The Quadripolar World at the Beijing Summit
It has become apparent in the wake of the rupture of the rules-based order that another world order has emerged.
It is not the unipolar world of Bretton Woods, American Empire, and sanctions — George W. Bush’s longing for a New World Order has gone out like a thousand points of light. This new world is not the semi-utopian multipolar order hoped for by the BRICS. Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist declaration that the End of History had arrived has proven flawed. His mentor Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations has not emerged either.
What has emerged instead is something neither side of that old debate predicted: a Quadripolar World Order in which four rival factions of a single transnational capitalist class fight each other for control of the planet’s financial, technological, and military architecture.
This is not a war between nations. It is a war within capitalism — between four competing visions of what capitalism should look like, who should run it, and on what terms the rest of us should live under it. The architects of this system are transnational in their operations but national in their bases of power. They are born somewhere, headquartered somewhere, and increasingly dependent on the state apparatus of somewhere to enforce their will. Geography and the nation state are still relevant — because when push comes to shove, each faction retreats into its territory: Davos, Washington, Silicon Valley and Beijing.
Four poles. Four weapons. Four visions of the future. And a war which none of them can win.
This quadripolar world is not defined, however, by traditional geographic borders, but by competing models of political economy (i.e., capitalism), technology control, and state sovereignty. Each pole wields a distinct weapon to enforce its will globally.
A multipolar world is one where multiple states compete within a shared system. A quadripolar world is one where four factions cannot agree on what the system is. That’s a deeper kind of world disorder. Multipolar BRICS envisioned a balance of power where the various poles would organically fall into power blocs where no single pole was dominant. The BRICS multipolar vision assumed that new reserve currencies, new development banks, and new trade routes would replace the rules-based, dollar-dominated unipolar order.
The quadripolar reality is that no faction can build a new global architecture because every faction can veto the others’ attempts. State Capitalists can build CIPS but cannot make it the global standard. Davos can write ESG rules but cannot make the Imperial Nationalists enforce them. Techno-Sovereigns can build network states but cannot make territorial states recognise them.
Each faction has the power to block each other. They can veto each other's projects, sabotage each other's institutions, sanction each other's allies, and block each other's standards. What none of them can do is construct a new global architecture that the others are forced to operate inside. The dollar order worked because the United States could compel the rest of the world to use it.
The quadripolar world order doesn’t work that way.
Every new institution gets met with a rival institution. Every new standard gets met with a parallel standard. Every claim to universality gets met with three competing claims to universality. The result is not a new order. The result is a fragmented infrastructure of half-built systems, none of which can become the standard because the others won't allow it.
The quadripolar world is younger than people think
This new arrangement didn’t exist five years ago. In 2019 the world order was Davos plus three challengers: a transnational capitalist class still nominally united around the Great Reset agenda, with state capitalism, techno-libertarianism, and right-wing populism as dissident movements. The pandemic was supposed to consolidate Davos’s hegemony — Klaus Schwab was virtually salivating at the opportunity he saw to remake the world in his own image.
He stated that the COVID-19 pandemic represented a “rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”
The Great Reset project failed because populism exploded under the pressure of international health mandates that crushed the working class. Amazon and Walmart stayed open and Mom and Pop had to shut down the restaurant. The largest wealth transfer in modern history drove the working class out into the streets — they threatened a MAGA revolt and then elected Trump as their political savior.
The 2020–2022 period is when the Imperial Nationalists discovered they had their own political base — angry, vocal, and motivated. The Techno-Sovereigns discovered they had their own ideology. The State Capitalists discovered they could survive sanctions. Each faction positioned itself in opposition to Davos’s attempt to consolidate its power base.
Elon Musk tweeted he declined a Davos invitation: "not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol."
Trump dismissed the WEF’s elite audience, referring to them as people who “have been screwing us for 30 years”
Jinping told Davos in his 2017 address: “We should stay committed to international law and international rules instead of seeking one’s own supremacy.”
The quadripolar order is the four broken pieces of a Davos project that shattered.
This explains why the order feels new: it is new. It’s roughly five years old. The majority of people are not even aware it has happened. Davos itself is, however, painfully aware — and that is why Mark Carney received a standing ovation at the World Economic Forum in January 2026. He said what they were all thinking:
“The rules-based order is fading… We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition… We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”
The Iran war is the event that broke the previous balance of power. Before Iran, the four factions were in a slow drift. After Iran, the alignments hardened: the Davos faction retreated decisively into the middle-powers coalition; the Imperial Nationalists committed to bilateral dealmaking and abandoned what was left of the multilateral pretence; the Techno-Sovereign Silicon Valley discovered their supply chains ran through Hormuz; the State Capitalists discovered they were now indispensable to resolving the crisis their rivals had created. The Iran war is the moment the quadripolar order locked in — the moment when each faction’s position became structurally fixed because each one’s strengths and dependencies were exposed.
The plane that landed in Beijing this week tells the whole story.
Donald Trump arrived as the Imperial Nationalist faction’s front man, the man dismantling the multilateral order in favour of bilateral leverage. Beside him: Larry Fink of BlackRock and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone — the two most institutionally embedded figures in transnational finance, as well as David Solomon of Goldman Sachs and Jane Fraser of Citigroup. The CEOs of Mastercard and Visa. Tim Cook, whose Apple empire is manufactured inside the People’s Republic. Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, hoping to close a 500-aircraft order. Elon Musk, whose Shanghai gigafactory is Tesla’s largest plant, and who six months ago was tearing down the federal government on behalf of the Techno-Sovereign faction.
Three of the four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class, flying together to negotiate with the fourth.
They are not on that plane because they agree. Fink runs the asset manager whose entire model — passive global allocation, ESG, stakeholder capitalism — the Imperial Nationalists have spent two years attacking. Cook needs the Chinese consumer market the tariff hawks want to decouple from. Musk needs the supply chains the Imperial Nationalists want to sever. Trump needs Xi’s cooperation on Iran, on rare earths, on the Strait of Hormuz — and Xi knows it.
China needs semiconductors to survive.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia was initially absent from the announced list. Then Trump personally called him, overriding staff objections, and Huang boarded Air Force One during the Alaska refuelling stop. Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips (H100 and H200) have been restricted from Chinese buyers; the Chinese market represents an estimated $50 billion to the company; China cannot maintain pace in the AI race without access to that hardware.
What came out of Beijing.
What flew into Beijing produced the stalemate that the quadripolar world order is predicated on. Not a Grand Bargain. Not a resolution. A choreographed theatre of agreement covering structural irreconcilability.
The two presidents announced a “Strategic Stability Framework” and a new “Board of Trade.”
Translated: we have agreed to keep talking, and we have built a mechanism to manage our future inability to agree. A framework is what you announce when you cannot announce an agreement. A board for managing trade disputes is an admission that trade disputes will continue. The leaders declared that their countries should be “partners, not rivals.”
They jointly declared that the Strait of Hormuz “must remain open to ensure global trade flow,” but Iran was not at the summit. Iran has not agreed. What was announced was a sphere-of-influence statement — two superpowers agreeing that a third country’s war should now resolve in a way convenient to both of them.
The State Capitalist faction is being asked to deliver Iran, but Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref delivered a sharp message directly targeting the summit, declaring “Our right to the Strait of Hormuz is established, and the matter is closed.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun reinforced that message Monday, saying Beijing’s position remained “clear and consistent” and that the priority should be preventing renewed war and further escalation.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) explicitly exempted Chinese ships from the blockade, allowing the Chinese supertanker Yuan Hua Hu to pass through the strait completely toll-free.
Meanwhile, the tech delegation got what it came for. Washington cleared roughly ten Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip. Not the H200. Not Blackwell B200. Second-tier silicon, carefully calibrated to let China’s AI sector continue functioning at a deliberately throttled level. Nvidia preserves market access. The Imperial Nationalists preserve the export control regime in name while gutting it in fact. China gets just enough hardware to stay in the race without catching up. Nobody wins; everybody gets enough to walk away claiming they won.
Huang called the sessions “very smooth.”
Musk called them “very good, very productive” — and brought his five-year-old son X Æ A-Xii to the meeting with Premier Li Qiang, because the Techno-Sovereigns do not fully accept the protocols of the system they are negotiating with. Musk was seen doing a 360 degree video of the Hall of the People, another act of playful rebellion.
Boeing got an aircraft order. But only 200 planes, not 500, causing Boeing stock (BA) to drop roughly 4% to 5% following the announcement.
Cargill and the agricultural delegation got nothing. Soybean prices plummeted this morning when a comment emerged from China that Chinese soybean purchases were “all taken care of” suggesting that they had completed purchase of the agreed to 12 million metric tons for this year, and that they had no interest of buying more.
The Davos financial faction came for market opening — broader access to Chinese capital markets, expanded asset management mandates, processing rights for Visa and Mastercard, the long-stalled liberalization that BlackRock and Blackstone have been pursuing for a decade.
So far, they got nothing.
And then, after a day of warm optics and ceremonial banquets, Xi took Trump into a two-hour meeting and warned him that Taiwan is “the most important issue” and that if it is mishandled, the two superpowers will “have clashes, or even conflicts.”
Everything else this week is theatre.
This is the Capitalist Civil War exposed to the whole world: four factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class, each holding leverage the others cannot manoeuvre around, each unable to win outright, each unable to walk away. The war does not produce victors. It produces summits — temporary truces between factions that need each other and hate each other enough to keep fighting. It produces plane loads of billionaires flying to negotiate a better piece of the pie. It produces Hollywood director Brett Ratner filming the negotiation.
What flew into Beijing this week was not a de-risking delegation.
It was the four factions of the new quadripolar world order ironically jammed into the Great Hall of the People.
None of them represents the People. None of them is building the institutions that can make positive decisions about the cost-of-living crisis, wealth inequality, or the Iran war. They are fighting for control of a system that has lost the ability to solve the problems it has created.
The summits will continue. The deals will be cut. Boards of Trade will be announced. And the war will not end, because the war is not something the participants want to end. It is the structure they exist inside. They cannot leave it without ceasing to be what they are.
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
Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking
Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?
Thanks for helping me understand why this feeling I had of "nothing geo-politically making any sense!!" maybe does make sense atm.
Excellent Richard.
Next will come the renaming of the entities to Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia and the disputed territories, or some facsimile. This is actually happening, unfortunately.