I’m not usually a fan of such ideas, but it does seem very, very suspicious to me, given that the leaders of the world’s most powerful countries are apparently doing everything in their power to undo the civilizational progress of the last hundred years—and are clearly doing so in a fairly well-coordinated manner. Have you ever been close to the top of of a large organization? While conventional wisdom is that the higher you go, the more informed, skilled, coordinated, wise, and even Machiavellian it is. My experience is that its usually the opposite. Sure, there are pockets of those things in individual people, but the people at the top are usually really good at a few things only. If they’re truly wise, they surround themselves with other people that cover their own gaps in knowledge, skill, temperament, etc. However the larger and more complicated the organization, the more outer rings of people are required with those other pockets of skills. In short, complex organizations (this includes governments) are the opposite of " fairly well-coordinated manner". There are just too many moving parts and the environment changes so quickly that the rules that worked a second ago changed. Most successful organizations I’ve seen make “okay” decisions most of the time “good” decisions every now and then, and the best orgs do everything they can to limit their internal fuck ups. The best vaccine against conspiracy theories about high groups of coordinated humans in leadership working against you is actually seeing humans in leadership trying to coordinate.