Making sense of the geopolitical map isn’t what it used to be.
Not only can no one agree whether World War 3 has formally started, but the traditional colors defining friend and enemy no longer seem to apply.
Instead, this war’s allegiances and interests have become multivaried and fluid.
Instead of homogeneous blocks of power, a plethora of inter- and intra-state actors are vying for influence within and outside of traditional nation-states.
If old WW2 battle maps looked like this:
Today’s maps may soon comprise a patchwork of colors within previously assumed borders and territories. The colors will juxtapose “no-go territories” versus “safe zones”, and “elite bubbles” versus highly protected “special economic zones”, all of them adjusting for the sensibilities of the map reviewer’s background, ideology, or values.
The truth, still missed by most observers, is that a deeper shift has already overturned every familiar framework of power.
The story isn’t about a unipolar world becoming multipolar — it’s about something far more radical.
Power is becoming intrapolar. Not just fracturing at the global level but fragmenting within nation-states, which no longer act as one.
The phenomenon, dare we say, doesn’t need Elon Musk and Rory Stewart to agree on whether civil war is or isn’t a viable risk factor for countries like the U.K.
In some cases, we’re already there. Remember the “London banana” that went viral a few months back? The idea quickly resonated with many Londoners, even as others called it farfetched.
But the point is that it might not be long before a few more colors are added to the map.
These upcoming ‘Rainbow Wars’ stand to pit friend alongside former foe, enemies one day and allies the next.
More confusingly still, the hallmarks that used to define a Western destabilization operation can no longer be relied upon. The formerly secretive methods and sources that underpinned such ops, aren’t so secret anymore. The technology has leaked into the public domain, and for the most part, has become accessible to all.
Allegiances, if any, can only be loosely divided between those who use these technical means to pursue chaos and freedom versus those who use them to pursue order and unity.
The light rainbow against the dark (or vice versa, depending on what side you’re on).
The change is both a warning and an opportunity for investors, since funding a system riddled with factional divides is akin to making or losing kingdoms during the late-stage Roman Empire.
Rainbow Spotting
It was only when I tried to make sense of the Gen-Z uprisings spreading across continents that the outlines of this new kind of conflict emerged.
To explain, it’s worth recapping how the Gen Z uprisings of 2025 went down.
- It all started in Nepal on September 8, after the government banned over 26 social media platforms.
- Within a day, Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned.
- Youthful ‘Gen-Z’ protests then inspired global copycats, with widespread and occasionally violent protests affecting Madagascar, Morocco and Peru.
- The latest victim, Madagascar’s President, Andry Rajoelina, fled the country aboard a military plane on October 13 after resigning under intense pressure.
In almost four years of writing geopolitics at The Blind Spot, I’d never felt less qualified and more confused.
It used to be so simple: if playbook X was deployed to topple a country’s government, it showed the hidden hand of player Y.
But today, anyone who tries to interpret geopolitical motives or algorithmic warfare through the old lens of national interests does so at their own peril.
Those predisposed to involuntary pattern recognition will have immediately spotted the similarities: the same memes in circulation, the “spontaneity” of the mass followings, and the sympathetic nature of the mainstream coverage.
Separately, and equally remarkably, was how quickly the protests overthrew local governments. And how close some of the impacted countries had gotten to China.
In Nepal’s case, the country had been cozying up to China with multiple BRI deals in recent years.
Madagascar was one of the first countries in Africa to sign a BRI deal with China in 2017. The African island state is also rumored to be preparing to partner with Beijing on a Chinese naval base, having upgraded its partnership status with China in September 2024 to a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’.
On the face of it, it all felt like a classic Western-funded color revolution of the Arab Spring variety.
And yet, something felt off.
The biggest protests — Morocco, Peru, Paraguay — which erupted in the aftermath of Nepal’s uprising, occurred among three staunch U.S. allies.
Could it have been that China was playing the U.S. at its own game? Seeking to sow its own political discord in the American sphere of influence?
My discrete inquiries suggested something else. Something more complex.
China, after all, is not an undivided whole itself. Some factions within the CCP, especially within the Chinese military, have long been rumored to oppose Xi. Some may even be working with the American military against the interests of other factions in their own leadership (especially if recent U.S. intel ads to recruit Chinese assets are anything to go by). The same goes for competing American factions within the U.S.’s own federal agencies.
The era of easy speculative finger-pointing is over. The era of fragmented sovereignties has arrived.
When your enemy’s enemy is your friend
Sovereign fragmentation doesn’t just redraw conflict lines on a map; it does so politically, too.
The Democrats, famously, believe Putin and Trump have been in cahoots since before 2016. If we take these accusations as a manifestation of our intrapolar hypothesis, perhaps they do and always did have a point?
Because in America’s hidden civil war, foreign leaders may lie closer to your interests than domestic agencies.
This putative Russia-U.S. alliance explains our Rainbow sovereignties perspective perfectly.
To understand why, you should first read our American América hypothesis. This sees Trump as today’s Diocletian, severing the U.S.’s foreign empire to fortify the one at home. It also means cutting off a wide range of U.S. institutional actors in the media, intelligence, and bureaucratic circles who hold their power bases abroad.
Here we start separating the signal from the noise. Like when Putin and Trump blindsided European leaders in Alaska to hammer out a bilateral peace deal, or when the latest Trump-Zelensky call reportedly had the American President pushing Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms for a ceasefire. Or when Kirill Dimitriev recently proposed that Elon Musk build an undersea tunnel linking Siberia and Alaska – presumably bypassing America’s European allies.
Because it’s increasingly obvious that Trump’s true enemies do not lie in Moscow or Beijing — they’re in Washington, Langley, and U.S. bases abroad.
That’s not to say Putin and Trump are natural allies. It’s more like when two rival mafia bosses, long entangled in a deadly dance by rivalling blood feuds, realize their wars are bad for business. Their efforts then unite in suppressing and neutralizing internal elements — former allies turned enemies for being unaligned with their overarching goals.
So Democrats’ claims of Trump being a Russian asset may simply be an exaggeration of a more complex truth: that the U.S. is no longer a single, unified power.
And if that’s true for the U.S., it should apply to every other country too.
Rethinking sovereignty
If the analysis is right, thinking of countries in the 21st century as cohesive states will keep entire fields of academia locked into an increasingly useless lens.
But if we used a time portal to convoke a medieval scholar and consult with him on this topic, he’d be confused — for the opposite reason.
“How could a state have interests?” he could ask; “Sovereignty relies on the personal interests of the monarch, and the monarch’s family — not in the state itself.”
For most of history, state structures were traditionally considered the personal property of the world’s most powerful families. Alliances between and within states were always fluid, reliant on personal interests, family relations, and marriages. The state and its bureaucracy already existed, but it was subsumed under the monarch’s personal interests.
The rise of modernity, nationalism, and industrialization saw this reality inverted. As 19th-century political theorist Max Weber famously explained, modern power flowed away from rulers’ bodies and towards state offices. This consolidated power inside national borders and cemented the idea of the nation-state. The importance of personality and families visibly remains, such as in the Jewish-American alliance engendered by Ivanka and Kushner’s partnership, or in China’s attempts to strategically marry into Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, but they were heretofore subsumed under the interests of state bureaucracies.
But now that this trend is reversing towards personalities once more, it’s worth asking if states haven’t always been legal fictions. A mixture of physical spaces and written, spoken, and unspoken agreements between individuals about how power is allocated.
Bodies and personalities, on the other hand, do exist. They can act.
Trump can physically slap Maduro. Scott Bessent can thump Elon Musk.
But the Office of the President itself can’t slap anyone.
Some readers may contest this because the state can still send in the troops. But we’d argue that to do so, it still needs people to believe in its legal fiction.
In which case, perhaps the nation-state isn’t vanishing so much as revealing what it always was: a temporary consensus about who gets to act in the world’s name.
What replaces it won’t be neatly bordered factions or ideologies, but shifting constellations of power — alliances defined not by flags, but by purpose. Balaji Srinivasan’s Network States.
Don’t get us wrong, the state’s not dead yet. But it, like everyone else, is in the grips of an identity crisis.
