In my readings, few questions impressed me as the one that gives the title to the second part of José Ortega y Gasset’s La Rebelión de las Masas: “Quién manda en el mundo?” The philosopher did not formulate it in a metaphysical sense, where it could be answered by something like “God”, “chance”, “fatality”, but in a geopolitical sense, and came to the conclusion that it was a pity that Europe had lost its position, leading the way to Russia and the United States.

The answer seemed out of place with the question. States, nations, governments and continents do not rule. The bosses are the individuals and groups that control them. Before geo-politics comes tout court politics. And then everything gets complicated formidably. It is easy to see which states or countries prevail over others. But finding out who really rules in one state or country — and through it in others — is a more daunting intellectual challenge than the usual political analyst can imagine.

The verb “command” comes from the Latin manus dare: the commander lends his means of action (his “hand”) to others to do something he has thought. A ruler gives orders to his subordinates, but upon closer examination you will see that only very rare rulers in history — a Napoleon, a Stalin, a Reagan — were themselves the creators of the ideas they came up with. Early theorists of the modern state got it right when they invented the term “executive power”: the man of government is usually the executor of ideas that he did not conceive of, nor would he have the ability — or the time — to conceive. And those who conceived these ideas were the same ones who gave him the means to reach the government to realize them. Who are they?

Applying the question to the specific case of the United States, the sociologist Charles Wright Mills, one of the New Left mentors, published in 1956 the book that would become a classic: The Power Elite. The answer he found took the form of a complicated plot of groups, families, businesses, official and unofficial secret services, sects, clubs, churches, and ostentatious and discreet personal relationship circles, including lovers and call girls. The political class, which culminated in the person of the nominal ruler, appeared there as the foam on the surface of dark waters. Mills was obviously on the right track. But he died in 1962 and did not have the opportunity to witness a phenomenon that he himself helped produce: the New Left itself became the power elite and lost all interest in “transparency.” On the contrary: not long ago it has worked its opacity to the point of having placing a complete stranger in the presidency of the most powerful country in the world and surrounding it with a protective wall that blocks every attempt to find out who it is, what it has done, who it is with, and what interests it represents. If you want an idea of what the power elite is doing in the United States, you need to look for information at the other end of the ideological spectrum: conservatives are the current heirs to the tradition of study inaugurated by Wright Mills.

It is thanks to them that today the fabian globalist elite, the living nucleus of power behind virtually all western governments, has become visible in its composition and in details of its modus operandi to the point of near obscenity, involuntarily comical the insistence of some in calling it “secret power”. Press enter on google for the words “Council on Foreign Relations” , “Bilderberg” , “Trilateral” and the like, and you will get more information than your neurons will be able to process over the next ten years — information whose level of credibility ranges from scientific evidence to top-down invention.

By contrast, little or almost nothing is known about the deep sources of power in Russia, China, and the Islamic countries. Even the descriptions we have of the visible ruling class in these regions of the globe are schematic and superficial, without comparison to the meticulous Who’s Who of the western elite. This is easily explained by the difference in access to information sources. It is one thing to search western archives and libraries, under the protection of democratic laws and institutions, and even in the US to break through the barrier of official ill through the Freedom of Information Act. It is completely different in trying to guess what is passing behind the impenetrable walls of the Russian-Chinese establishment.

Neither the KGB nor China’s intelligence services have ever given access to independent researchers. Even the archives of the USSR Communist Party closed again after a brief period of tolerance, motivated not by any sudden love of freedom, but by the illusory conviction, soon denied, that western researchers were mostly sympathetic to the Soviet regime.

In the Islamic world, beneath the ruling class and the clutter of terrorist groups stretches an unfathomable network of esoteric organizations, some millennials, whose power of influence is vastly varied from country to country and from time to time. These organizations, which constitute the spiritual core of Islam, the profound assurance of its civilizational unity and, in the long run, the condition for the possibility of worldwide Islamic expansion, remain perfectly unknown to western political analysts, journalists or even scholars. The difference in visibility between the big contending globalist schemes is a source of catastrophic errors in describing the power conflict in the world.