Geopolitical Intelligence

Three things that get conflated into one. Difficulty is what an attacker faces — mountains, distance, population, and the force waiting. Strength is what a country can field. Threat is whether anyone next door could realistically try. They come apart: Ethiopia is genuinely hard to invade and nobody nearby is equipped to, while Pakistan is hard to invade and lives beside two armies that could.

Difficulty also counts the moat — the share of a country's perimeter that is water rather than land, because crossing water under fire is the hardest thing an army does. It is a measured proportion, not a label: 100% for Japan, 95% for the United Kingdom, 21% for Israel, and 0.3% for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose 37 kilometres of Atlantic coast sit against nine land borders. Coastline length alone would not work — Canada has more of it than anyone and almost all of it is Arctic.

What an army is worth, and what its budget really buys

A dollar of Russian military spending buys about 2.7 times what a dollar of American spending does, so the nominal budgets are not comparable. Corrected for that, Russia outspends the United States. The fleet value is the replacement cost of everything a country fields — its balance sheet rather than its salary.

Fleet value sums tanks, aircraft, helicopters, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, submarines, amphibious ships, satellites and warheads at approximate replacement cost — round figures, since a frigate's price varies by a factor of two between builders. Payroll is ESTIMATED as headcount times GDP per capita — there is no salary series — and what remains is the envelope for buying and maintaining hardware. Crude, and it lands within a few percent of the known US personnel figure; it strains for conscript armies, where the column goes blank rather than negative. The PPP multiplier is GDP at purchasing power parity over GDP at market rates, 1.0 for the United States by construction.

Difficulty weights terrain and mean altitude, land area, population, military strength and alliances. The weights are a stated judgement, not a published index — no source ranks invadability, so this is an argument, made from military budgets, troop numbers, armour, air power, nuclear status and topography the platform already held. Exclusive economic zones and coastline length are absent: those columns are populated for 14 countries out of 218.

Where a mineral comes out of the ground, how few countries that is, which straits those producers sit beside, what the ore becomes, and which listed companies live off it. Ordered by concentration, because that is the risk that no shipping route can relieve: cobalt refining is 82% Chinese and rare earth oxides 75%, and a substitute strait does not help with either.

Production shares are 2024figures — later years exist in the source but are projections, not observations. Chokepoints are straits a top producer borders, not a routing model: which one a cargo transits depends on where it is going. Companies are matched where a listed sub-sector names the mineral itself, so “no listed pure-play” means no company is classified under it, not that none exists. 43 further minerals are omitted here for having no real end-use data.

A dozen straits and canals carry most of what moves by sea. Dot size is oil transit, colour is how many active conflicts involve a country on their shores. The Strait of Hormuz is the one with no alternative at all: everything leaving the Persian Gulf goes through a shipping lane two miles wide.

Transit volumes are approximate US EIA figures for 2023, held as static reference data — this list changes once a decade and has no live feed. What IS computed nightly is the conflict count beside each one, from the current conflict feed rather than the tension index, which is driven by a country's worst neighbour and would rank Hormuz below Gibraltar.

Territory under competing claim — the kind of risk that produces no shooting most years and shapes everything. The country in colour holds the ground; the others claim it. 185 of 291 disputes have an identifiable holder; where none is shown, the border itself is undemarcated and nobody holds it outright.

From Wikipedia's List of territorial disputes, where bold marks the holder. Claimants are read from the article each flag links to, never the cell text. Wikipedia's own marking is preserved rather than corrected: Western Sahara is recorded with Spain as holder because that is what the page says, and partially recognised entities such as the Sahrawi Republic drop out for having no ISO code.

Deaths this year against last year. The direction is the closest thing to a measure of war fatigue that public data supports: a war killing half what it killed a year ago is not the same war. This list is current — the UCDP figures elsewhere on this page are academically coded and released a year in arrears, so no 2026 conflict can appear in them.

Fatality counts are Wikipedia's running totals, scraped nightly — current but rough, and low estimates where a range is given. Green means fewer deaths than last year; it does not mean a war is ending. Forces committed and economic cost are not in any source the platform ingests.

Every country carries the trouble of its neighbours as well as its own, which is why Finland and Estonia score as highly as they do without being at war: their worst neighbour is Russia. Bigger and hotter dots mean more tension.

Countries are drawn at their capitals on an equirectangular grid, not as outlines — the platform holds coordinates but no boundary geometry. That also avoids the choropleth's built-in distortion, where Russia and Canada shout and Singapore disappears.

The same countries, shaded by how freely their economies operate — property rights, trade openness, regulation, sound money. Set against the tension map above, it shows how little the two overlap: some of the freest economies sit in the most dangerous neighbourhoods.

Economic Freedom of the World score, 0 to 100. This series stops at 2019, so it describes a settled picture rather than today's — worth remembering next to a tension index that is recomputed nightly.

Economic output divided by land area, in millions of dollars per square kilometre. Every other wealth measure on this site is per person or a percentile rank, and both make a small rich country look like a large one. This asks a different question: how much economy is packed into the ground. The city-states run away with it — Macao produces more per square kilometre than any country produces in total per square kilometre of anywhere — but the interesting name is the Netherlands, the densest full-sized economy on earth.