Throughout history, power has rarely been as it appears on the surface. In today’s world, the illusion of nation-state competition masks a deeper reality: the rise of a globally interconnected oligarchy. Financial, technological, and political elites in every major country appear to compete, but behind closed doors, their interests increasingly converge, especially when it comes to digital surveillance, financial engineering, and the centralization of control.
One of the clearest examples of this duplicity is the system of foreign aid. As former Congressman Ron Paul famously put it,
“Foreign aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries.”
On the surface, foreign aid is sold to the public as charity, development, or national security. In reality, it is a transfer of wealth from ordinary taxpayers in donor nations to connected elites, corporations, and governments in recipient nations. The “aid” rarely lifts the poor; it fattens oligarchs, cements political loyalty, and keeps the cycle of dependency and corruption alive. When nations question the system, they are subtly reminded not to “bite the hand that feeds them”—revealing that foreign aid is both a carrot and a stick in the global oligarchic toolkit.
This same pattern—of theater for the masses and collusion for the powerful—now extends far beyond aid. Whether in the global rollout of digital ID systems, central bank digital currencies, or the harmonization of tech censorship and surveillance, what looks like competition is often coordination. Elites in the U.S., China, Russia, and Europe may disagree on details, but they increasingly agree on one thing: the necessity of managing populations, securing their own wealth, and limiting true self-governance.
The collapse of the “unipolar moment” has not delivered freedom or sovereignty to the world’s peoples. Instead, it has accelerated the consolidation of an international oligarchic order—one that works above nations, above politics, and above any genuine democratic accountability. The struggle of our era, then, is not between competing countries, but between awakened civil society and an entrenched, global class of elites who would rather manage the world than serve it.
If we are to reclaim freedom, we must see past the spectacle of partisan and international rivalry. The real fight is to expose and break the collusion of power—whether it’s through foreign aid, financial manipulation, or digital control grids—and to demand a system rooted in true accountability, transparency, and the dignity of the individual.
