York trade publisher. It was a follow up to the Limits to Growth, written two decades before in 1972.

The full quote:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."

In full, the passage floats pollution, warming, water, and famine as a “common enemy” around which humanity might unite, and then, in the very next breath, warns that to cast them as the enemy is to mistake symptoms for causes. It is a caution against manufacturing a scapegoat. It is not declaring war on humanity, it is stating that “only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.”

Then look at what the Club of Rome actually is, because the name is doing unearned work. It is a club. Founded in 1968, its members are former heads of state, retired officials, scientists, diplomats — a roster, a threshold, a letterhead. It convenes. It commissions. It publishes. And it has never possessed the power to compel a single government to do a single thing, though it does indeed have influence. Soft power is not hard power. In the absence of a reward, whether monetary, position or status, all that is left to compel someone to do something is blackmail or bribery.

This is exactly what a club is and exactly what a cabal is not. A cabal needs a command center. If we consider mafia style organized crime rings, the organizational structure is very clear, evident and impossible to hide.

The richest irony is reserved for the document’s own thesis. The First Global Revolution describes a world being driven into an unknown — upheaval no institution commands and no committee can steer. "The new global revolution is coming into being amid social, economic, technological, and cultural earthquakes that have set in motion humanity's journey into a vast unknown."

That is not the voice of a hand on the rudder. It is the voice of passengers describing the storm. The people accused of secretly piloting the ship are on record saying no one is piloting it.

The Club of Rome is not a piece of a unified plan. Although it has overlap with Davos and the World Economic Forum, its current Vice-President Alvarez Pereira is critical of the WEF: “Klaus Schwab decided to go in another direction, which I am sorry to say, is a lot about self indulgence about the richest and most powerful people on Earth, to feel that they are doing something, and to be talking about it.”

A cabal, like an organized criminal syndicate, has a center that can adjudicate. When its members disagree, someone settles it. A class has no such authority. There is no sovereign power or judge or court system over the billionaires to rule on their disputes, which is exactly why those disputes do not resolve — they grind and clash and the billionaires fight publicly.

This is the difference between a class and a cabal — or a cult, or a club. A class shares a structural position without a chain of command. Convergent interest is not a meeting.

IV. The class-size

There are approximately 3,428 billionaires according to Forbes, or 4020 according to Hurun. The politically consequential movers and shakers are closer to 300–500. The same fact cuts both ways:

The dismissive liberal may claim ”it’s all markets, chaos and randomness, there is no cabal,” but the reality is that the class is real, small, knowable and their names are published every year in Forbes — while conspiracist sees an omnipotent hidden hand: but it’s 300–500 publicly observable people who file disclosures, give speeches, feud in the open, and cannot agree on anything.

Entrance to the class requires extreme wealth; what the credentials reveal is something subtler. Among influential Americans — Fortune 500 chief executives, senior editors, top scientists — Ivy League alumni are overrepresented by a factor of roughly sixty: about 36 percent of that tier, drawn from well under one percent of the adult population. The pattern repeats transnationally with different letterheads — Oxford and the grandes écoles in Europe, Tsinghua among China's party-state elite.

The conspiracist looks at this and asks how they could all think alike without coordinating. But that has the causation backwards. They think alike because they were educated alike — the same economics departments, the same case studies, the same internships and fellowships and dinner circuits, year after year, cohort after cohort. The shared worldview that looks like the product of a conspiracy is the product of a curriculum. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why people stamped by the same educational machine come out the same shape.

V. Everything is right out in the open

Several hundred visible billionaires cannot hide either and they aren’t even trying. The national leaders of 195 nations meet every year at the United Nations. Nobody is hiding.

The so-called secret rulers of the world maintain websites, agendas, attendee lists, a journal. WEF, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, CFR, Chatham House all publish. The conspiracist must explain why the invisible hand has a press office which can be reached by email: public.affairs@weforum.org

The WEF does not want a world government — and cannot enforce one. It advocates multi-stakeholder governance and positions itself as facilitator, not sovereign. Without force, or the threat of force, there is no government at all. A government must have a police force and military to ensure safety and security. The WEF cannot do that nor have they ever advocated for hard power.

Instead, it actively promotes a model of multi-stakeholder governance, which critics argue effectively shifts global decision-making power from democratic nation-states to corporations and unelected elites. This is not to make any claims that this is a good thing, because it is not.

A world government would force the class to submit its interests to a regulating body. The current condition — no one able to stop them, minimal restraint on personal freedom — is more to their liking, not less. They prefer the anarchy at the top because it allows them to live above the law. They don’t want to be regulated, taxed or constrained in any way.

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns are the perfect example of this. The push to create Network States is the desire to live and work tax-free without state control.

VI. Nobody is in Charge

What global mastermind can predict the outcome with any certainty?

The global cabal theories rely on the premise that it is easy to manipulate the world, yet the exact opposite is true. Even a perfectly coordinated cabal, operating in total openness with no need to hide, could not produce the outcomes it is accused of engineering — because the system is too complex for anyone to steer.

The current Iran War is a perfect example. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz benefits no one. If this is an event orchestrated by global elites, they are all losing. Trump and Netanyahu are losing. International trade is losing. Iran is losing. Oil companies are losing. While the U.S. gained in oil revenue, the direct military cost of the conflict has effectively negated the financial windfall.

Powerful nations cannot predict or control the outcomes of their actions, let alone predict the secondary consequences. In reality, human history is driven more by chaos and unintended consequences than by perfectly executed secret plans.

Global cabal theories are fundamentally unbelievable because they assume perfect coordination and absolute secrecy across millions of people. Humans are notoriously bad at keeping massive secrets, or even small secrets. The vast architecture needed to control the complex geopolitical and technological forces at play would be a daunting task even if a global cabal was managing world affairs publicly.

VII. The Great (Failed) Reset

In June 2020, the World Economic Forum launched the Great Reset — a program for remaking post-pandemic capitalism around stakeholder capitalism and green infrastructure, announced by name, with a book, (books), a website, and a Davos summit meant to consecrate it. To the commentariat, it was the mask slipping at last: the plan, in writing, at last admitted publicly.

And then the plan tanked. The branding drew fire within weeks, the summit never convened under the name — the scheduled 2021 Great Reset summit was postponed, and then cancelled.

Inside a year the Forum was conceding the point in its own promotional video — the slogan, it admitted, hadn’t gone down well.

“…a great reset that sounds more like buzzword bingo masking some nefarious plans for world domination hands up this kind of slogan hasn’t gone down well, but all we really want to say is that we all have an opportunity to build a better world, and it’s not surprising that people who’ve been disenfranchised by a broken system and pushed even further by the pandemic will suspect global leaders of conspiracy, but the world’s not that simple.”

By 2022 the phrase was scrubbed from Davos entirely and replaced with themes about fragmentation and turning points; by 2026 the Forum’s own risk reporting had pivoted to geo-economic confrontation and a multipolar world — a world it no longer pretends to be resetting.

The underlying policies did not vanish. Stakeholder capitalism, digital identity, the rhetoric of a Fourth Industrial Revolution — all survived under quieter names. The aims persisted. But watch what the episode actually demonstrates. A cabal executing a plan does not publish a retraction of its own branding. It does not put its hands up and surrender. The Great Reset was a faction’s full blown bid for hegemony — the Davos faction naming its terms in the single year it believed, “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, re-imagine and reset our world” — and the bid failed: against the other factions, who had no reason to submit, and against the public whose consent it required, and never won.

What the commentariat reads as a plan still unfolding in the dark is a defeat conducted in broad daylight.

VIII. Conspiracy is the Bogeyman Theory

The conspiratorial commentariat answers the problem of evil by locating a responsible agent, a bogeyman. If a hidden them is doing this on purpose, the world is legible — there is something to fight, someone to blame, a plan that could be exposed and stopped.

Faction analysis offers the harder picture: no one is sailing the ship, there is anarchy at the top and the factions pull the drifting ship in all directions at once.

This is genuinely more frightening than any conspiracy.

Apocalypse with a church: The religious right—particularly movements aligned with Christian nationalism and biblical literalism—has a profound and growing influence on conspiracy theories, acting as both a primary incubator and a major amplifier for them. This influence is most prominent in the United States and Canada, where religious anxieties are frequently merged with populist politics. A.k.a: MAGA

End times eschatology is the gasoline on the commentariat’s fire. By framing political and cultural conflicts as literal "good vs evil" or “Democrats vs Republicans” or “MAGA vs the Globalists” they portray political battles against unseen spiritual forces as fulfillment, or anticipated fulfillment, of Biblical prophecies.

Apocalypse without a church: The New Age / wellness strand has no Beast, no Satan, no Revelation — and arrives at the same destination — don’t engage the political arena because the system will collapse. The anticipated new world rises from the ashes; the fifth dimension solves what politics cannot. The New Agers believe we are on the cusp of an evolution of consciousness and humankind will soon collectively vibrate on the fifth dimension and magically create a nouveau hippie Utopia.

Both wings share the apocalypse but it resolves into opposite politics. The wellness New Age strand exits the system — the collapse will do the work, the fifth dimension will sort it out. The militant MAGA strand does the reverse: the end-times reading is a call to arms, not a permission to rest. But it sends its soldiers against a spiritual abstraction — the Beast, the globalist, the Antichrist — rather than the thing in front of them. One apocalypse demobilizes; the other mobilizes against a phantom. Neither one fights the actual war.

The conspiratorial commentariat thrives because they are looking for a simple, comforting narrative to explain our chaotic world. Real conspiracies do exist, but a grand global cabal conspiracy fails logically because history is incredibly messy — modern history, especially, is a vast labyrinth of unscripted simultaneous events. It is not an unbroken string of intentional actions by secret societies.

Complex events such as pandemics, wars, or the details of ancient history are difficult to understand and often lack clear, neat answers. The conspiratorial commentariat attempts to decipher world events in a way that appeals to the human desire for order by claiming a small, sinister group is pulling all the strings. Believing these theories offers psychological comfort because it suggests that someone is in charge and understands what is happening, which is preferable to no one is in charge and no one understands what is happening.

IX. Interchangeable Masks

The commentariat’s worldview denies billionaires their autonomy — free agents reduced to automatons and puppets of bigger billionaires. This assumes that billionaires are pliable, yes men who are easily manipulated or compliant. The exact reverse is true — billionaires are ruthless, driven and not yes men. They are domineering, wilful and don’t conform to traditional rules.

How do you control an egomaniac?

There is a long list of suggested culprits who are the hidden hand behind the scenes, pulling the strings of virtually everyone. The short list:

Jews/Mossad/Khazarian Mafia
Aliens/Reptilians/Lizard People
Vatican/Jesuits/Black Pope
Venetians/Black Nobility
British Empire/Tavistock/Fabian Society
Lucifer/Nephilim/Fallen angels/Anti-Christ
WEF/UN/WHO/Agenda 2030
Kissinger/Soros/Schwab/Gates/Fauci
Rothschild/Rockefeller
Bankers/BIS/Federal Reserve
Knights Templar/Round Table
Democrats/Socialists/Communists
Illuminati/Freemasons
Committee of 300
Pedophiles/adrenochrome harvesters
The Cathedral

These are interchangeable masks. The complete lack of agreement within the commentariat is further evidence that the cabal is so invisible that no one knows who they are, but all claim absolute authority that they have identified the source.

Scholars who study the power elite credit the elite with functioning minds and autonomy. The commentariat does not — its worldview is deterministic, fatalistic, at the edge of nihilism. But that fatalism is not a character flaw, and the relentless doom posting on Substack is not a pose. It is what happens when people perceive a real catastrophe and are looking at the wrong map. The dread is earned; only its object is misplaced. There is reason for doom.

The mainstream media and national leaders do not give the conspiratorial commentariat enough credit and they also underestimate the power of a vocal, motivated minority. However, the cabal theory makes the commentariat feel powerless: an omnipotent hidden hand they can never defeat. However the transnational capitalist class is real, visible, named, mortal, and at war with itself — which means it can lose.

X. It Can’t be Capitalism

The exemption list is more revealing than the blame list — because what or who can never be guilty tells you what the theory is for.

The pattern: the bogeyman is always a parasite on a sacred host, never the host itself. America is never to blame — only the Deep State occupying it. Christianity is never to blame — only the Vatican that betrayed it, the Jesuits who infiltrated it, the churches that went apostate. Capitalism is never to blame — only the bankers who corrupted it, the crony monopolists that perverted it, the globalists who hijacked it.

It has to be communism, not capitalism, because capitalism is on the exemption list by definition. When capitalism produces the dystopia, the dystopia gets relabeled. When China does capitalism, it’s still communism.

Billionaires as a class are exempt because the good billionaires are exempt — only specific billionaires are guilty, and the sorting is tribal: Soros and Gates are the cabal; Trump and Musk and Thiel are insurgents fighting the globalists.

This leads us to the root of the problem and the core of the debate: NATIONALISM.

Nationalism is sacred. Globalism is profane. An abomination. The Beast and the Kali Yuga. America is the chosen nation. Everyone else is non-chosen.

This is the master exemption, the one beneath all the others, because the nation is the believer’s first sacred membership and the one he will defend to the end. Every other entry on the blame list is finally a way of naming what threatens the nation from outside it or above it — the globalist, the supranational body, the foreign creditor, the rootless financier, or China. “Globalism” is just the word for everything that crosses the border, and in the conspiratorial cosmology whatever crosses the border is, by definition, the enemy. Nation sacred, globe profane. The map has only two countries — Us and Them.

However, the capitalist civil war has four combatants, and one of them is the nationalist faction — the tariff hawks, the nationalists, the hard-power men: a faction of transnational capitalism like the other three, with its own accumulation strategy in defense, energy, industrial base, and protected domestic markets. But it does not look like a faction to the people inside it. It looks like the nation itself, defending itself. That is the Imperial Nationalist faction’s grift — its capital interests are invisible to its own supporters, because those interests wear a flag. And so Trump, JD Vance and Hegseth are filed not as a capitalist bloc executing a strategy, but as freedom fighters rescuing the sacred host from the profane invader. The commentariat is enlisted in the war and believes it is a bystander. It is standing in the middle of the battlefield, holding a flag, convinced the flag is neutral ground.

This is why the exemption list is not a quirk of the genre but the reason the genre cannot see straight. Half the war is rendered invisible by the act of loving one side of it. You cannot map a conflict you have already sorted into demons and angels, and you certainly cannot recognize your own army as one of the armies.

Which is why “it’s communism, not capitalism” is an honest mistake, and a revealing one. They have seen the State Capitalist faction, and the surveillance grid, and the open contempt for civil rights, and they have reached for the only word their tradition ever gave them for all of it. Some of the commentariat opt for “technocracy” or “techno-feudalism” but they avoid “capitalism” like the plague.

Because it can’t be capitalism.

What they are looking at is capitalism in a specific factional form. It’s a form they don’t like, but to give up “communism” is to admit there is something horribly wrong with capitalism.

And it can’t be capitalism because it can’t be America, because it can’t be Western civilization or Christianity or Republicans or Democrats. It has to be the other.

Most of us hold some version of the bogeyman theory of evil — that the world's suffering has guilty culprits, and removing the culprits would remove the suffering. Conspiracy theory is only its most elaborate form.

The wellness-left runs the identical machine with the nouns swapped: the body, nature, Mother Earth are the sacred hosts; Big Pharma, Monsanto, the toxins are the parasites. It rests on the single axiom that empowers the whole apparatus: the thing I am, cannot be the cause. Everything else is built on top of that. Conspiracy theory, like every Bogeyman Theory, is a machine for moving guilt outward — away from the self, and away from everything the self belongs to.

Every conspiracy theory is an alibi for something the believer loves.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

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Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

I. Origins of the Panopticon

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of competing surveillance civilizations. The Anglo-American, Soviet, and Chinese systems emerged from different political traditions, but all sought the same strategic objective: converting information into power. The Cold War was therefore not only a military and ideological struggle but also a contest between rival architectures for collecting, processing, and controlling information.

From that perspective, Capt. Ralph Van Deman, widely regarded as the “father of American military intelligence,” is often cited as the man who transformed scattered military, police, and private intelligence practices into a more systematic national security apparatus during World War I. His institutions and methods became important building blocks of the later American surveillance state.

The Soviet Cheka and its successors developed another branch during the same time frame, while the Chinese Communist Party eventually built a third. The digital age has not replaced these traditions; it has amplified them.

The modern American surveillance apparatus traces to the 1898 conquest of the Philippines — in 1901 Capt. Ralph Van Deman took command of the Army's Division of Military Information, originating with the U.S. Army’s Division of Military Information. He utilized emerging technologies like telegraphy, photography, and index-card databases to compile detailed files on thousands of Filipino leaders. This apparatus was designed to suppress Filipino resistance through total information control, tracking physical appearance, finances, and political loyalties.

Following the Philippine-American War, Van Deman repatriated these colonial policing methods to the United States. Upon the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, he established the Military Intelligence Division (MID), adapting the Philippine model for domestic use. Collaborating with the American Protective League, the MID amassed over a million surveillance reports on German Americans and political dissidents, laying the institutional foundations for future agencies like the NSA.

The Soviet Union arguably built the world’s most extensive human intelligence surveillance system, relying on millions of informants, party officials, workplace monitors, and security officers. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, abbreviated as VChK, and commonly known as the Cheka was the first Soviet secret police organization, that morphed into the NKVD and then, eventually the KGB which became one of the largest intelligence organizations in history.

In November 1927, the CCP established its first formal intelligence service, with Zhou Enlai founding the Central Special Branch to conduct "special operations" work. Informally called Teke, Zhou Enlai established secret bases across the Chinese territory which was an early ancestor of the China’s Ministry of Public Security (1949), later MSS (1983).

In the West, the National Security Act created the CIA in 1947, followed by the consolidation of UKUSA into Five Eyes SIGINT-sharing.

II. Computerizing the Dragnet (1945–1990)

The SIGINT apparatus went machine-scale during Project SHAMROCK’s telegram interception program that lasted for three decades (1945–75). MINARET was the watchlist program that targeted specific Americans (including senators and Martin Luther King Jr.) — and along with the automated Five Eyes dragnet that became known as ECHELON — it expanded from intercepting satellite and telex traffic to monitoring emails, faxes, and internet traffic, utilizing ground-based stations and satellites to collect global data.

The Church Committee, formally the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, was established in 1975 to investigate covert operations and abuses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Vice-Chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas), the bipartisan committee conducted a 16-month investigation that exposed widespread illegal domestic surveillance, including Project Shamrock and Project Minaret, which involved the warrantless monitoring of American citizens and political dissidents.

During the same time period, the KGB relied on advanced electronic eavesdropping. They deployed resonant cavity microphones, FM transmitter bugs, and wireline intercepts.

The most famous of these resonant-cavity devices was discovered bugging the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. In 1952, a sweep of the U.S. embassy in Moscow picked up the voice of Ambassador George Kennan with no transmitter in sight. The source turned out to be a carved wooden Great Seal of the United States — a wartime gift from the Soviets, hanging in Kennan's study. Smashed open, it revealed a pencil-shaped bug that needed no power source: it sat dormant until Soviet technicians nearby bombarded it with microwaves, then resonated Kennan's every word back to them, and could have done so indefinitely. The Americans only found it by having Kennan pretend to dictate a telegram, baiting the Soviets into switching it on. Kennan recalled an "acutely conscious" sense of unseen presence — and the morning after, a "new grimness" among the staff, the air so thick with hostility "one could have cut it with a knife."

The KGB’s primary domestic role was suppressing dissent. They maintained extensive files on dissidents. They monitored public figures and private citizens through informants, wiretaps, and secret detentions, forcing many to self-censor. Unlike the U.S., there was no judicial oversight; surveillance was a tool of the Communist Party to enforce ideological purity.

III. The Western Unipolar Consolidation (1991–2013)

The Soviet collapse temporarily removed the rivalry. The 1990s laid the digital groundwork: the US-centric internet backbone, the Clipper Chip and Crypto Wars (1993). Then 9/11 detonated the modern surveillance state — the Patriot Act (2001), warrantless wiretapping, Stellar Wind (2001), Total Information Awareness (2002–03), PRISM (2007), and the fusion of state SIGINT with the new hyperscaler data layer.

The Five Eyes was itself expanded to the Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes and data collection programs PRISM and XKEYSCORE as Snowden would describe it in 2014.

On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in a TV interview: “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?”

Snowden:

“You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. ... You can tag individuals ... Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.”

For a solitary decade the Western grid operated as one integrated apparatus presenting itself as universal. It was the most consolidated panopticon ever built — and it was only half the planet.

IV. China Builds a Surveillance State and Exports it to the World

The other three factions inherited a single machine and are fighting over who controls it. China did the one thing none of them could: it built a second machine — and then put it up for sale.

Following the MPS's 1997 internet regulations, the Golden Shield Project was launched, becoming operational around 2003. The key sections, Articles 4–6, are the following:

“Individuals are prohibited from using the Internet to: harm national security; disclose state secrets; or injure the interests of the state or society. Users are prohibited from using the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit information that incites resistance to the PRC Constitution, laws, or administrative regulations; promotes the overthrow of the government or socialist system; undermines national unification; distorts the truth, spreads rumors, or destroys social order; or provides sexually suggestive material or encourages gambling, violence, or murder. Users are prohibited from engaging in activities that harm the security of computer information networks and from using networks or changing network resources without prior approval.”

The Great Firewall (operational 2003) was the beginnning of the splinternet, a term describing the fragmentation of the global internet into isolated, state-controlled digital regions. By enforcing strict censorship through deep packet inspection, DNS spoofing, and TCP reset attacks, the system created a separate, domestic internet ecosystem that blocked access to global platforms like Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

Since 2014, the firewall is operated by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the national internet content regulator and censor of China. Due to the Great Firewall, China has one of the lowest cross-border internet traffic rates in the world. Usage of foreign apps in China is minuscule.

China’s mass surveillance infrastructure evolved from the Skynet project (launched 2005, expanding to an estimated 600 million cameras) to the Sharp Eyes Project (Xueliang Project), which is a Chinese government surveillance launched a 2015 initiative that aimed to achieve 100% coverage of public spaces, particularly in rural and remote areas. The Social Credit System emerged in 2014 to regulate behavior through data fusion.

Xinjiang serves as the primary testing ground for these technologies, where the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) utilizes facial recognition and predictive policing algorithms to monitor and detain Uyghur populations. This regional “laboratory” allowed the state to refine AI-driven behavioral scoring and preemptive control mechanisms before scaling them nationwide.

Edward Snowden said China's mass surveillance mechanisms and machinery of private communications was "utterly mind-boggling." He was initially, “so impressed by the system’s sheer achievement and audacity that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian controls,” a statement he made in his memoirs, Permanent Record.

Having perfected the machine at home, China began selling it.

China is the world’s dominant exporter of physical surveillance infrastructure and AI-driven control systems. Technology linked to Chinese companies is found in at least sixty-three countries worldwide. Major state-backed firms like Hikvision, Dahua, and Huawei lead this trade, with Chinese companies securing more import deals than any other nation. China exports facial-recognition AI to 83 countries — twice as many as the US (57).

The primary vehicle for export is the “Safe City” (or “Smart City”) package. These are turnkey solutions that bundle hardware, software, and financing into a single government contract, deployed in cities including Nairobi and Belgrade. There are 398 documented cases of smart-city technology exports by 34 Chinese companies across 106 countries, with over US$22 billion invested, loaned, or contracted in Indo-Pacific Digital Silk Road digital infrastructure between 2017 and 2023.

These systems integrate facial recognition, license plate readers, predictive policing algorithms, and centralized command centers. Often funded through subsidized loans from Chinese state lenders such as China Eximbank and the China Development Bank as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, creating long-term dependency on Chinese maintenance and upgrades.

V. The Aftermath of Snowden

The long-term impacts of Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks of the NSA’s surveillance apparatus have been profound, reshaping American law, the global tech industry, and international relations.

Snowden (June 2013) shattered the Western grid’s legitimacy and triggered global data-localization. In 2018, the NSA was compelled to delete millions of records after it learned that some of the data had been collected from phone service providers without legal authority or authorization.

Domestically, the revelations forced a landmark, albeit incomplete, legal reform: the USA Freedom Act of 2015 formally ended the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a practice later ruled illegal by a federal court.

However, other powerful surveillance authorities—notably Section 702 of the FISA Act and Executive Order 12333 — remain largely intact, ensuring the agency retained significant capabilities.

Internationally, the damage was severe and lasting: revelations that the U.S. had spied on allies such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel frayed diplomatic trust, while the United Nations Human Rights Council affirmed that offline rights apply online, and the European Union invalidated the Safe Harbor data agreement, accelerating global privacy regulations. As for Snowden himself, he remains in exile in Russia, with the Trump administration circle, via Tulsi Gabbard pushing for a pardon. Putin gave Snowden Russian citizenship in 2022.

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VI. The Panopticon Eats Itself

The 2013 rupture didn’t kill the grid; it killed the consensus that it served only one master. The post-Snowden question wasn’t “should this exist” but “whose is it now?” Three diverging surveillance models formed inside the Western bloc, concurrent with the split within the Transnational Capitalist Class.

Three factions, one server. To see the war, let’s take a look at the data sitting on a hyperscaler’s machine — Facebook. Three Western factions want three incompatible things from it, and none can have its way without defeating the others.

Silicon Valley owns the data. It is Facebook’s asset, its leverage, its business.

The Imperial state wants to use it. In 2018, Congress passed the CLOUD Act, which asserts a simple, sweeping claim: if a company is American, U.S. authorities can force Facebook to surrender its data wherever on earth the servers physically sit. A Microsoft server in Dublin is, legally, within Washington’s reach. This is the Imperial Nationalist faction annexing the Silicon Valley layer by declaring legal dominion over it.

Davos wants to wall it off — and here the mechanism matters, because it is not a conspiracy theory and no faction recruited an agent. Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, brought a private complaint against Facebook out of genuine conviction; he has spent his career suing European regulators too, for enforcing too little. He was never anyone’s instrument. What turned his grievance into a faction weapon was the institution it landed in. The Court of Justice of the European Union chose — twice — to strike down the transatlantic data agreements not on narrow privacy grounds but on the broadest possible one: that U.S. surveillance law rendered American jurisdiction categorically unsafe for Europeans’ data. Safe Harbor fell in 2015; Privacy Shield in 2020. That is not a privacy holding. It is a sovereignty holding — a border drawn against another faction’s reach, using a private lawsuit as the pretext.

This is what it means to call Brussels a Davos organ rather than an independent power. Davos has no army and no hyperscaler; its instrument is the regulatory machine, and that machine works by converting whatever enters it — a student’s complaint, a merger filing, a market-access request — into binding rules that bind other factions’ systems. Schrems supplied the key. Brussels decided which lock to open. The GDPR (2018) then generalized the principle, and the DMA, DSA (2022), and AI Act (2024) extended it into the architecture of the platforms themselves. The faction actor was never the litigant. It was the court that ruled and the legislature that codified.

Now hold the two orders side by side. The CLOUD Act commands American firms: hand us your data, wherever it lives. Schrems and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) command the same firms: then you may not hold Europeans’ data at all. These are not different rules in different rooms — they are contradictory directives issued to the same companies about the same servers, by two factions of the same broken grid. Silicon Valley cannot obey both: it is legally American, and therefore exposed to Washington’s subpoena, but commercially captive to Europe, and therefore bound by Brussels’s wall. The firm is not a player so much as the ground the other two fight on.

That is the war inside the panopticon, and it explains why none of these factions can simply merge their grids into one. Davos has no army and no hyperscaler; it can only rule by making others comply — which means its power requires the others to remain separate enough to be bound. The Imperial state has the reach but not the consent. Silicon Valley has the machines but neither sovereignty nor jurisdiction of its own. Each holds one layer of a grid that no longer answers to a single master — and each is using its layer to capture, wall off, or escape the others.

And Silicon Valley itself is not one faction but two, split over a single question: Can the state apparatus be reformed, or only escaped?

The first wing — the hyperscalers, Apple and Google and Microsoft and Meta — believes it can be managed from inside. Publicly, they wage a privacy crusade: encryption by default, transparency reports, court fights against overreaching warrants. But the crusade stops exactly where a state’s reach begins. In December 2022, Apple rolled out end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups — genuine protection, the company locked out of its own users’ data. Then in January 2025, the UK served Apple with a secret Technical Capability Notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, demanding blanket access to encrypted iCloud data — even for users outside Britain. Apple pulled the feature from the UK rather than build the backdoor, and challenged the order in court. But it could not win alone: the demand was only beaten in August 2025 after the US intelligence chief intervened on Apple’s behalf — and months later the UK quietly renewed it. The lesson was unmistakable: the platform’s privacy held only because one faction’s state shielded it from another’s. The hyperscalers will defend your data against everyone except the state that owns their jurisdiction.

The Network State wing of Silicon Valley, that is centered around Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, crypto, Starlink and the Network State vision, with Curtis Yarvin as house philosopher, concluded that the state is unreformable and started building parallel infrastructure to route around the state. Palantir — Thiel’s company simultaneously selling the security state its surveillance backbone (ICE, the Army) and ideologically committed to exit.

Thiel himself decamped with his family to Buenos Aires in 2026 — a "temporary" bug-out hedge, the New York Times reported — even as Palantir booked $687 million in U.S. government revenue that quarter and Anduril took a $20 billion Army contract. It’s the Hotel California — you can check in, but you can never leave.

VII. Chokepoints

The grid is not one machine but a hundred. Every nation with the means now runs its own — partial or complete, home-built or bought, wired to one of the four faction stacks. It would be naïve to imagine that China, Russia, India, Europe, and the United States ever shared a single interconnected grid.

India is building its own grid from orbit down: a 52-satellite surveillance constellation to watch China and Pakistan, and the domestic Central Monitoring System to spy on its own population. The Gulf states have built comprehensive domestic surveillance that blends mass monitoring with targeted espionage, bought turnkey from whoever sells. And the market reaches everywhere: at least 74 governments have acquired commercial spyware, while African states — Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Malawi, Zambia — now spend over a billion dollars a year on surveillance gear they did not build.

And yet, a nation can own every camera within its borders and still not control its grid — because that grid runs on hardware, software, and silicon someone else can switch off. This is the real architecture of power: not who watches, but who can deny whom.

The United States, Israel, and China can degrade or compromise another nation’s surveillance independence outright — through cyber-espionage, supply-chain implants, and the denial of critical chips and code. Russia can disrupt but not deny: Sandworm and the FSB can break and intercept, but cannot dictate the terms on which others build. The Netherlands holds a narrower, sharper lever — ASML’s monopoly on extreme-ultraviolet lithography means a single export license caps the ceiling of any nation’s ability to manufacture advanced chips at all (though Washington keeps its own hand on that valve, pressing The Hague over sales to China). And the EU denies by rule: its dual-use export regime, significantly expanded in late 2025, bars the sale of cyber-surveillance tools to regimes likely to use them for repression.

Deniability is the cornerstone of a faction’s power. Owning a grid is common now; the ability to reach into someone else’s and turn it off is what separates a faction from a customer. Every chokepoint — a chip, a cable, a standard, a software update — is a hand on a switch that belongs to someone else.

VIII. The Quadropticon

There never was a real global panopticon. Even the Communist eye was never one. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, Moscow and Beijing surveilled each other as rivals. There was never a single all-seeing grid — only ever a contest between them.

The Cold War ran rival eyes — a Western grid, and a Communist East that was itself split between Moscow and Beijing after their 1960s rupture. The Western surveillance apparatus never won, never unified the world under a single control grid; after Snowden’s revelations in 2013 it shattered into three, each faction seizing the layer it could hold. The Eastern faction didn't collapse; its Chinese half went digital and put itself up for sale, while Moscow was demoted into the junior partner that can disrupt but not deny.

So we don’t live under a panopticon. We live under a quadropticon — four surveillance powers, no longer answering to any single master, each using its piece of the apparatus to wall off, reach into, or escape the others. The war inside the machine is four factions fighting over the infrastructure, with humanity as the ground they fight on.

The four of them never argue about the one thing that matters. Every grid points the same direction. The camera always faces down — state to citizen, platform to user, capital to crowd. Not one of them points up. They fight relentlessly over who holds the controls. They have never once disagreed about who is being watched.

That is you. Not the subject of one all-seeing state, but the ground four rival powers are enclosing at once. They all watch you. They each want to own you. And not one of them is accountable to you.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

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On the 25th of January, 1904, a British geographer stood before the Royal Geographical Society in London and redrew the map of the world. Sir Halford John Mackinder’s argument was deceptively simple: For four centuries, sea power had ruled the world from maritime empires. But the railroad changed everything. A continent stitched together by rail and road could move armies and resources across its interior faster than ships could carry them around its edges, and the largest such interior on earth lay in the heart of Eurasia — a vast continental fortress, inaccessible to navies. Mackinder called this the pivot area. Whoever organized the pivot area, he warned, could outbuild and outlast any maritime power.

Fifteen years later, in Democratic Ideals and Reality, he refined the thesis in its enduring form:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

It was a theory of land power versus sea power, interior against rimland, and it cast a long shadow over the twentieth century that can be read as a series of arguments proving his thesis: Two world wars turned, in part, on preventing a single power from consolidating that Eurasian heartland. The Cold War was a forty-year campaign to contain the land power that sat beside it.

When the Soviet Union fell and the contest seemed finally won, it was Mackinder’s logic that supplied the victor’s instruction manual. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski — Carter’s national security adviser, and one of the coldest geostrategists America ever produced — published The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argued that the United States stood alone as the world’s only superpower, but its prime imperative was pure Mackinder, updated for the unipolar moment: Eurasia was the chessboard, and America had to ensure that no rival power, and above all no coalition of rival powers, was ever permitted to dominate the Eurasian landmass. Keep the main players divided. Russia, China, a uniting Europe, Iran.

The Old Chessboard
From Mackinder to Brzezinski, the threat was always out there — a rival on the landmass, a coalition on the horizon. The Heartland thesis is not dead. In some respects we are watching it play out in real time. Today, there is a middle powers coalition consolidating the Eurasian interior. China sits at its center, the largest industrial power the world has ever seen, reaching westward by rail, pipeline and road through the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia is joined at China’s hip — a resource-rich junior partner, co-dependent, supplying energy and raw materials — Brzezinski’s nightmare. On Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, the game is going badly for the Americans. What is happening is the very thing Brzezinski wrote his book to prevent: the Eurasian coalition, refusing to stay divided, organizing the Heartland against the maritime order that has policed it since 1945.

But the old chessboard is only one board. To see the full contest, we must recognize that Mackinder’s map has also been layered over by a new digital terrain and it has been fundamentally expanded into three distinct boards, each with its own geography, currency of power, and dominant players.

The Three Boards: Territory, Commons, and the Streams

1. The Mackinder Board is the original chessboard of physical territory. Its currency is land, resources, armies, and industrial capacity. The Heartland-Rimland dynamic is alive and well, with Russia and Iran playing the classic land-power game and China building the overland road and rail connectivity that Mackinder warned would be the ultimate geopolitical prize for any contender to the Western world order. The war in Ukraine and the struggle over Taiwan are quintessential Mackinder Board contests.

2. The Maritime-Space Commons is the board Mackinder could never have foreseen — the one the United States built after 1945 and now operates as its sovereign domain. Its geography is the world’s oceans, the global airspace, and orbital space. Its currency is carrier strike groups, nuclear submarine fleets, satellite constellations, and global airlift. This is not a “rimland” of Eurasia; it is a separate, self-contained super-platform whose coastline is the entire rim of the World-Island. The U.S. Navy ensures freedom of navigation in every major sea lane; U.S. Space Command and assets like Starlink provide a decisive intelligence and command advantage. The Maritime-Space Commons is the American foundation that can project power onto the Mackinder Board, economically strangle a Heartland power, or simply cut off a continent. Mackinder saw the oceans as a moat around the continent; the U.S. turned the moat into its own territory.

3. The Rheopolitical Board is the New Grand Chessboard — the financial-data infrastructure layer. Its geography is the streams: payment rails, data centers, fibre-optic cables, fabrication plants, the algorithms, and the chips that run them. Capital moves as electronic settlement through a handful of clearing systems; information moves as data through networks; and the coordination of everything else — logistics, markets, weapons — moves through AI. Its chokepoints are SWIFT, the dollar clearing system, the semiconductor supply chain, and the digital platforms. This is the domain we can call rheopolitics: the politics of the streams, where the gate built at the chokepoint lets one faction cut the others off from the flow they all depend on. Rheo, taken from the Greek, meaning river, stream, flow.

These three boards do not replace one another. They stack, and they are now playing into each other. The networks still need the ground — the data center sits somewhere, the cable runs through a physical seabed — and the control of the Commons determines who can secure those physical networks. The Rheopolitical Board has not abolished the Mackinder Board; it has given new weapons to the factions fighting over it.

The Pawns Are No Longer Only States

The old chessboard had one kind of piece: the state. Powers were countries; countries were powers. The emergence of the second and third boards alters not merely the terrain of power, but the identity of the players. On the Mackinder Board, states are primary. On the Maritime-Space Commons, the state still dominates, but private actors like SpaceX now operate critical infrastructure. On the Rheopolitical Board, many of the critical chokepoints are controlled by institutions, corporations, and elite networks that transcend state boundaries.

The contest is being waged by the four factions of the global ruling class. Global communication and transportation produced globalism and a transnational elite, and this class, once united by the rules-based order, has splintered into four factions fighting over the three boards. The old board had many ruling classes, territorially contained into 195 nations. The new structure has one class — transnational, tiny, a few thousand people — split into four. Many territorial elites became one transnational elite in four pieces.

The factions and their relation to the three boards:

• The Davos Institutionalists. Their native board is the Rheopolitical Board, specifically the legacy financial plumbing. They hold SWIFT, the dollar clearing system, the IMF, and the rules-based governance architecture. Their aim is to dissolve sovereignty into post-national governance, managing the global streams through multilateral consensus.

• The Imperial Nationalists. Their native board is the Mackinder Board and the military dimension of the Maritime-Space Commons. They hold the reserve currency and the guns — the U.S. military, the treaty alliances, and the legal architecture that can turn a shared financial utility into an American weapon. Their aim is to recapture transnational power for the nation-state and win the great-power competition over territory and industrial capacity.

• The Silicon Valley Techno-Sovereigns. Their native board is a privatized slice of the Maritime-Space Commons (Starlink, private space) and the architectural layer of the Rheopolitical Board (compute, AI models, cloud, platforms). They hold the hyperscaler infrastructure and are reaching into money. Their aim is to exit the state board entirely, building network states and digital infrastructure above the old geography.

The State-Capitalists. This faction is the only one that systematically fuses all three boards into a single move. China is the core architect, building a full-suite alternative to the Western infosphere: Digital Yuan (Rheopolitical Board), BeiDou and blue-water navy (Maritime-Space Commons), and the Belt and Road Initiative (Mackinder Board). Russia provides the Heartland’s security umbrella and raw materials; Iran is the warm-water gateway. BRICS is their institutional layer — a direct challenge to the Davos Institutionalists. Their transnational reach and their state power are the same thing, which is why China’s ruling class plays all three chessboards with one hand.

The Commons Is Not a Commons

The second board is the one Mackinder could never have foreseen, and it is the one most often mistaken for neutral ground. The Maritime-Space Commons is the system the United States built after 1945 and has run ever since as a sovereign domain: the oceans, the airspace, and orbital space, policed by carrier strike groups, submarine fleets, satellite constellations, and global airlift. Mackinder saw the ocean as a moat around the World-Island. The Americans turned the moat into territory. It is not the rimland of Eurasia; it is a self-contained super-platform whose coastline is the entire rim of the world, and from it the holder can project force onto the Mackinder Board, strangle a Heartland economy, or sever a continent from the streams it depends on.

Oceans facilitate over 90% of global trade by volume, making the security of these commons essential for international commerce. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. enjoyed uncontested naval supremacy. This period, termed the “unipolar moment” by Charles Krauthammer, allowed the U.S. to project power globally without credible peer competition. Many strategists mark the 2008 global financial crisis as the beginning of the end for absolute dominance. The crisis strained U.S. resources while accelerating China’s economic and military rise. Simultaneously, China began deploying Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems specifically designed to keep U.S. carriers at bay in the Western Pacific.

The word commons is a piece of Western propaganda. A commons is shared by all and owned by none. This one is built by one power, held by one power, and rented to the rest.

Three claims on it run at once. It is American-anchored — the carriers, the satellites, the bases, the dollar’s enforcement reach are all American, and no other Western power can reproduce them. It is contested among the three Western factions, each holding a different piece. And it is challenged from outside by the one faction building a rival.

The Imperial Nationalists hold the hard power core: the Navy, the bases, the treaty alliances, the capacity to actually coerce. This is their native ground — the place where the reserve currency stops being a spreadsheet entry and becomes a blockade. Silicon Valley has privatized a slice and is racing to enlarge it: Starlink, private launch, the orbital layer the state once monopolized and now leases back from Elon Musk.

And Davos holds the layer no one thinks to count — the legitimacy. Davos owns the narrative that the American asset, “The Planetary Commons”, is a global public good: freedom of navigation, the rules-based order, the alliance as a community of values rather than a protection racket. That story is what turns one nation’s military into something allies will fund, host, and die beside. It is the same move Davos makes on the Rheopolitical Board, where SWIFT is sold as neutral plumbing rather than an American weapon. Davos’s faction-power is the manufacture of neutrality — making one faction’s possession look like everyone’s commons. The hard power belongs to the Imperial Nationalists; the cover story belongs to Davos.

The fourth faction does not bother contesting the American asset. The State Capitalists are building a parallel commons of their own — a blue-water navy, BeiDou against GPS, sovereign constellations, their own undersea cable. They understood that you do not capture the other man’s platform; you build your own and make exclusion from his survivable. The same logic as CIPS, one board down.

Here is the asymmetry that matters. The Mackinder Board is a four-way brawl; the Rheopolitical Board is a four-way brawl; but the Commons is something stranger. Three of the four factions fighting over it are Western — born from the same ruling class, heirs to the same 1945 inheritance — and they have discovered they want incompatible things from it. The Imperial Nationalists want to wield it nakedly, as American power, mask off. Silicon Valley wants to privatize and inherit it. Davos wants to keep the mask on and govern it as a shared trust. The fourth simply walks away to build its own. Which means the Commons is the board on which the West discovers it is not one thing. The capitalist civil war is most visible here — not between West and East, but inside the West, over who controls the machine America built. The deepest fracture on this board does not run between Washington and Beijing. It runs between Washington and Davos.

The Davos Dilemma

Which brings us to Europe, and to the predicament that has no clean exit. Europe sits on all three boards at once and owns none of them outright. On the Mackinder Board it is rimland — the western edge of the World-Island, the front line the Eurasian China-Russia-Iran axis is organizing against and the ground the Ukraine war is fought on. On the Rheopolitical Board it is Davos’s intended chassis: having lost Washington to the Imperial Nationalists, the faction that needs a state to govern the global stack has only one candidate left, and it is Europe — the euro, the regulatory apparatus, the banks, and the middle-power coalition Mark Carney is trying to assemble into a pole that is neither Washington nor Beijing. And on the Commons, Europe is something else entirely: not an owner but a tenant. It does not co-own the American platform; it shelters underneath it for military protection. NATO is the lease agreement.

The Davos dilemma, caused by the rupture in the rules-based order, is forcing them to attempt the impossible — building a sovereign European power on the Rheopolitical Board — but that power has no Commons of its own. No aircraft carriers, no satellite constellations, no tanks, jets or helicopters. It remains militarily hostage to the very faction it is trying to escape. This is why European strategic autonomy and European rearmament have significantly increased in the last few years. Davos cannot run an autonomous nation-state while renting the Commons from the faction they are declaring independence from. Davos can build Europe into a Rheopolitical power and still not free it from the Imperial Nationalist leash.

The consensus among defense analysts and officials is that full operational independence is at least 5 to 10 years away, contingent on sustained political will and successful industrial scaling. The primary driver for this shift is the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and growing fears that American security guarantees are no longer unconditional.

The collective West does not own the Commons is no — NATO is the institutional fiction that the Commons is shared. It lets Europe behave as a co-owner, lets America present its asset as an alliance, and it lets the arrangement read as a community rather than a hegemon and its dependents.

When the Imperial Nationalists turned the annexation drive on Greenland — Danish territory, NATO territory — the mask came off, and Europe saw that the protector and the threat were the same entity. Allies began treating the American military as a danger to the alliance itself. Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said aloud that an American attack would mean the end of NATO.

The annexation drive was walked back by Trump, and walked back at Davos, on the World Economic Forum’s stage in January 2026: “I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the US is asking for is a place called Greenland,” he said. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.”

NATO does not own the Commons. NATO is the story Davos tells about who owns it — and Greenland was the moment the Imperial Nationalists showed they can stop telling it whenever they choose. Canadian Prime Minister and quintessential Davos Man Mark Carney admitted as much on the same stage: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” Carney said. “That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. This fiction was useful — and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. But this bargain no longer works.”

The Siege of Tehran: A Three-Board Weapon

Iran has been excommunicated from the financial Heartland three times, and the three excommunications reveal the factions pulling the same lever on the Rheopolitical Board while the other boards were in play.

In March 2012, the lever was operated as designed. EU regulation required it; SWIFT, a Belgian cooperative, disconnected sanctioned Iranian banks. This was the Davos plumbing department doing its job — a multilateral, rule-bound, governing infrastructure. When the nuclear deal came in 2016, the banks were reconnected. The system worked exactly as the system is supposed to.

In May 2018 President Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA and re-imposed secondary sanctions on Iran, effectively forcing European companies to choose between the Iranian market and the US financial system. Same lever, but the hand was now a single state, wielding the Maritime-Space Commons’ dollar supremacy to enforce a financial blockade on the Rheopolitical Board — over the objections of the Europeans who had reconnected those banks two years earlier. This is the Imperial Nationalist move: the reserve currency and the messaging layer wielded alone, the shared utility privatized as a weapon. Those banks did not come back.

In 2025, the battlefield moved inside the institution itself. The Europeans pulled the trigger — the E3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) invoked the snapback mechanism, rebuilding the full sanctions architecture. China and Russia tried to block it at the Security Council and lost; then they sent a joint letter denying the Europeans had standing. The machinery of governance on the Rheopolitical Board was itself the terrain, and the State-Capitalists were losing the procedural game even as they raced to build their way out of it.

The exclusion of Iran is the reason CIPS exists, the reason mBridge exists, the reason the de-dollarization rails are being built. China and Russia watched the lever get pulled on the Rheopolitical Board, understood that the Imperial Nationalists could back that lever with total dominance of the Maritime-Space Commons, and began laying a second pivot area — not to storm the existing network but to make exclusion from it survivable.

By December 2025, Iran’s economic crisis had reached a breaking point. The rial collapsed, merchants shuttered their shops, and the government dismantled its subsidized exchange-rate regime. The ability to lay siege to a nation without firing a shot — by choking its access to the Rheopolitical Board while the Mackinder Board’s armies remain in their barracks and the Imperialists’ fleets patrol the sea lanes — is the ultimate power of this new, three-board world.

Mackinder’s Maxim That Won’t Update

Mackinder gave the old board its motto, and it was a ladder with a throne on top: who rules East Europe commands the Heartland, who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island, who rules the World-Island commands the World. Three rungs and a prize at the top. The form worked because Mackinder’s world had a top — one pivot, one prize, one power able, in principle, to climb to the end.

Try to write the same line for the new board. The cleanest version covers most of it:

Who gates the compute chokes the network;
Who chokes the network throttles the economy;
Who throttles the economy holds the world.

But it covers only one of the three boards — the rheopolitical one — and the moment you try to fold in the others, it buckles. Add the Commons and the chokepoints that it runs through, and the maxim falls apart. The maxim cannot hold three boards on a single axis, because the three boards have no single axis.

And nobody can reach the top rung anyway. No single faction holds all things necessary for global dominance, and the moment one moves to seize a stretch it doesn’t already control, the other three dam the flow it was reaching for. The Imperial Nationalists can pull the SWIFT lever but cannot build the chips. The Silicon Valley insurgents can launch the satellites but cannot enforce a sovereign sanction. The Davos institutionalists can govern the rules but cannot guard the sea lanes. And the State Capitalists, for all their unity, still have to plug into the Western stack to sell what they make. Each holds a piece. None holds the set.

So Mackinder’s maxim will not update, and the reason is not a failure of phrasing. His world had a prize to win because power and geography were attainable. This world has stacked three geographies on top of one another — the old chessboard of territory, the Maritime-Space Commons hidden in plain sight since 1945, and the rheopolitical grid laid over both — and power is now split across all three, held in four hands. Whether any one of those hands can ever close around the other three is precisely what Mackinder’s maxim can no longer tell us.

Which leaves the question the whole arrangement begs. If the boards are stacked, and no faction holds them all, and the motto refuses to close on a ruler — then what would a faction actually have to do to win outright? To deny the other three and hold the world? Is it even possible?

That is the next question. And the answer is stranger than the board.

NOTE: The term rheopolitics was coined independently twice in the spring of 2026 — first in French, as rhéopolitique, by Xavier Carpentier-Tanguy (Fondation Jean-Jaurès, May 19), derived from maritime circulation and the history of blockade; then in English, in the my current book project here on Substack (June 2), derived from financial clearing and data infrastructure.

The two defining treatments appeared a day apart — his note for the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique on June 29, my "Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny” on June 28 — neither author aware of the other, showing that we are both attempting to describe a real geopolitical shift, from different ends of the board.

This piece is part of a longer project — a book-in-progress on the four-faction civil war inside the transnational capitalist class. If this kind of elite-power analysis is what you want more of, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Subscribe now

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The War Inside the Panopticon

This piece is part of a longer project — a book-in-progress on the four-faction civil war inside the transnational capitalist class. If this kind of elite-power analysis is what you want more of, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Subscribe now

The four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class disagree about time, and not because they wear faulty wrist watches or exist in different time zones, but rather, because they are trapped in a foot race where one runner is in a marathon, another is in a hundred-metre sprint, a third is running hurdles, and the fourth is in a relay.

Davos plans in decades. Imperial Nationalists plan in election cycles. Silicon Valley plans in product cycles and civilizational arcs. State Capitalists plan in dynasties. These are not stylistic differences. Each faction’s temporal horizon is its theory of power. Davos believes power flows from coordinating long-horizon institutional commitments. Imperial Nationalists believe power is maintained and exercised by compressed transactional victories. Silicon Valley believes power flows from circumventing institutions altogether. State Capitalists believe power flows from outlasting opponents. Time is not what they disagree about. Time is the medium through which each faction theorizes power itself.

This produces a structural asymmetry that defines the stalemate. Three of the four factions can win on their own clock. Imperialists win by blocking. State Capitalists win by outlasting. Silicon Valley wins by rendering the question moot through acceleration. Only Davos requires the others’ cooperation on its preferred timescale — because only Davos believes the prize is something that has to be built together by all the factions.

The result is what we could call chronopolitical friction: the structural grinding that occurs when actors operating on incompatible timeframes are forced to govern, regulate, and compete within the same geopolitical space. A world where one faction is planning for 2050, another for November’s midterms, another for the next software update, and another for the next dynasty cannot produce coordinated global decisions. Davos’s only weapon — long-horizon institutional coordination — is the one the other three factions are incapable of wielding, regardless of stated intentions.

Davos: The Decades Clock

The World Economic Forum, which meets every year in Switzerland, is the central arena of the Davos faction. The WEF has no formal 10-year mandate, but it structures its policies, risk assessments, and global initiatives around a 10-year structural planning horizon — the energy transition, demographic curves, ESG timelines — all of which exceed any single election cycle.

Ten years is the unit in which the faction thinks.

The clearest evidence of the WEF’s operational timelines is found in its annual flagship publication, the Global Risks Report. Every year, the WEF mandates its network of experts to evaluate systemic threats across three distinct, explicitly stated horizons: “It explores risks in the current or immediate term (in 2026), the short-to-medium term (to 2028) and in the long term (to 2036).”

The issues Davos exists to address all exceed the four-year election cycle. The 1t.org Trillion Trees initiative, launched at Davos 2020, aims to conserve, restore, and grow one trillion trees worldwide by 2030 — a ten-year horizon for a problem that operates on a geological time. The Reskilling Revolution, launched the same year, pledged to provide one billion people with better education, skills, and economic opportunity by 2030. The decade lens is the standard unit for tracking what Davos worries about: technological displacement, climate tipping points, long-term societal polarization.

The structural weakness of Davos's timeframe is the gap between what it can coordinate and what it cannot. Where the plan only requires private capital to commit, the decade horizon works beautifully: the Reskilling Revolution and the Trillion Trees initiative are tracking toward their 2030 targets, because they ask corporations to pledge things corporations were already willing to do, and a pledge can be carried across ten years by the institution that made it. Where the plan requires a sovereign state to act against its own short-term electoral interest, it collapses.

Net-Zero 2050 is the cleanest case: the target assumes that every government along the way will keep honouring a commitment its predecessor made, through every election in between. The decade horizon assumes the institutions executing the plan will still be standing — and still oriented toward the plan — when the decade ends. Trump signed the executive order withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement on his first day in office, January 20, 2025; the withdrawal took legal effect on January 27, 2026, exactly one year later under the agreement's own statutory delay. One of the world's largest emitters exited the framework on which Net-Zero 2050 was built, and the framework's own architecture required a year to register the loss. A corporation that pledged in 2020 is still that corporation in 2030. A government that ratified in 2020 may, by 2026, be run by a faction that treats the ratification as a foreign imposition to be torn up.

The 2026 Global Risks Report provides evidence from the WEF’s own inner investigations: “geoeconomic confrontation” (trade wars, sanctions, the weaponisation of economic policy) moved up eight positions in a single year to become the WEF's top-ranked short-term risk. State-based armed conflict was right behind it. Meanwhile, the long-horizon environmental risks the faction was built to address fell in the rankings: critical change to Earth systems dropped seven positions, biodiversity loss dropped five. The report titled itself the Age of Competition. The 2026 annual meeting's official theme was Reestablishing a Spirit of Dialogue. When the coordination summit has to plead for permission to be a coordination summit, the coordination has already broken — “ruptured” in the words of Mark Carney.

Every January in Davos, the Forum publishes its updated ten-year risk landscape, and every January the political conditions for acting on it have deteriorated further. The Annual Meeting itself has become less a coordination summit than a barometer — a temperature check on a global economy that the faction can describe but increasingly cannot move.

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Imperial Nationalists: The Election Clock

The faction centered on the US-Israel axis operates on a fundamentally different clock: the two-to-four-year democratic election cycle. It emphasizes fast, transactional, high-profile victories. Where Davos treats the decade as the minimum unit of meaningful action, Imperial Nationalists treat anything beyond the next polling date as a risk and a vulnerability. The US presidency runs four years with a disruptive midterm at exactly the halfway point.

Netanyahu’s coalitions, perpetually fragile, often compress his effective planning window to twelve or eighteen months between snap elections. Netanyahu’s own coalition put forward a bill to dissolve the Knesset on May 13, 2026, and trigger a snap election. On May 20, 2026, the Knesset held a preliminary vote on the dissolution bill, which passed with 110 votes in favor and no opposition.

The national temporal horizon is short, unpredictable, and constantly being reset.

This produces a political culture built around the visible win. Rather than committing capital to a ten-year structural transition — a green energy grid, a renewed multilateral architecture, an industrial re-skilling program — the faction prioritizes immediate results that can be messaged to voters within months. Tariffs deliver headlines faster than trade agreements. Strikes deliver headlines faster than treaties. Accords delivered before a coalition collapses are more politically useful than frameworks negotiated to last beyond it.

The Abraham Accords were structured to be signed within Netanyahu and Trump’s compressed window; the Obama administration’s nuclear framework with Iran, by contrast, was negotiated as a multi-decade agreement and, because it was never ratified as a treaty, ran directly into the 2016 election. The Trump administration tore it up within months of taking office. The same temporal asymmetry that makes long-horizon coordination difficult to build makes it relatively easy to destroy.

A dramatic recent illustration of how the Imperial Nationalists forgo diplomacy in favor of optics came in May 2026, when Brett Ratner — the Hollywood director rehabilitated through making First Lady propaganda — hitched a ride on Air Force One to scout Rush Hour 4 locations in China. Ratner was traveling alongside Musk, Cook, Fink, Schwarzman, and Solomon on a presidential summit with Xi Jinping. There was no real separation between deal-making, image management, and diplomacy. A diplomatic trip and a location scout flying together on the presidential plane.

The clash between the Imperialists and Davos is, at root, a clash about the perceived weaponization of time. Long-term predictability — the entire premise of multilateral coordination — appears from inside the Imperial Nationalists’ worldview as a mechanism by which unelected bureaucrats lock future governments into policies they cannot change. Net-Zero 2050. The SDGs. The thirty-year climate frameworks.

From the inside of a four-year cycle, these read as foreign interference in domestic sovereignty, and a faction operating on this clock will happily break a ten-year international agreement to gain a two-year electoral advantage. This is not a weakness of the faction’s temporal horizon. It is the central feature.

Silicon Valley: The Product Cycle Clock

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns faction operates on two clocks at once: At the micro-level, Silicon Valley runs on weeks or months — the software release cycle, the venture funding round — “move fast and break things.” At the macro-level, it stretches across centuries or millennia — longtermism, effective accelerationism (e/acc), astroengineering.

The two temporal horizons are both in opposition to institutional time — the time of elections, treaties, regulatory hearings, multilateral negotiations. The future arrives faster than legislatures can debate it, and the timescales worth caring about are longer than any electoral mandate. Either way, the state’s clock is irrelevant.

The short horizon is a political weapon. Deploying a new technology faster than a government can comprehend, debate, or regulate it is not a side effect of engineering velocity; it is the deliberate strategy by which the faction has accumulated power. While the WEF spends five years conducting committee studies on AI risks, a techno-sovereign can rewrite a platform’s code, deploy an algorithmic change, or shift billions in capital overnight — instantly altering global information ecosystems in ways that legislators are still drafting white papers about.

When regulation finally arrives, the technology has already pivoted to something the legislation does not cover. The faction’s chronopolitics is not anti-state in the populist sense. It is post-state: indifferent to the question of governance because it operates at a speed governance cannot match.

The long horizon does the same work from the opposite direction. Influenced by longtermism and effective accelerationism, the faction treats existing political systems as minor, fleeting blips in deep evolutionary time. The projects worth pursuing — AGI, radical life extension, multi-planetary civilization — are not policy goals to be negotiated through institutions but engineering challenges to be solved by sufficiently well-capitalized private actors.

Alvin Toffler saw their organizational form in 1970, before any of this faction’s principals were adults: “The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics... the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals.” Toffler in his book, Future Shock, was describing a workplace. He had, in fact, described the operating system of a political faction that would arrive fifty years later.

The faction’s leaders are not young — Thiel is 58, Andreessen and Musk both 54 — but the operating tempo is set by the work, not the workforce. Discord-and-group-chat communication, meme-driven politics, the gig-economy relationship to labour: this is what middle-aged capital looks like when it has adopted youth culture’s pace as its political mode. The structural point is what this leaves the faction unable to do. Silicon Valley cannot, on its own, govern territory. Coordination on a four-year cycle is too slow; coordination on a thousand-year horizon is a sci-fi novel.

The faction’s theory of power is that institutional time can be made irrelevant — that the question of who governs becomes moot if you can simply outrun governance. This is why it keeps attaching itself to whichever territorial faction will let it operate at speed. The mode is brilliantly effective at evading state authority. It is structurally incapable of replacing it.

State Capitalists: The Dynasty Clock

The State Capitalist faction — led by China, Russia and Iran — operates on a horizon the Western factions cannot match, because none of the state capitalist regimes are subject to the kind of four-year electoral disruption that defines Western politics.

And this is despite the variations on the theme of state capital: China runs a single-party state, Russia and Iran run consolidated autocracies and India runs a democracy whose civilizational planning transcends electoral cycles. What is similar about the faction is not how leadership is selected but what leadership selection does not do: it does not reset the long-horizon plan every four years. The faction’s coherence is the durability of its planning horizon, not the form of its government.

China operates the most institutionalized long-horizon planning in the world. The Chinese Communist Party structures its entire geopolitical and economic existence around Centenary Goals — explicit hundred-year planning windows pegged to founding anniversaries. The Imperialist interpretation of this project is captured in Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon, which frames the project as a secret strategy to outpace the United States as the world’s dominant power by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic. Pillsbury’s framing is contested within China studies, but the underlying observation is not: the leadership does not change based on a vacillating public vote, which means a 30-year industrial policy — the Belt and Road Initiative, the monopolization of critical mineral supply chains, the EV and battery dominance — can be put into place without the risk that a new administration cancels it every four years.

For the sanctioned, autarkic regimes of Russia and Iran, time functions as a cushion rather than a horizon. They do not need to plan in centuries; they need only to outlast the Western politicians opposing them. A hostile American administration hits an election hard stop in two-to-four years, with foreign policy potentially inverting at each turn. The temporal strategy of these regimes is attrition — absorbing short-term pain through sanctions and kinetic gridlock, because they know their political structures will physically outlast their adversaries’ terms in office. This is long-horizon politics by negation: not because the regimes plan ahead, but because they cannot be electorally removed within any timeframe their opponents can rely on.

India is the most complicated and hybrid case, blending elements of all four factions. It runs democratic elections, participates heavily in Western financial structures, possesses Silicon Valley’s demographic and technical depth, and operates a multi-decade developmental plan — the Amrit Kaal, the “Golden Era,” aimed at Target Year 2047, the centenary of independence. India’s dominant temporal mode is civilizational, but the structure is hybrid: democratic, sovereign autonomy internationally, and a 25-year development plan.

Across the faction’s internal variation — Chinese Centenary planning, Russian and Iranian attrition, Indian civilizational ascent — the underlying claim is the same. The state-capitalist faction treats time as an asset that it owns. The Western factions treat time as a resource they are rapidly running out of.

Conclusion

Temporal misalignment is not a symptom of the stalemate between the four factions. It is the stalemate’s structural feature.

The factions disagree about time because they disagree about what power is. Davos believes power flows from long-horizon institutional coordination. Imperialists believe it flows from compressed transactional victories. Silicon Valley believes it flows from outrunning institutions altogether. State Capitalists believe it flows from outlasting opponents. These are not competing strategies within a shared game. They are four games being played simultaneously on the same board, each with its own clock, each with its own definition of winning.

Davos can read the global risk landscape but no longer move it. Imperial Nationalists can disrupt the coordination others require but cannot build the institutions to replace it. Silicon Valley can evade state authority but cannot replace state capacity. State Capitalists can outlast the West but cannot impose a positive global order on a system whose institutions they do not control. Each faction is structurally capable of preventing the others from winning. None is structurally capable of winning itself.

This is what the stalemate actually is. Not a pause between resolutions. Not a transitional moment awaiting a new balance of power. The interregnum is the balance of power.

The temporal architecture of the ruling class once supported coordination, in the unified phase of the Transnational Capitalist Class that preceded its fracture. It no longer does. To break the stalemate, the factions would need to coordinate. To coordinate, they would need a shared temporal horizon. The absence of that shared horizon is what makes them factions. The ruling class can no longer cooperate well enough to repair the conditions that destroyed its ability to cooperate. The very thing that would have to happen — coordination across factions — cannot happen, because the conditions for it to happen no longer exist.

This article is a chapter in an ongoing series I’m working on. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book, The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

This invisible lens of Awareness Creep happened gradually over the course of a series of events, some unfortunate and others seemingly benign.

Here is a comprehensive breakdown of how Awareness Creep unfolded and evolved over the last twenty-five years, mapping out how the standard pursuit of profit gradually transformed into a hyper-conscious war for global dominance.

Phase 1: The 2000s – Blind Prosperity & Simple Competition

During this era, the factions were largely blind to their fundamental incompatibilities. They were unified by the neoliberal “rules based order” established by Western financial elites. They operated under the assumption that a rising global tide would lift all boats and there appeared no alternative model on the near horizon, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The Catalyst(s) that changed this myopic optimism was the expansion of the internet and the entry of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.

At that time, Silicon Valley was viewed by Davos as a group of startups geeks, creating useful consumer tools, but essentially harmless. The State Capitalists (primarily China) were viewed by Davos as a massive, cheap mega-factory that would eventually liberalize and adopt Western corporate norms. Likewise, Western ruling elites viewed Russia as a defeated, chaotic former adversary that needed to be integrated into the Western-led global order as a junior partner.

This was known as the “modernization thesis,” popularized by Seymour Lipset, briefly stated, "the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.”

The National Imperialists, currently dominated by the Trump/Netanyahu coalition, viewed Silicon Valley as a speculative dot-com bubble and Davos as a talking heads think tank with no real influence. The Awareness Level of what was coming was Zero. Factions interacted through standard market competition. There was no concept of existential warfare; everyone assumed they could maximize profits simultaneously.

Phase 2: The 2010s – Friction & the Creep into Politics

The 2008 financial crash and the subsequent decade exposed structural cracks. The factions realized that the rules of the global economy were actively favoring some at the expense of others.

The Catalyst that broke the illusion was the Eurozone crisis, the rise of populist political movements (Brexit, Trump), and the consolidation of Big Tech monopolies that mushroomed virtually overnight. Silicon Valley grew so massive that it began swallowing legacy industries. They realized they needed political shields, transforming into the largest lobbying forces in Washington and Brussels. Its original mandate changed from “We build products; we don't do politics,” to serious lobby groups such as the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) and Technet.

The Imperialists realized that Davos-backed climate initiatives and Silicon Valley data monopolies were actively threatening their bottom lines. They pivoted their capital toward funding nationalist political movements to stall global treaties. As the post–Cold War globalization consensus fractured, some sectors of capital and political actors increasingly converged around sovereignty-oriented and nationalist movements because they saw parts of the emerging global order as threatening their long-term interests.

State Capitalists realized that Western tech platforms were Trojan horses for Western cultural and political influence. China built the “Great Firewall” and began aggressively subverting the Davos banking network. China wanted the economic benefits of the internet and globalization, but not the loss of political control that the CCP believed could accompany unrestricted information flows. The Great Firewall became a way to pursue economic integration while maintaining centralized authority.

The Awareness Level became Tactical.

Different power networks and institutions gradually realized that their interests were diverging within the global order built after the Cold War. Factions realized their rivals were actively working against them. They weaponized domestic political systems, Super PACs, and regulatory bodies to protect their respective market shares. Davos wanted more integration and international coordination.

Imperialists and national-security, sovereignty-oriented actors became concerned about supply chains, industrial decline, technology dependence and strategic competition. The hard power WashingtonTel Aviv Consensus became increasingly at odds with the Davos globalists.

Phase 3: The 2020s to Present – Hyper-Consciousness & the Open War

The pandemic created the ultimate pressure cooker. By legally freezing the physical economy, global authorities inadvertently allowed Silicon Valley to cannibalize the middle and working classes. The resulting working-class fury fueled a populist firestorm that culminated in the return of Donald Trump.

During the pandemic, Silicon Valley used its digital network monopoly to stage a massive economic coup over the physical world.

Davos-aligned governments enforced physical lockdowns through Davos adjacent functionaries who acted like the pandemic PR men. This act effectively criminalized the physical economy (Mom-and-Pop retail, local restaurants, independent gyms) while leaving the digital economy untouched.

The Great Wealth Transfer: As physical competitors were legally forced to close, billions of consumer dollars were funnelled directly into digital infrastructure. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon became the world’s sole supply chain lifeline; Zoom replaced the office; Netflix replaced entertainment. Silicon Valley billionaires added trillions to their net worth in months, extracting wealth directly from a frozen working class.

The Imperialists suffered the most. They watched their real estate and retail empires collapse overnight. The Imperialists—the faction whose power is anchored in physical territory, tangible assets, and national sovereignty—suffered a near-total sectoral rout during the pandemic. Fossil fuel giants were gutted by a historic demand collapse, with global revenue losses projected at $1.8 trillion and some long-term forecasts warning of a terminal decline erasing $25 trillion in future profits; the market capitalizations of Shell and BP halved within days. Physical retail and commercial real estate faced an extinction-level event: U.S. retail bankruptcies hit a decade high, regional mall occupancy dropped 13 percent, and urban retail rents plunged by over 30 percent. Only the defense-industrial sub-sector, sheltered by government contracts, absorbed the shock without catastrophic damage. For the Imperialists, the pandemic was not a setback—it was a strategic defeat that accelerated the transfer of wealth from their physical empires directly into Silicon Valley’s digital infrastructure.

The destruction of the working class and the strict mandates imposed by Davos-aligned institutions created a boiling pot of public resentment. The working class felt abandoned by Davos bureaucrats (who mandated lockdowns and vaccines) and exploited by Silicon Valley (which profited from their isolation). This resentment manifested as the anti-vaccine movement, a fierce distrust of mainstream media, and a rejection of global institutions.

The Imperialists and populist leaders saw this massive, angry voter base and weaponized it. They funded the MAGA movement and parallel right-populist movements globally, shifting the narrative from a health crisis to a war between “corrupt global elites” and “ordinary citizens.” Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and take on the deep state.

The re-election of Donald Trump and the rise of nationalist leaders globally acted as the definitive hammer that broke the global ruling class into four separate war rooms. Trump was the political vehicle the Imperialists used to smash the system. His ascent shattered the illusion of a unified global elite, forcing Davos into a defensive position, dragging a predatory Silicon Valley into the political mud, and signaling to State Capitalists that the old global alliance was officially dead.

Davos is Isolated: The return of an “America First” agenda stripped Davos of its primary enforcer—the U.S. government. Davos could no longer rely on American military or financial backing to enforce global climate accords or free-trade treaties. They were forced to retreat into the European Union, turning to aggressive tech regulation (antitrust laws and AI containment) as their only remaining shield. They recognized that borderless algorithms and decentralized crypto networks could strip states of their tax bases and regulatory power, and shifted from passive oversight to active legal warfare against tech founders.

Silicon Valley is Forced to Pick a Side: Tech billionaires realized they could no longer sit on the sidelines as borderless tech utopians. With the rise of tariffs and national security mandates, Silicon Valley had to pivot. Figures like Elon Musk and major venture capitalists openly allied with the MAGA/Imperialist faction to secure domestic deregulation, while others double-downed on government defense contracts (like Palantir and Anduril) to fight State Capitalists abroad. Leaders published manifestos openly declaring war on the regulatory state (Davos) and traditional physical infrastructure (Imperialists).

State Capitalists Seized the Fracture: Seeing the Western alliance shatter into three competing internal factions (Davos vs. Silicon Valley vs. Imperialists), State Capitalists (China, Russia, and the BRICS+ alliance) realized the global rules-based order was dead. They aggressively accelerated their de-dollarization plans, secured physical resource pipelines, and braced for a world defined entirely by protectionist trade wars. They began explicitly dismantling global trade agreements to build insulated, parallel economies. Alternatively, the Trump administration exited from 66 international organizations, conventions, and treaty-related bodies on January 7, 2026.

The Awareness Level has become Absolute.

Major networks of power increasingly began modelling one another as strategic competitors rather than as participants in a shared globalization project. Every faction now maps out the other three as explicit adversaries. Corporate boardrooms, state intelligence briefs, and geopolitical war rooms are actively designed around countering the moves of the other three blocks.

This has created a volatile unstable global order. Even the boundaries between the factions are unstable because they are all essentially part of the transnational capitalist class and they are dependent on each other, as well as competing with each other. It’s a messy divorce where the estranged parties keep living in the same house because no one can afford to move out. This is dangerous in high stakes economic warfare.

Competition increasingly centers on control of the infrastructure through which power flows — payments, data, AI systems, supply chains, semiconductors, energy networks, and communications systems.

There is factional overlap and hybrid actors and unclear divisions. These fluid coalitions continuously are recalculating who is partner, rival, or dependency. China may have clear state boundaries but it also has a strong billionaire class with divergent interests from the state. State capitalists like Russia share its aversion to western imperialism, but at the same time have their own model of state capitalism and their own often conflicting interests.

An illustration taking front and centre stage: The Davos faction, led by Mark Carney, have become keenly aware of the factional warfare. The Awareness Creep prompted Carney to remark “we are in the midst of a rupture not a transition” at the World Economic Forum in January 20, 2026. The playing field is no longer hidden; the four factions are now feuding in full view of the world.

This article is a chapter in an ongoing series I’m working on. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book, The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

On Thursday, May 21, the Alberta premier announced that the question of secession would join the October 19 provincial ballot. Not a vote to secede — a vote on whether the province should begin the legal process toward a future binding vote on secession. “A referendum to have a referendum,” as commentators have noted. Separatists themselves called it cynical. Legal counsel for Stay Free Alberta, the group that gathered over 300,000 signatures for a direct separation vote, called the wording a “cynical abuse of people”.

They are not wrong, but they are reading the wrong document. This wasn’t aimed at the ballot box. It was aimed at Canada’s S&P AAA rating.

To see why, you have to look at what the Davos Man in Ottawa has spent the past six months building — and how it relates to the Capitalist Civil War quietly and sometimes loudly raging in the news every day.

Mark Carney is the closest thing the Davos faction has to a head of state. Chair of Bloomberg, vice chair of Brookfield, WEF board member, former central banker twice over: he is not a politician who wandered into transnational capital, he is transnational capital that parachuted into the prime minister’s office in Ottawa. And for the past year he has been executing a strategic retreat — “a rupture not a transition” — from the rules-based order, an order that Carney claimed at the WEF conclave in January 2026, is dead.

In its place, he is preaching variable geometry. Fluid coalitions of the willing. At the European Political Community summit in Yerevan this month, he said the quiet part into a microphone — that the international order “will be rebuilt out of Europe,” with Canada as its external anchor. Carney is essential abandoning the universalist WEF project and retreating into its European geographical borders.

Carney is building a European bunker with Canada, the EU-C, or Europe+1. This is what the Davos faction looks like when it loses. Not collapse — relocation. It abandons the soft power global commons and digs into a smaller territory it can actually hold — a hard power military industrial complex.

Canada is leading the charge with the institutional crown jewel — a proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB)— a multinational lender, modelled on the World Bank, pooling sovereign capital from dozens of allied states to raise $135 billion USD to finance the rearmament of the West.

Here’s the connection to Smith’s referendum:

The bank works only if it can borrow cheaply, and it can only borrow cheaply if Canada can confirm rock-solid economic stability. The whole edifice of Carney’s retreat — the EU rapprochement, the DSRB, the middle-power coalition — runs on Canada’s AAA credit rating and national stability.

This is the asset Danielle Smith is leveraging. The irony is sharp enough to draw blood: Carney is himself an Albertan, raised in Edmonton. The faction’s last stronghold is threatened in the province its own master planner comes from.

Ouch.

Here is the faction logic underneath the headlines. Smith is doing the work of the Imperial Nationalist faction organized around Washington’s hard-power dominance and bilateral dealmaking. Transactional not transnational. Hostile to exactly the kind of institution-building Carney represents.

Trump does not need to annex Alberta to win. He needs only to make the seas choppy enough to scuttle the ship. Every month of credible secession threat is a month of doubt priced into Canada’s standing, a month the DSRB’s backers spend wondering whether the host country can keep its own federation together. The threat is the weapon. Secession would almost be a waste of everyone’s time due to the enormous logistical challenges and public blowback.

To win at chess, sometimes you don’t need to take pieces. You just need to put enough pressure on the centre of the board until the opponents defence collapses.

The two pronged attack is Smith herself applying institutional pressure from above, threatening fiscal instability while keeping her own hands clean. She says she will vote No. She means it. That is the point. The state actor never has to commit treason if someone else will commit it for her.

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The second attack is where the faction logic stops being a metaphor. The Alberta Prosperity Project — a fringe separatist group, not Smith’s government — has met U.S. State Department officials in Washington three times. The report, broken by the Financial Times, with the subtitle “Separatists from oil-rich province try to capitalise on friction between White House and Mark Carney”, is specific about what was discussed: the mechanics of secession, a switch to the U.S. dollar, the standing-up of a new military force, and a request to State and Treasury for a $500 billion credit line to bankroll an independence referendum. Washington’s official response was the boilerplate of plausible deniability — officials “meet with a number of civil society groups,” no commitments made — while the group’s own lawyer, Jeff Rath, told reporters the Trump administration shows Albertans more respect than Ottawa does, and that he had a stronger relationship with Washington than with his own prime minister.

This is the Imperial Nationalist faction, organized around Washington’s hard power and bilateral dealmaking, being formally asked to underwrite the fracture of Davos’ Canadian stronghold: in its own currency, with its own security umbrella, on its own credit.

Smith does not have to break Canada; she has to make it expensive to defend. The separatists do not have to win the referendum, they just have to ruin Carney’s variable geometry equation by adding some unstable coefficients so the numbers don’t add up to AAA rating.

Of the four factions now fighting over the architecture of global capital, only Davos requires anyone else’s permission to succeed. The Imperial Nationalists need a military. The State Capitalists need a sovereign treasury. Silicon Valley needs an exit. Davos needs institutional, multilateral, voluntary financial backing and this is the one resource a hostile premier in a resource province can withhold.

Carney’s genius and his curse are the same thing: he is building the most sophisticated machine in the world for coordinating willing partners, and willingness is the only fuel it runs on.

So the October ballot is not really a question about whether Alberta stays in Canada. It is a question about whether the Davos faction’s Europe+1 bunker is as defensible as its architect needs it to be. Smith has handed Carney a six-month ultimatum and it is running straight into the summer’s trade summits.

The Canada Investment Summit In September 14–15, 2026 in Toronto, where Carney will pitch his variable geometry framework to anchor $1 trillion in direct foreign capital. The summit relies on highly targeted invitations sent directly from the Prime Minister's Office rather than open registration. The exclusive invite list is billed as “100 of the world’s largest and most powerful institutional investors, collectively representing up to $50 trillion USD in managed assets,” but the reality is that it is Blackrock and Blackstone leading the pack — stateless asset-manager capital, the purest Davos-faction money there is — with the Gulf State sovereign funds right behind them.

And that second group is the giveaway. The Gulf money is not a faction. It is the great non-aligned layer of global capital — patrimonial sovereign wealth, monarch-as-chairman — that funds Davos and Silicon Valley and Washington alike, and competes mostly with itself for dominance of the Gulf region. Carney’s own finance minister all but confirmed it is coming, name-checking Qatar and “the Middle East colleagues” among those who “intend to come.” Which tells you that Carney is not assembling allies. He is courting financial mercenaries — pitching “stability” to capital that owes him nothing and will bank wherever there is calm waters and return on investment.

This is the Davos faction’s curse stated again. It needs buy-in even from money that has no loyalty to it. And every month Danielle Smith keeps a secession threat alive is a month that the calm waters look choppy — which is the whole point. The mercenaries chase stability. Smith’s only job is to make Canada look unstable enough that they keep their checkbooks closed until October.

This is part of a series of articles. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

CHAPTER 8: 100 People Who Actually Rule the World

This is a representative selection — not exhaustive, not a ranking. The Transnational Capitalist Class numbers roughly 3400 billionaires and another difficult to calculate number of members who are politically-connected individuals with billionaire-level clout and influence. The recent Forbes billionaires list claims there are 3428 billionaires with a total wealth increase of 28% from the previous year. Elon Musk leads the list with a net worth of $839 billion, followed by Larry Page ($257 billion), Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), and Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion).

In reality, the politically consequential top tier is closer to 300–500 individuals. The names below are split up to reflect membership in the Four Factions. The factions are evolving and emerging — some members are in more than one faction and others cross the floor.

I have included links to their Wikipedia bios for further exploration.

Davos Faction (Stakeholder Capitalist Globalists)

The financial-managerial wing of the TCC. Their factional identity is institutional integration with the post-1989 multilateral order — asset management (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street), central bank networks, climate-finance architecture, multilateral institutions, philanthro-capitalist infrastructure.

• Larry Fink — BlackRock

• Mark Carney — Canadian PM, the faction’s current synthesizer

• Klaus Schwab — WEF founder, symbolic anchor

• Bill Gates — Gates Foundation

• Michael Bloomberg — Bloomberg LP

• Jamie Dimon — JPMorgan Chase

• Christine Lagarde — ECB

• Mukesh Ambani — Reliance (Davos-aligned commercial wing of Indian capital)

• Bernard Arnault — LVMH

• Marc Benioff — Salesforce

• Ray Dalio — Bridgewater

• Warren Buffett — Berkshire Hathaway

• Michael Sabia — Clerk of the Privy Council, Carney’s Canadian network

• Marc-André Blanchard — Chief of Staff to PM Carney, Carney’s Canadian network

• Mark Wiseman — Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., BlackRock alumnus

• Brian Moynihan — Bank of America

• David Solomon — Goldman Sachs

• Jane Fraser — Citigroup

• Børge Brende — WEF president

• Kristalina Georgieva — IMF

• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala — WTO

• Ajay Banga — World Bank

• Chrystia Freeland — Canadian Liberal, the faction’s most ideologically committed elected official

• François-Henri Pinault — Kering

• George Soros / Alex Soros — Open Society network (faction-adjacent, distinct political project)

Imperial Nationalists

The hard-power faction: military-industrial integration, settler-nationalist political projects, decoupling and tariff hawks, neoconservative networks. Organized around the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Membership defined by political project, not industry or demography.

• Donald Trump — President; the faction’s most consequential political-businessman

• Benjamin Netanyahu — the faction’s organizing political figure

• Narendra Modi — Indian PM, the Hindu nationalist regional variant

• Miriam Adelson — Las Vegas Sands, the most consequential single political donor

• Robert Mercer / Rebekah Mercer — Renaissance Technologies, nationalist-right political infrastructure

• Paul Singer — Elliott Management, neoconservative donor anchor

• Charles Koch — Koch network’s Imperial Nationalist-realigned remnant

• The Murdoch family (Rupert, Lachlan) — News Corp/Fox, faction media apparatus

• Gautam Adani — Adani Group, Indian conglomerate aligned with Modi project

• Bernard Marcus estate network — Republican Jewish Coalition infrastructure

• Idan Ofer — Israeli shipping/energy

• Yitzhak Tshuva — Delek Group, Israeli energy

• Patrick Drahi — Altice, French-Israeli telecom-media

• Jared Kushner — Affinity Partners, Gulf-Israeli normalization architect

• Howard Lutnick — Cantor Fitzgerald, Commerce Secretary

• Scott Bessent — Treasury Secretary, hard-decoupling hawk

• Bill Ackman — Pershing Square, post-October 2023 Zionist political operator

• Marc Rowan — Apollo Global, Israeli political activism

• Robert Kraft — Patriots/FCAS, pro-Israel political infrastructure

• Haim Saban — Saban Capital Group, bipartisan Israeli political donor

• JD Vance — Vice President, faction’s elected representative

• Larry Ellison — Oracle, Trump-aligned with pro-Israeli activism (cross-cuts Silicon Valley)

• John Hagee / Christians United for Israel — Christian Zionist mass-mobilization apparatus (network, not individual billionaire)

• Viktor Orbán‘s circle / CPAC Hungary network — European variant

• Stephen Schwarzman — Blackstone, Trump-aligned despite Davos commercial overlap

Silicon Valley (Techno-Sovereigns)

The newest faction. Network State ideology, administrative-state demolition, AI/biotech/aerospace concentration, libertarian-to-reactionary political project. Membership defined by both industry concentration (tech and tech-adjacent capital) and ideological commitment to the techno-sovereign (Techno-Optimist, Network State) project.

• Peter Thiel — Palantir/Founders Fund, the faction’s network anchor

• Elon Musk — Tesla/SpaceX/X/xAI, most visible operator (currently ambiguous alignment)

• Marc Andreessen — Andreessen Horowitz, intellectual operator

• David Sacks — Craft Ventures, Trump’s AI/crypto czar

• Joe Lonsdale — 8VC/Palantir cofounder

• JD Vance — Vice President (cross-listed; primary commitment Imperial Nationalist, formation Silicon Valley)

• Alex Karp — Palantir CEO

• Curtis Yarvin — house philosopher (not a billionaire but the faction’s intellectual architect)

• Balaji Srinivasan — Network State author

• Brian Armstrong — Coinbase, crypto-political infrastructure

• Palmer Luckey — Anduril

• Trae Stephens — Anduril/Founders Fund

• Keith Rabois — Khosla Ventures alumnus, Founders Fund

• Garry Tan — Y Combinator

• Larry Page — Google cofounder (retired but structurally significant)

• Sergey Brin — Google cofounder

• Jensen Huang — Nvidia (commercially central, factionally moderate)

• Mark Zuckerberg — Meta (recently realigning toward faction’s political project)

• Sam Altman — OpenAI (faction-adjacent with Davos sympathies)

• Vinod Khosla — Khosla Ventures (partial, Davos sympathies)

• Jack Dorsey — Block, libertarian-aligned

• Patrick Collison — Stripe

• John Collison — Stripe

• Dustin Moskovitz — Asana/Open Philanthropy (faction-divergent, more Davos-adjacent)

• Brian Chesky — Airbnb

State Capitalists

The faction operating through party-state structures rather than individual capital command. Centered on China, with allied state-capitalist projects in Russia, Iran and the Gulf forming an an extended bloc whose BRICS-era political coherence has now visibly failed. The faction’s internal structure is asymmetric — China’s CCP elite is the analytical core; Russia and the Gulf are aligned counterparties whose membership is partial and project-dependent.

China (faction core):

• Xi Jinping — General Secretary, internal agglutinator

• Li Qiang — Premier

• Ding Xuexiang — First Vice Premier

• He Lifeng — Vice Premier for economy/trade

• Wang Huning — chief party theorist, ideological architect

• Cai Qi — Politburo Standing Committee

• Pan Gongsheng — PBOC Governor

• Lan Fo’an — Finance Minister

• Wang Wentao — Commerce Minister

• Pony Ma (Ma Huateng) — Tencent

• Zhang Yiming — ByteDance

• Zhong Shanshan — Nongfu Spring

• Wang Chuanfu — BYD

• Robin Zeng — CATL

• Ren Zhengfei — Huawei

• Jack Ma — Alibaba (post-2020 reduced but structurally significant)

• Jin Liqun — AIIB President, faction’s multilateral institution

Russia (allied state-capitalist project, increasingly cross-cutting with Imperial Nationalism via war economy):

• Vladimir Putin — President, the BRICS-era agglutinator whose binding power has just visibly failed

• Sergey Lavrov — Foreign Minister, faction diplomat

• Igor Sechin — Rosneft, oil state capital

• Alexey Miller — Gazprom

• Yury Kovalchuk — “Bank Rossiya” oligarch, ideological hardliner

Gulf state capital (allied, cross-cuts Imperial Nationalism through Israel normalization):

• Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — Saudi Crown Prince, directs $1.15T PIF; operates across factions — State Capitalist in domestic-developmental mode, Imperial Nationalist on regional security, Davos-courting on global capital deployment

• Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) — UAE President, directs ADIA (~$1T) and Mubadala

• Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani — Qatari Emir, directs QIA (~$525B)

• Yasir Al-Rumayyan — PIF Governor, operational head of Saudi state capital deployment

Overlapping and Hybrid Faction Members

These factions are not all nations with flags. The Imperialists are dominated by the Trump-Netanyahu national coalition and the State Capitalists are dominated by China-CCP, but Davos and Silicon Valley have no national flag or club badge to wear, so they can more easily slide into another faction. Loyalties are fluid.

Several figures in the Davos sample (Schwarzman, Ackman) operate in the Imperial Nationalist overlap. Several figures in the Silicon Valley sample (Ellison, Karp, increasingly Andreessen on Israel-related questions) operate at the Silicon Valley–Imperial Nationalist overlap. Elon Musk has his hands in all the factions, though he is born a Silicon Valley boy.

This cross-cutting pattern is my book’s evidence that the factional civil war is partly a realignment in progress rather than a fixed balance of power.

The Gulf monarchies are the clearest junction zone where all four factions compete for influence. MBS, MBZ, and Tamim each maintain operative relationships with all four factions and align differently depending on the issue: with Davos on global capital deployment and ESG framing, with Imperial Nationalists on Israel normalization and Iran containment, with Silicon Valley on AI infrastructure (HUMAIN, G42), with State Capitalists on Belt and Road and BRICS+. They function as a swing bloc.

Russia under Putin has migrated factionally over the past decade. Pre-2022 Russia operated as a recognizably State Capitalist project with parallels to China. Post-2022, the war economy has restructured Russian capital around military production, oligarch reorganization, and territorial revanchism — a factional drift toward Imperial Nationalism in character, but not joining the Washington/Tel Aviv Consensus. Putin’s “agglutinator” failure on Iran is partly a consequence of this drift: the State Capitalist project requires economic-developmental coherence, and Russia no longer has one.

India under Modi is in active migration from Davos-curious to Imperial Nationalist. The February 2026 Knesset address and the post-Iran-war BRICS defection are the two visible milestones of this migration. The Adani–Ambani capital base is split: Ambani remains Davos-integrated; Adani has migrated toward the Imperial Nationalist alignment via Modi–Trump–Netanyahu coordination.

The State Capitalist faction is the most internally coherent because it operates through party-state discipline rather than individual factional commitment. This is its strength and its limit. The faction cannot recruit transnational class members in the way Davos can; its expansion runs through state-to-state agreements rather than class formation.

What follows is the series so far. It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

A book written in public, one chapter at a time.

The left/right binary that dominants most political commentary is a distraction. The real conflict reshaping the world right now is happening inside the transnational capitalist class itself — between four factions with incompatible visions of how global capital and society should be governed.

This Substack (The Margins) is where I’m drafting The Capitalist Civil War, a book that names those four factions, traces how they fractured, and argues that their unresolved struggle is the defining feature of our political moment. The thesis is unfolding in real time as events happen — Davos summits, BRICS implosions, Hormuz blockade, tech-state mergers, European realignments — and posting the chapters as rough drafts lets me test the theory against current events as they unfold and refine the argument with reader feedback before final publication.

The four factions, briefly:

• Davos — stakeholder capitalist globalists working through the WEF, BlackRock, and multilateral institutions

• Imperial Nationalists — the Washington-Tel Aviv Consensus pursuing hard power and bilateral dealmaking

• Silicon Valley — techno-sovereigns building network states and tearing down the administrative order

• State Capitalists — civilizational-state projects led by China, Russia, and Iran

It’s a work in progress, organized as it will eventually appear in my upcoming book
The Capitalist Civil War. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The Three Grand Chessboards

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

CHAPTER 17: Mortgaged, Extracted, Disconnected

CHAPTER 18: Permanent Planetary Turbulence

Hold my beer.

In an interview with Sulaiman Ahmed on May 14, Escobar claimed that Putin was the glue — the agglutinator — that held the whole BRICS together. This is the most interesting confession in the whole interview. Escobar admits that what looked like a coherent bloc was actually one man’s bilateral diplomacy:

“Putin was the only one who had to get Modi and Xi on the same room on the same table and tell them both, ‘okay, now you, we sit here, the three of us, and you’re going to talk your issues to each other face to face.’ So the agglutinator was Putin.”

BRICS is effectively “blown up” and impossible to put back together in its current form.

While he spent years as one of the alliance’s biggest public advocates, he admits that he was “too romantic” about its potential to succeed.

BRICS wasn’t a class formation or even a stable institutional bloc. It was a glue-stick held by one aging Russian president. When the glue couldn’t override Modi’s hard tilt toward Washington and Tel Aviv, the whole package came apart.

The Iran war is the event that blew everything up: “This war changes everything. Everything.” He’s explicit that BRICS was working — or appeared to be — until the Iran war exposed that Modi was playing an insider game.

Modi’s visit to Israel in February, 2026, the first Indian PM ever to address the Knesset.

It was the pre-existing fissure the war then ripped open. “Even before the start of the war, that Modi visit to Israel blew up BRICS from the inside, big, big time.” India under Modi had already defected in substance; the war just made the defection public.

Escobar claims that in a private interview, Vivek Ramaswamy told him the Indian-American operation in U.S. politics has been, all along, a long con to redirect U.S. trade away from China and toward India — and that BRICS membership was instrumentally a means to that end, not an alternative to it.

“The entire infiltration has always been to get closer to the US. So you could never trust them as a partner. The partnership for in BRICS is only a means to try and get closer to the US.”

It’s devastating for the multipolarity thesis. It means one of the five founding BRICS members has been treating the bloc as a leverage instrument against another founding member (China) the entire time. My four-faction model predicts that there is no unified counter-hegemonic project, only state apparatuses pursuing factional interest under a shared rhetorical umbrella.

The State Capitalist’s umbrella orgs — BRICS, the SCO and the multipolar world project — are all anti-hegemon attempts to steer around sanctions and trade off the US dollar. That aspect of the project succeeded.

The agglutinator concept is transferable to each of the four factions: Every faction in the four-way model has one. Davos had Schwab (now gone, replaced by no one officially, but unofficially Mark Carney has filled the glue vacuum). Imperial Nationalists have Netanyahu as the synthesizer figure binding U.S. neocons, Christian Zionists, and the Israeli right. Silicon Valley has Peter Thiel who is funding all the Network State projects. State Capitalists had Putin as the agglutinator of the external BRICS face, with Xi as the internal CCP agglutinator.

The factional civil war (Capitalist Civil War) can be partly tracked by watching when the agglutinator's binding power fails. Schwab resigned without a permanent successor and Mark Carney has stepped into the functional vacuum with his middle-powers coalition, which is in itself the Davos faction's first explicit admission that its Great Reset universalist project has failed. Putin's binding power just visibly failed in the Iran war. Netanyahu is under domestic siege; his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners just submitted a bill to dissolve the Knesset. Thiel is the most intact of the four — which tells you something about which faction is currently best-positioned.

Escobar is narrating exactly what the four faction model predicts: that what looked like a transnational class formation (BRICS), was actually a temporary balance of power between state actors that defaulted back into bilateral state-to-state relations the moment any of them faced an existential test. What survives are bilateral relationships, territorial alignments, state actors: China-Pakistan, Iran-Pakistan, Russia-Iran, Russia-China — temporary, minilateral coalitions without any ideological umbrella to glue them together.

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Trump Agrees: BRICS is dead.

It was originally Trump who stated “BRICS is dead,” before reporters February 13, 2025, at the White House, hours before his meeting with Modi.

“they will come back and say we beg you we beg you not to do this . BRICS is dead since I mentioned that BRICS died the minute I mentioned that but BRICS was put there for a bad purpose and uh most of those people don’t want they don’t even want to talk about it now they’re afraid to talk about it because I told them if if they want to play games with the dollar then they’re going to be hit with a 100% tariff the day they mentioned that they want to do it and they will come back and say we beg you we beg you not to do this BRICS is dead … “

At the recent BRICS foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi, May 14-15, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi strongly urged the bloc to issue a sweeping, formal condemnation of international law violations by Israel and the United States. Because BRICS operates strictly on absolute consensus, India's refusal meant a unified declaration was impossible. India could not bridge the gap, the summit concluded in a major diplomatic failure. Host India was forced to scrap the joint statement entirely and settle for releasing a basic Ministry of External Affairs Chair's Statement and Outcome Document.

To make matters worse, India’s pro-Israel posture wasn’t the only element tearing the meeting apart. The conflict in the Persian Gulf spilled directly into the room, creating an unbridgeable clash between new members Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Iran accused the UAE — “a member State that has its own special relations with Israel” — of trying to sabotage the text by demanding a separate condemnation of Iranian military strikes on GCC states.

The UAE representative, Minister of State, Khalifa bin Shaheen Al Marar, rejected Araghchi’s remarks, accusing him of attempting to justify “terrorist attacks” against the UAE and other Gulf states. Escobar recorded his BRICS is dead interview on May 14. The same day, in New Delhi, the bloc's foreign ministers were proving him right in real time.

Following the collapse of the New Delhi meeting, Brazil, predictably, took the Davos-aligned position of polite denial. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira told The Hindu that “BRICS is evolving with new members; differences will take time to resolve” — the diplomatic vocabulary of a faction that cannot yet admit the project is over.

BRICS was never a pro-multipolar project. It was an Anti-Washington/Israeli Consensus project. China’s vision of multipolarity, Russia’s vision, India’s vision, and Brazil’s vision were mutually incompatible from day one. What they shared was a common interest in escaping from dollar hegemony, sanctions enforcement, SWIFT capture, and Washington conditions.

Strip away the rhetorical scaffolding and the bloc was always RC+.

Russia and China — the only two members with the state capacity, military weight, and structural opposition to the Washington/Israeli Consensus to make the escape possible. Everyone else was either a hedger (India, the UAE, Indonesia), Davos-aligned ballast giving lip service to the Global South (Brazil under Lula, South Africa under the ANC), or a sanctioned regime grateful for the life raft (Iran, increasingly Egypt and Ethiopia as conditions worsen). The agglutinator wasn’t holding together a five-power bloc. He was holding together a China-Russia core surrounded by passengers.

The New and Improved BRICS™ may reinvent itself over an anti-Zionist stance, but any resurrected BRICS would be a smaller, harder, more ideologically defined bloc. If the litmus test is Zionism, then it would exclude India and the UAE outright, which means the "Global South" framing dies with the current version.

The agglutinator failed. The glue didn’t stick. BRICS is dead.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry