The Layered Global Map

Factions, tiers, and the infrastructural board

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.

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.

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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.

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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

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

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

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch