Save this story for later. Peter Thiel appeared at a Zoom event one evening this past April in a familiar pose: his face sat tense and almost twitchy, and yet his voice radiated authority and calm. Even by Thiel’s rarefied standards, his main interviewer that evening, in a conversation hosted by the Nixon Foundation, was impressive: Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former Secretary of State and a potential Presidential contender, who was treating the billionaire with deference while asking him the broadest of questions about the future of the U.S. and China. “You spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the technology fight between the West and the ideas that the Chinese Communist Party puts forward—whether that’s disinformation or the capacity to move digits around the world,” Pompeo said to Thiel, before asking the investor how the two powers compared, technologically. For anyone interested in who will hold power in the Republican Party in the near future, the event made for a stark tableau of clout. Pompeo’s eyes narrowed attentively as he listened to Thiel; the Trump national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien, who had also been invited to ask questions, was nodding appreciatively beneath a formidable white coif.