The Three Grand Chessboards

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

CHAPTER 10: The War Inside the Panopticon

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