For decades, great-power strength was often described with words such as territory, military force, GDP and ideology. All of them still matter. But a growing share of contemporary power appears in less visible places: the fabrication plant capable of making an advanced chip, the refinery that processes a mineral, the cable connecting continents, the system settling a payment, the strait concentrating thousands of ships, or the regulatory permission deciding who may access a technology.
Seen this way, power is not only a property someone possesses. It is also a position inside a network of dependencies. An actor gains room to maneuver when it can keep functioning after a route closes; it loses room when one interruption can stop a disproportionate share of the system.
Technology, semiconductors and access control
A struggle over the rules.
The technology race shows that controlling a capability does not require owning an entire market. Sometimes it is enough to control one stage that is difficult to replace: design, advanced fabrication, lithography equipment, high-performance memory, data centers, software, intellectual property or export licensing.
In January 2026, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security changed its policy for certain advanced chips exported to China. Applications for products such as Nvidia's H200, AMD's MI325X and comparable chips moved to case-by-case review under security, compliance and domestic-availability conditions. The important point is the mechanism: access to technology is managed as a strategic lever rather than as a simple border between “allowed” and “banned.”
This complicates the idea of a purely commercial global economy. A company may have money to buy and demand to sell into, yet still depend on a license, a machine made by a handful of suppliers, a particular foundry or a component chain crossing several jurisdictions.
Critical minerals and processing power
Owning the mine is not enough if someone else controls refining.
The energy transition, artificial intelligence, defense and electronics rely on materials that rarely move straight from mine to factory. Between extraction and product lie separation, refining, intermediate materials, components and technical know-how.
The International Energy Agency reported in its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 that, excluding rare earths, the average share of the leading refining country reached 72% in 2025. For gallium, graphite, manganese and magnet rare earths, China accounts for more than 90% of global refined supply. That concentration matters because very small material volumes can underpin enormous downstream industries.
Chinese controls announced since 2025 on heavy rare earths, graphite, battery materials and selected processing technologies made visible a vulnerability that cannot be solved simply by “opening another mine.” The IEA estimates that full implementation of certain rare-earth restrictions could place roughly $6.5 trillion per year of downstream production outside China at risk.
A second lesson follows: a supply chain may diversify extraction and remain concentrated in the middle. If a new mine feeds the same refinery, relies on the same specialized equipment or depends on the same industrial know-how, the political map looks more diverse while the chokepoint remains shared.
Shipping routes and strategic chokepoints
When geography becomes power.
Oil, gas, minerals, components and goods have to move. That is why a handful of straits and canals carry importance far beyond their physical size: Hormuz, Malacca, Suez, Bab el-Mandeb and Gibraltar are narrow lines capable of conditioning global flows.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that in 2024 about 22.5 million barrels per day of oil and liquids moved through Malacca and around 20.7 million through Hormuz. UNCTAD estimated that roughly 22% of global seaborne container trade moved through Suez in 2023. The OECD estimated that about 19% of global maritime trade passed Gibraltar that year.
On September 14, 2026, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd announced that four additional joint services would return through Suez. The move demonstrates the economic value of the shorter Asia-Europe route, but also its fragility: both companies stressed that future operational decisions would depend on stability in the Middle East.
Reuters reported the same day that traffic through Hormuz remained far below levels seen before the regional crisis. The exact number can change from week to week; the structure does not. When a large share of energy or trade needs one narrow corridor, security, insurance, ship availability and military decisions become economic variables.
When the second route can fail too
An alternative only counts if it does not share the same failure point.
Saudi Arabia built its East-West Pipeline to move crude from the country's east to Yanbu on the Red Sea, bypassing Hormuz. It is exactly the kind of redundancy that reduces a geographic dependency. Yet in September 2026 an attack forced a temporary shutdown of the pipeline, threatening capacity of roughly four million barrels per day.
The episode reveals something deeper than the vulnerability of one pipe. A second route may have its own chokepoint, depend on another conflict zone, or terminate in a corridor that is itself under pressure. The goal is not to draw more lines on a map; it is to prevent apparently separate lines from collapsing under the same kind of shock.
This gives us a general rule: apparent redundancy is not real redundancy when two alternatives share the same cause of failure.
Submarine cables and the geography of the internet
The digital world still depends on physical routes.
The internet feels immaterial because the user experience happens on a screen. Underneath it sits a geography of cables, landing stations, data centers, power and operators.
In June 2026, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules to accelerate and secure submarine-cable deployment. The FCC estimates that these systems carry the vast majority — and up to roughly 99% of intercontinental internet traffic — and facilitate more than $10 trillion in global financial transactions every day.
The point is not that the internet is “about to break.” It is that infrastructure that feels virtual still relies on physical routes and on a small number of places where undersea systems connect to terrestrial networks. Landing stations, terminal equipment, service providers and jurisdictions all belong on the map of digital power.
Payment systems, currencies and financial autonomy
Moving value also requires infrastructure.
Money does not travel only as banknotes or reserves. It travels through correspondent banks, messaging networks, clearing houses, settlement systems, compliance rules and, increasingly, central-bank digital infrastructure.
In September 2026, India pushed a proposal within BRICS to link central-bank digital currencies and make cross-border payments easier. It is important not to make the story more dramatic than it is: India said the goal was to make international transactions faster and more efficient, not to replace the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency.
That is exactly why the example matters. Financial autonomy does not have to mean “abandoning” a dominant currency. It can mean building additional settlement routes, reducing friction, or avoiding total dependence on one system. Once again, sovereignty appears as the ability to choose among viable routes.
Spain, Gibraltar, Ceuta and the relationship with Morocco
Spain also occupies a sensitive point on the map.
Spain sits beside Gibraltar, one of the maritime corridors linking the Atlantic and Mediterranean, while maintaining two Spanish cities in North Africa. Trade, security, migration, energy, diplomacy and territorial sovereignty therefore intersect in a very small space.
In August 2026, the Spanish government publicly rejected any negotiation over the sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla after renewed remarks from a Moroccan minister. The exchange came shortly after the severe July border crisis in Ceuta, during which Reuters reported roughly 72,000 brief entries and at least 96 deaths.
Two things can be true at once: Spain needs Moroccan cooperation in areas such as border control, security and economic relations; and that need increases the strategic value of preserving its own room for decision. Recognizing interdependence does not require turning every incident into a conspiracy or every form of cooperation into subordination.
Interdependence, redundancy and the cost of choice
Sovereignty is not autarky.
It would be easy to read everything above and conclude that the solution is to produce everything inside one border, depend on nobody and duplicate every infrastructure. That model is not only impossible for most countries and companies; it can be extraordinarily expensive.
The IEA estimates that new refining projects outside the dominant supplier can face capital costs 20% to more than 150% higher, while operating costs average around 50% higher. Part of global concentration exists because efficiency itself concentrates.
That changes the definition of sovereignty. It is not absolute independence. It is deciding consciously where it is worth paying for redundancy, inventory, local capacity, alternate allies or response time. Economically, a second route is an option: it can look expensive when everything works and become extremely valuable when the main route fails.
This also explains why not every dependency is bad. Some dependencies lower costs, accelerate innovation and enable specialization. The problem appears when a dependency is critical, opaque and there is no reasonable plan to absorb its disruption.
Dependence, alternatives and sovereignty
The invisible map.
Put chips, minerals, straits, pipelines, cables, payments and borders together and a richer architecture appears:
resource → processing → route → chokepoint → dependence → alternative → cost → sovereignty.
The pattern can travel from geopolitics to smaller scales when the causal relationship remains intact. If all company revenue depends on one platform, there is a chokepoint. If a team can operate only because one person holds all critical knowledge, there is another. If a household relies on one account, one mobility route or one person for a critical function, the system also contains concentration.
The useful question becomes less “am I strong?” and more: what part of this system could stop everything else if it failed, what second route exists, and what does it cost to keep that route genuinely viable?
Laboratory · Quick audit
Structural sovereignty index
Score each point. This does not measure personal worth; it measures how much redundancy the system has today.
Application: draw your own dependency map
A way to carry it with you.
Choose one real objective: housing, business, money, health, learning, mobility or communication. Draw eight elements: resource, processing, route, chokepoint, dependence, alternative, cost and control.
Then do not try to strengthen everything. Find the point whose improvement changes the whole system most. Ask whether your “second route” shares the same cause of failure as the first. The aim is not to eliminate dependence; it is to turn a blind dependency into a known and manageable relationship.
Sources, updates and precision
What can be verified should retain a route back to its origin.
Primary sources for this edition: U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, semiconductor licensing-policy revision, January 13, 2026; International Energy Agency, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026; U.S. Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints; UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport 2024; OECD, Risks and Resilience in Global Trade; FCC, Secure Submarine Cable Infrastructure, June 25, 2026; Reuters reporting on Suez services, September 14, 2026, the Saudi East-West Pipeline, September 13, 2026, BRICS payment interoperability, September 10, 2026, and Ceuta, Melilla and Morocco, August 12, 2026. Figures describe specific periods and can change.