2026-05-23
minor edits by 2026-06-29
The most important geopolitical graph - world energy balance of trade
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- The most important fact about geopolitics today is who has nuclear weapons. There are nine nuclear-armed nations divided into approximately 2 geopolitical blocs. All other nations are client states for one or more of these nations, and have no sovereignty.
- The list - bloc 1 (US, UK, France, Israel, India), bloc 2 (China, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan)
- The second most important fact about geopolitics is the world energy balance of trade graph. This is also related to the energy use per capita graph. This is also related to per capita usage of air conditioners and room heating for example.
- I think people studying geopolitics should study dollar flows less and energy flows more. (Maybe some of you already do, in which case this advice is not for you.)
- It is very important to study the pairwise energy flows between each of the nine nuclear-armed countries.
- Examples of insights you can draw:
- China is on the frontier of many technological races. But, they're also a large net importer of energy, primarily from Russia. If Russian leaders ever cut off energy supply to Chinese leaders, Chinese economy would decline by a lot.
- Saudi Arabia is a large net exporter of energy, but they don't have nuclear weapons, hence they are vulnerable. Currently Saudi Arabian leaders have good relationship with US leaders, and give US a lot of energy. They also give UAE and Qatar a lot of their energy, such that UAE and Qatar now consumer more energy per capita than Saudi Arabia.
- Indonesia is a large net exporter of energy, but they don't have nuclear weapons, and they are not on the frontier of any tech race AFAIK (I haven't googled). There may also be domestic political factors in Indonesia I haven't studied. The net result is that their own energy consumption per capita is very low, and they export most of their energy to China, India, east Asia and southeast Asia.
- It might also be worth tracking the exact transport routes, as these are the first to be hit during an actual war.
- For instance, coal is typically transported by train or by ship, and oil is typically transported by pipeline or by ship.
- Ships can usually be routed via a longer path if the shortest path goes through war territory. See for example Iran blocking oil shipments via Strait of Hormuz, this has increased energy prices but not actually blocked shipments completely.
- Railway tracks and oil pipelines on the other hand are not as straightforward to reroute. If you successfully blow up all the railway tracks or pipelines between a pair of countries, it is often not straightforward for them to find a third country to reroute the trade through.
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