The globalist universe is no more. It has split up into technological blocs. The US and the West are in one block while China and Russia are in another. And while China and Russia have to some extent demonstrated that they can get along without the US, the converse is simply not true.

Recently, a fancy dinner took place at the White House, attended by China’s Chairman Xi, who was on a three-day state visit, and some two dozen CEOs of major US-based transnational companies. Why were they there and what did they try to accomplish?

The answer turns out to be as simple as it is shocking.

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The globalist universe has undergone fission. This was made inevitable by Western sanctions against Russia. They were, to begin with, based on some faulty reasoning: that Russia would just dry up and blow away if deprived of Western trade and investment. Instead, Russia found new export routes for its energy exports and launched a rather impressive program of import replacement.

For those products it could not replace, it organized “parallel import” paths that skillfully circumvented Western sanctions. It turned out that there were plenty of countries willing to help. Parallel imports were a bit more expensive, and so Russia put in place capital controls. Western companies operating in Russia, of which there were around 4000 at the start of 2022 and there are around 2000 now, were prevented from moving their profits out of Russia. Instead, they had to be deposited in special “Type S” accounts with the Russian Central Bank, where they await the lifting of sanctions.

If you think that Russia’s import replacement initiatives were somehow insignificant, consider the following. When Siemens refused to service its gas turbines in Crimea, Russia started making its own rather quickly. As a result, Siemens has lost the Russian market. And then Russia went further and created new jet engines as well (which are another type of turbine). Only four nations are capable of building jet engines, and only one of them — Russia — can do so without using imported materials or components.

And when sanctions were used to block the imports of carbon fiber and resins for airliner wing construction, Russia engineered the entire technology on its own more or less from scratch. While it was at it, it also replaced every last bit of imported technology in the new airliners it is getting ready to mass produce, including avionics. These are just a couple of the more spectacular examples. There are plenty of others.

And then there is the area of nuclear energy, where Russia definitely leads the world. It owns half of all uranium enrichment and two-thirds of the world’s nuclear reactor portfolio. Meanwhile, Europe and the US, in all of recent memory, were only able to build 4 new reactors, combined. That’s Olkiluoto in Finland, Flamanville in France and two reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — in Georgia. The total construction delay for these 4 reactors added up to over 30 years and the cost overruns added up to around $40 billion. After its experience with Vogtle, Westinghouse was forced to declare bankruptcy. Two more reactors had been planned in the US, but these plans had to be abandoned.

These are just a couple of the more spectacular examples. There are plenty of others.

Russia’s many nuclear projects around the world also sometimes experience delays and cost overruns, but nothing nearly so spectacular. As existing nuclear reactors, especially in the US and in France, age out and have to be decommissioned, there is nothing to replace them — short of asking Russia for help.

Over the past 4.5 years, Russia has shown that trade with the West is nonessential. This is not universally true, but it is certainly true for Russia because it has the resource base, the production capacity and the intellectual capital to make it on its own. But if Russia can do it, then how many other countries can do so, perhaps with Russia’s help? Quite a few — and what that means is that they no longer have to live in fear of Western sanctions. They can follow their own development strategies and no longer have to work to enrich the West.

China is certainly one of these countries. Its response to US attempts at a trade war was to impose export limits on rare earth metals. This made US weapons manufacturers and other high-tech companies scream in pain. The US has ambitious plans to replace Chinese rare earths, but these are just plans — not products ready for shipment. This was just one pain point, and China used it quite skillfully, but there are numerous others. There is simply no replacement for all sorts of Chinese-sourced components. Without them, all sorts of maintenance projects in the US — never mind manufacturing — would grind to a halt.

There are some Russian exports that are critical as well. The primary Russian exports critical to the U.S. economy are mineral fertilizers, enriched uranium, palladium and titanium. Without these, US nuclear, airspace and automotive industries would not be able to function. But from the Russian point of view, exports to the US only amount to around $5 billion per year — a paltry sum, considering that Russia’s trade with China is nearing a quarter of a trillion per year in dollar terms, although the US dollar is no longer used.

While Russia dominates in several key technology niches, China’s technological dominance is now very broad. Over the past several decades, China has traded cheap labor for technology. Every kind of manufacturing moved to China. Along with it moved the machine tools and every other kind of manufacturing technology — and the engineering, and the skilled labor. Now China is the production center for the entire planet.

What is left in the West, from which the technology for it initially came, is corporate management and a bunch of wealthy stockholders — wealthy only while their stock portfolios hold their value. What’s left in the West are warehouses and office buildings while the factories that make the product are mostly in the East. And the few factories that are still to be found in the West are totally dependent on parts and materials imported from the East.

Recently, a very interesting get-together took place at the White House. During Chairman Xi’s state visit to the US, the following nominally American, but really transnational captains of industry were summoned to a fancy dinner at the White House. Present were the following:

David Ellison of Paramount Skydance, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of SpaceX/Tesla, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Michael Dell of Dell, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, Jane Fraser of Citigroup, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Mary Barra of GM, Darren Woods of Exxon, Albert Bourla of Pfizer, Larry Culp of GE Aerospace, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, Jim Taiclet of Lockheed Martin, Michael Miebach of Mastercard, and Visa’s Ryan McInerney.

The combined net worth of these 22 individuals is approximately $1.72 trillion.

It is notable that very few of these captains of industry actually have anything to do with industry per se. Actual industry, that is. Americans have a tendency to apply the term “industry” to non-industrial sectors such as entertainment. Industry is that which processes raw materials into manufactured products. And for that, almost none of these supposed captains of industry have the required eduction. There are only three engineers among all of them:

Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google has an M.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from Stanford University

Kelly Ortberg of Boeing has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Iowa

and Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil

These three are actually qualified to oversee engineering in some meaningful fashion. The rest have to confine themselves to financial management, stockholder relations, strategic planning, regulatory navigation, and international trade diplomacy. And here is a key fact which I am sure they understand full well: Chairman Xi can replace them with hired help at the stroke of a pen. Not that he would rush to do so — China almost always follows its doctrine of small steps — but the fact that he can is enough to enforce some discipline.

Once again, it is the Russians who showed the way. Recently, several Western companies operating in Russia were placed under government control, Swiss food giant Nestlé and French retail chain Auchan among them. That is, their top managers — not technical or operations staff — were replaced with those appointed by the Kremlin. The companies were not nationalized — God forbid! — but the Russian government took control of their operations. It’s just that their Western managers can no longer manage these companies for the simple reason that they don’t have Russia’s national interests at heart. And, as I already mentioned, they can no longer get at their profits — at least not until all sanctions have been lifted. There will probably be some other conditions, such as compensation for the economic damage the sanctions have caused.

But what of the highly compensated Western financial manipulators? Isn’t it about time to replace them with AI agents? There is a very important difference between technical and operations staff and financial managers: the technical and operations staff know a myriad details that are all relevant to keeping the production lines running and the businesses functioning. The financial managers, on the other hand, can be replaced with hired help — or AI agents. From the point of view of a government — be it Russian or Chinese — what is important about these financial managers is their loyalty. If they are loyal to the West in general or to the US specifically, then they are, by definition, working for the enemy. Either they pledge allegiance, and start being loyal to Russia or to China, or they can take a hike.

Which is why all of these nominally American captains of industry showed up to pledge allegiance to Chairman Xi of the Chinese Communist Party. All the big capitalists pledging allegiance to the chief communist! I thought I’d never see the day!

These people must still feel very important because of their very large compensation packages and their tremendously valuable stock options. But what if the production facilities that make their companies valuable are taken out of their hands? What if the profits of these operations stay on deposit where they can’t get at them? How wealthy and important would they feel then?

Not very, I would think. Which is why they all showed up — to pledge allegiance to Chairman Xí. Henceforth, they will take instruction from the Chinese Communist Party. They will not stray from their mission to Keep China Great.

And what, you might wonder, does Trump have to do with all of this? Unlike Putin or Xí, both of whom are career national leaders, Trump is just a temporary caretaker — and an amateur one at that. He pops into the White House periodically for short periods of time and pretends to know what’s going on there — rather unconvincingly. But he did fine as the White House maître d’ — attending to guest relations, staff supervision and seating arrangements at the state dinner.

Beyond such very important functions, he has tried to use the presidential office to polish his personal brand and to further enrich the Trump clan. The sales of the distinctive red MAGA hats alone generated over $100 million. He and his friends also clean up on insider trading. He uses his position to rock the markets — announcing a war on a Friday and peace on the following Monday — and trades accordingly. “But isn’t that corruption?” you might exclaim. Well, yes and no. Perhaps “creeping Ukrainianization” would be a better term for it. And, keep in mind, within the US justice system, if somebody gets away with a crime, calling that person a criminal is considered libel.

Beyond shameless self-enrichment, at which he excels, Trump has made some massive blunders by being overconfident and an amateur. After meeting Putin at Anchorage, Alaska, he demonstrated to the whole world that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep his word. He proposed what he called a “deal” and what Russians called a “gentlemen’s agreement” and then failed to follow through, showing that he is no gentleman.

And then, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran demonstrated that US military might is largely fictional. Now that most US military bases in the Middle East have been destroyed, Trump’s continued empty threats to start yet another war look quite delusional.

And along the way China demonstrated that a trade war with the US can be won just by putting some limits on a few key exports. And then both China and India demonstrated to the world that US sanctions against Russian oil imports can be safely ignored.

Other than shameless self-promotion and self-enrichment, Trump’s only notable success is in establishing himself as the world’s greatest windbag.

And now Trump is simply running out the clock. He seems to be throwing fewer and weaker temper tantrums and is looking more and more like a broken man who is increasingly out of touch with reality. His functions from now on are likely to remain purely ceremonial: meet chairman Xí when he lands, entertain him, wine and dine him and pretend to do a bit of diplomacy — just to keep up appearances.

But then there were all of these transnational corporate heads who were justifiably concerned about their future, which has become uncertain now that globalism has died. They had to be given a chance to kowtow before the Chinese emperor. Which they did.