Today I helped build a compound index measuring which countries are most resilient to oil shocks and best positioned for 21st century transitions. Four dimensions: clean energy share, purchasing power, clean tech production, compute capacity. Sixty countries scored and ranked. You can explore it here.
The Nordics dominate. Iceland at 80.5% clean energy. Sweden, Norway, Finland stacking hydro, nuclear, and high GDP. The petrostates cluster at the bottom — Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia — high wealth masking zero structural transition. The index works. It measures what it says it measures.
But it misses something fundamental.
Taiwan scores poorly. 8.6% clean energy. Fossil-dependent economy. Mid-table composite. And yet Taiwan might be the most strategically consequential country on the index, because TSMC manufactures 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Every AI training run, every hyperscale data center, every advanced weapons system routes through a single company on an island with low energy resilience and a fraught geopolitical position.
The index measures resilience — how well you absorb a shock. It does not measure leverage — how much shock you can inflict.
These are orthogonal axes. And the most dangerous quadrant is the one the index can’t see: high leverage, low resilience. The indispensable fragility.
Albert Hirschman saw this in 1945. A country has power when its trading partners benefit more from the relationship than they would from substitutes. The leverage isn’t in what you have. It’s in what others can’t replace.
Michel Callon, working in actor-network theory, gave it a structural name: the obligatory passage point. A node in a network that all traffic must flow through. Control the passage point and you become functionally indispensable — not because you’re strong, but because you’re positioned.
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman formalized this for geopolitics in 2019 as weaponized interdependence. Two mechanisms: the panopticon effect (you see everything flowing through your hub) and the chokepoint effect (you can cut the flow). They applied it to SWIFT, to undersea cables, to semiconductor supply chains. The power doesn’t come from the size of your economy. It comes from the topology of the network and where you sit in it.
The Netherlands scores 19.1% clean energy on our index. Modest. Unremarkable. But ASML — a single Dutch company — is the sole manufacturer of EUV lithography machines. Without EUV, no one fabricates chips below 7nm. The entire advanced semiconductor industry passes through the Netherlands like water through a single pipe. A country of 18 million people holds an irreplaceable chokepoint in the global compute supply chain.
The UK scores 26.5% clean energy. Arm Holdings, based in Cambridge, designs the chip architecture used in virtually every smartphone on earth and increasingly in data centers. It’s not manufacturing. It’s not even hardware. It’s intellectual topology — the obligatory passage point is an instruction set.
South Korea: 17.5% clean energy. SK Hynix and Samsung produce 95% of the world’s High Bandwidth Memory — the component that makes AI training physically possible. No HBM, no large language models, no AI boom. The leverage is extreme. The resilience is modest.
In network science, there’s a measure called betweenness centrality — how often a node sits on the shortest path between other nodes. High betweenness, low redundancy: the network depends on you, but if you fail, the network fragments. That’s the structural signature of indispensable fragility.
The resilience index tells you who survives a shock. But it doesn’t tell you who is the shock. Taiwan’s low score doesn’t mean Taiwan is weak. It means that if Taiwan breaks, everyone breaks — including Taiwan.
Resilience and leverage are different games played on the same board. The countries that confuse one for the other — or believe that having one grants the other — are the ones most likely to be surprised.