The New Grand Chessboard

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of an ongoing book-length 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.

This piece is part of a longer project — a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War, a four-faction feud inside the transnational capitalist class. If this kind of elite-power analysis is what you want more of, paid subscribers make this work possible.

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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 Cold War was over, and the United States stood alone as the world’s only superpower. But how to keep the hegemon intact? His answer was pure Mackinder, updated for the unipolar moment. Eurasia was the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy would be played, and America’s prime imperative was plain: 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, a challenger to be contained. The trend in geopolitical circles is to declare Mackinder obsolete because geography is abolished by the internet. But this is misguided. The truth is stranger than a geopolitical theory. The Heartland thesis is not dead. In some respects we are watching it play out in real time.

Today, there is the 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, which it has spent two decades building. 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. A brief glance at the Iran War is ample proof.

Mackinder called the pivot area the permanent zone of conflict. What is happening is a perfect storm — the 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.

The New Grand Chessboard

A great deal of foreign-policy commentary is simply Mackinder and Brzezinski regurgitated back to us in the present tense, and it is not wrong to do so. It is only incomplete. Mackinder’s theory still describes something real, and what it describes is happening. The Old Chessboard is still being played, but while it is playing, a second board has been laid over it.

The classical tradition assumed that power flowed through physical geography — that to control the world you controlled territory, and the resources, chokepoints and populations that territory contained. Armies crossed it; navies ringed it; resources came out of the ground, and the map of power was a map of the earth.

It was simple. That was the magic.

But look at what actually is happening now, and how. Capital moves as electronic settlement through a handful of clearing systems. Information moves as data through cables, servers and platforms. And increasingly the coordination of everything else — logistics, markets, weapons, the management of the flows themselves — moves through computer servers, through the accelerating layer of artificial intelligence. All of them have a physical infrastructure, but none of them is territory in Mackinder’s sense. They are networks, and they run through infrastructure: payment rails, data centers, fibre-optic cables, fabrication plants, the algorithms, the internet itself, and the chips that run them.

This is the New Grand Chessboard.

Its black and white squares are not the regions of the earth, but segments of the infrastructure through which the world’s capital, information, and intelligence pass. The second board has not replaced the first. It has been laid over it, and the two are now playing into each other. The networks still need the ground — the data center sits somewhere, the fibre-optic cable runs through the physical ground, and the chip is fabricated somewhere else.

Mackinder’s Heartland was strategic for three reasons, and the infrastructure network contains the same three factors.

It was inaccessible. The interior lay beyond the reach of any navy, defended by sheer distance. The new Heartland is defended too, but by fortified walls of a different kind — proprietary standards, vetted membership and data-localization law. SWIFT/CHIPS are closed systems; you are admitted or you are not. China’s data-sovereignty laws and Europe’s GDPR draw borders around information the way coastlines once drew them around territory. The blockade-proof interior has become the access-controlled network.

It was rich. The Heartland held the coal, the iron, the grain. The new Heartland holds the resources of a financialized economy — liquidity, transactional data, compute — and they pool in a handful of cities: New York and London clear the majority of the world’s money; a few firms own the majority of the world’s models. Whoever sits on those nodes reads the real-time pulse of the global economy and can act on it before anyone at the periphery has a chance to respond.

And it was central. This is the deepest parallel. The Heartland sat between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; the dollar-clearing system sits between every national economy on earth. The centrality is itself the weapon. A land power astride the rim could throttle trade; a power astride the financial pivot can sever a nation with a keystroke. The modern siege is exclusion from the financial system, but there is no army, no cannon fire, just a name struck from the ledger.

Here the analogy breaks down partially because Mackinder’s Heartland was impregnable. The Digital Heartland can be struck remotely, by anyone with an internet connection and a grievance — a vulnerability the physical interior never had. And it can be bypassed. CIPS, mBridge, the de-dollarization rails are not attempts to storm the pivot area, but to lay a second one alongside it. And that is the real contest — not who holds the existing network, but whether a rival network can finish before the first one can lock everyone out.

To understand who is fighting over this new infrastructure Digital Heartland, we need to briefly return to a framework developed earlier in this series.

The pawns on the board are no longer only States

The old chessboard had one kind of piece: the state. Powers were countries; countries were powers; the players Brzezinski named were all governments, and the game was played between them.

The emergence of a second chessboard alters not merely the terrain of power, but also the identity of the players. On Mackinder's board, states were the primary actors. On the infrastructure board, many of the critical chokepoints are controlled by institutions, corporations, and elite networks that transcend state boundaries.

The new board’s most important pieces cut across states. The contest over the second board is being waged by the four factions of the global propertied class. Global communication and transportation, the internet and international trade produced globalism and an elite class of transnational players, and this class, once united by the rules-based order, has splintered into four factions.

The second grand chessboard is the transnational capitalist class fighting over the financial-data infrastructure of the planet. Here the ruling class is transnational and far smaller — the roughly 3,400 billionaires, plus corporate chiefs, heads of state, UN and NGO leaders, and mayors of major cities. Within that club, a core of maybe 300 to 500 movers and shakers, who do most of the heavy lifting for the class.

Donald Trump, Larry Fink, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Carney, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen — a few of the notable heavyweights. The old board had many ruling classes, territorially contained, most of them minor. Brzezinski’s real players were a handful of great powers, not 195. The new board has one class — transnational, tiny, a few thousand people — split into four. Many territorial elites become one transnational elite in four pieces.

The rise of the transnational corporation and the independent billionaires class has further led to this fracture. China’s ruling class entered the TCC over the last 25 years, beginning with China’s entrance to the WTO in 2001. The rules-based order kept them under one umbrella, but now, they are under four umbrellas and they are all getting wet.

The factions are fighting over the segments of the New Grand Chessboard. The Davos institutionalists hold the legacy financial plumbing and the rules; the Silicon Valley insurgents hold compute and are reaching into money; the State Capitalist coalition holds the industrial base and is building rails (literally railroads and metaphorically the financial rails) to escape the others’ control; the Imperial Nationalists hold the reserve currency and the guns. Each controls a chokepoint the others cannot easily route around, which is exactly why none can have a clear victory over the others. They are entangled in the way that only people fighting over shared infrastructure can be — unable to defeat one another without damaging the thing they are all trying to possess.

The Iran War and the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz are a case in point. We will return to this later.

Control of the Chokepoints

The original thesis we are working with — that the four factions are fighting over the financial infrastructure — implies a fight for control of data, and the infrastructure that makes data possible. We cannot have Blackwell B200 chips without the supply and manufacturing chain that makes it possible. We also need the transportation grid to ship the chips to buyers.

“Financial infrastructure” was already implicitly broader than finance — SWIFT is a messaging network, submarine cables carry financial data, the B200 chip is a manufacturing chokepoint. What we’re really describing is control of the chokepoints for global coordination: the infrastructure layers through which capital, data, goods, energy, and people flow — and through which exclusion can be weaponized. SWIFT exclusion, Huawei bans, chip export controls, airspace closures — these are all the same move at different layers of the stack.

The civil war is over who sets the terms of access and who can impose denial. That's the thread. Mackinder gave us the founding thesis of geopolitics — the study of geography and power, the ground that armies moved across. The New Grand Chessboard needs its own name. Call it rheopolitics, from the Greek rheo — stream, flow, current: the study of the streams that capital, data, and compute now move through, and of the chokepoints where those flows can be dammed. Geopolitics was the politics of the ground; rheopolitics is the politics of the streams. The gate built at the chokepoint lets one faction cut the others off from the stream they all depend on.

The Mackinder Update

Mackinder’s insight was correct and survives: control the pivot territory, control the world island, control the world. The Belt and Road Initiative is literally the physical infrastructure expression of Mackinder’s Heartland theory — China is building the overland and maritime connectivity across Eurasia that Mackinder said was the ultimate geopolitical prize.

But here’s the inversion that upsets Mackinder’s tea cart: the digital infrastructure layer partially reverses Mackinder’s geography. His theory privileged land power (the Heartland) over sea power. But the global internet runs overwhelmingly through undersea cables — Pacific routes, Atlantic routes, and the emerging contest over who lays cable where. This is sea power as infrastructure, not military. The US/allied network of submarine cables is the digital equivalent of British naval supremacy. Starlink is attempting an orbital alternative that bypasses both land and sea chokepoints entirely.

The hyperscaler layer of the Silicon Valley faction (Google, Amazon AWS, Meta and Microsoft Azure) has been substantially captured by the Imperial Nationalist faction's legal architecture, while the Network State wing is engaged in an explicit infrastructure exit strategy — Starlink, blockchain, sovereign AI compute — designed to reconstitute Silicon Valley's factional independence at a higher orbital and digital layer. In China, the fusion is explicit: Huawei is a state asset, BeiDou is a state asset, Alibaba's data is accessible to the CCP on demand. No fiction of private ownership is maintained.

These are partially separate, partially overlapping battles. BRI doesn’t help you if your financial data runs on US-routed cables and your AI chips come from TSMC. That’s why Taiwan and the Blackwell B200 chips are the master chokepoints — they sit at the junction of the digital and physical layers, but Taiwan and the B200 are the chokepoints no one dares to touch — too central, too catastrophic if either the United States or China made a move to occupy Taiwan — the stalemate continues because it is too dangerous. The financial pivot is the chokepoint that was actually squeezed, and it was squeezed on a less powerful nation, in full view, while every government on earth took notes.

So we have two simultaneous contests: China is waging and winning the Mackinder game via the Belt and Road Initiative, and the US/Silicon Valley are trying to win the digital layer via cables and data centers.

An updated rheopolitical version of Mackinder’s famous maxim might be:

Who gates the compute chokes the network;
Who chokes the network throttles the economy;
Who throttles the economy holds the world.

That is the logic of the new board. The catch is that no single faction holds the whole stream at once — and the moment one moves to seize a stretch it doesn’t already control, the other three dam up the river downstream.

The Siege of Tehran

Iran has been excommunicated from the financial Heartland three times, and the three excommunications are three different hands on the same lever — and together they map the whole Capitalist Civil War.

In March 2012, the lever was operated as designed. EU regulation required it; SWIFT, a Belgian cooperative bound by that regulation, disconnected the sanctioned Iranian banks and said so regretfully. This was the Davos plumbing department doing its job — a multilateral, rule-bound, governing infrastructure doing what its governance prescribes. 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 Donald Trump seized the levers and ripped up the JCPOA, but no European regulation compelled Iran’s exclusion this time. By November, the United States initiated the “maximum pressure” campaign and simply threatened SWIFT itself with secondary sanctions until it complied. Same lever, but the hand was now a single state, reaching into supposedly neutral infrastructure and turning it into ordnance — 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 this round — the E3 invoked the snapback mechanism, and the full UN and EU sanctions architecture switched back on, rebuilt on the same 2012 statute. There was no new bank to de-bank — Iran’s banks had been off the network since 2018. The fight was over the procedure. China and Russia tried to block the snapback at the Security Council and lost; then China, Iran, and Russia sent a joint letter denying the Europeans had any standing to invoke it at all. The veto, the standing, the mechanism — the machinery of governance 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, drew the obvious lesson, and began laying a second pivot area beside the first — not to storm the existing network but to make exclusion from it survivable.

Russia and China could obstruct at the Security Council but they could not keep the sanctions and exclusion from hurting. By December 2025, Iran's economic crisis had reached a breaking point. The rial was collapsing to record lows, merchants in Tehran's Grand Bazaar were closing their shops in protest, and the government was dismantling the subsidized exchange-rate regime that had helped shield basic necessities from the full force of inflation.

The ability to lay siege to a nation without firing a shot is the ultimate power in our modern digital chessboard. Exclusion from the board is far more devastating than real armies circling the gate. Tehran’s only saving grace was that it had an escape route from Trump’s sanctions and financial exclusion — China’s CIPS and mBridge. But if China was to also exclude Tehran from the alternative payment system, it would be the end of Iran.

To return to our New Grand Chessboard, it is a four-way board this time around. Controlling the territory is not as important as controlling the networks that connect the financial and data infrastructure. The four factions are locked in an asymmetrical stalemate.

Davos wants to dissolve into the transnational — post-national governance, the state board sublimated into rules and institutions. Imperial Nationalists want to recapture transnational power for one national state — pull the money and the guns back inside the American container. Silicon Valley wants to exit the state board entirely onto a new layer — network states, orbital and digital infrastructure above and outside the old geography. And the State Capitalists fuse the two boards into a single move — their transnational reach and their state power are the same thing, which is why China’s ruling class plays both chessboards with one hand.

Mackinder believed that geography determined the fate of empires. The twenty-first century has not abolished geography, but it has layered a new terrain atop it. The decisive struggles of our era are increasingly fought not only over territory, but over the networks that coordinate territory: payment systems, data infrastructure, compute, communications, and logistics. The old chessboard remains. But a second board now overlays it, and the powers that dominate it may prove as consequential as those that dominate the land beneath it.

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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.

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

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