The ultimate game-theory of top global political power on earth is KOBK: kill-or-be-killed. There is no other option.
This is so because top players can never be sure of the intentions of other top players. The world at the top is like an uneasy group of mafia bosses who can be and often are killed and replaced.
In world politics, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) acted as a Nash Equilibrium which held well-enough during the Cold War. But those days are gone: Uncontrollable unrestricted warfare is the game being played now.
(Tactics include: mass infiltration and spying, sedition, terrorist acts, poison, murder, bioweaponry, mind-control, propaganda, information collection, theft, control of money, Central Bank Digital Currency, mandates, captured agencies, bribery, blackmail, etc. Uncontrolled unrestricted warfare allows for anything. If you don’t do it, your enemies will.)
If we keep this in mind, our analyses of what is happening now and what will happen in future will be much sharper and to the point. Briefly, top players must always seek more power, more information, better weapons, and more ways of using whatever they have to destroy both real and potential rivals.
This is why we are seeing USA and other 5-Eyeys countries gathering as much information as they can about their own citizens as well as the rest of the world. This is why these same powers are mandating masks, lockdowns, vaccines, quarantines, and so on—to exercise total control over their own people. Absolute power plus maximum information collection is the only way they can assure themselves they are safe from their own people.
We can see Beijing is doing the same thing. To many, it appears 5-Eyes are imitating Beijing by creating their own “social-credit” system of surveillance and total control. A better analysis is they must do that based on KOBK dictates.
It is important to understand that people at the top ultimately have no choice but to follow KOBK dictates. Given the game they are playing—kill-or-be-killed—they have no choice but to aim for totalitarian control. This is what we all should expect to see more of. This is the inevitable direction the world is heading in. Kill-or-be-killed is the ultimate, irreducible, ineluctable game being played today.
This does not mean we cannot or should not fight back. It does mean that we must understand what we are fighting against. Uncontrolled, unrestricted warfare is necessarily the game top players are playing on all fronts.
UPDATE: KOBK is 100% amoral. A KOBK player could be evil or good, a demon or a saint, or anything in-between. I emphasize KOBK because it is a rock-bottom game-theory that no player can escape. If a player even suspects his potential rival is going to play by KOBK rules, he has no choice but to do the same. The Kill-or-be-Killed basis of KOBK does not mean literally kill the person. It means kill their ability to threaten you with KOBK. As a power, a suspected KOBK rival must be utterly destroyed. KOBK battles often do kill real people, but their game-theory essence is only to kill the ability of the rival to fight. Another aspect of KOBK is its tendency to escalate very rapidly. This happens because any suspicion that a rival is going KOBK must be met with a savage KOBK blow. ABN
American Buddhist Net 
This does make sense but I was looking for more specifics. The main takeaway is there is an ‘elitist’ conflict which drives everything below it (how can it not)? We below are in turmoil because ‘the top’ won’t stop. We want to anticipate their actions and look to their possible motivations. We yearn for a final re-assurance but haven’t found it yet.
My apologies, my first reply (deleted) to you was based on misunderstanding which post you were commenting on. The essay you were commenting on is very stark realism. The main takeaway is the top power players cannot but engage in a kill-or-be-killed game. This is not a cheerful conclusion and I hope you or someone else will convince me it is wrong. I have offered this idea elsewhere but no one has refuted it so far. If you can, please do! I will be most grateful.
As it is, if the conclusion cannot be refuted, at least we know where we stand and where top players stand and why they act as they do. One decent hope for the future is we may get top players that somehow become beneficent dictators, a very good form of government. If that happens, they may be able to find a way to ensure that future top people will continue to be beneficent. Possibly with the aid of technology even more advanced than today’s this could happen, though I can seem many nightmare outcomes there as well. Another possibility is aliens much smarter and kinder than us will takeover earth and govern us well.