Real Power

Geopolitics in the conventional sense tends to fixate on the relations between states, which is basically like looking at the stage and the actors on the stage, but not looking at the directors or the script writers. But the middle nation approach goes further than that, we look at who actually has power, regardless of what kind of power that is. Now that includes state power, but also of course it includes private sector power, financial networks, media empires, asset managers, transnational corporate systems. These are not traditionally part of geopolitical analysis, but they're absolutely central to to to understanding the exercise of real world power. I mean, in my opinion, if you ever listen to an analyst, so called analyst, talking about politics, talking about geopolitics, and they never factor in corporate power, they never factor in private sector power, the drivers of economies, the real drivers of policy, well, that's an incredibly shallow, and ultimately misleading so called analysis.

You should be asking, who is shaping the outcome? Who can impose costs? Who can alter behavior without being altered in return? Once you identify the who, then it's not that hard to understand the why. What the desired result is and try to deduce, given what you know about the who, what are the chances that they're gonna be successful?

So this could be a country, it could also be a corporation, it could be a consortium, or an investor network. So you need a way of gauging real existing power, relative power of any given actor, of any given entity that has influence over policy, that wields, you know, significant degree of power in any given society. That's why at Middle Nation we developed what we call the relative power index, RPI. The RPI is a model for roughly calculating functional leverage between power entities, or the the the general standing of any given actor in terms of power relative to others. Because the existing metrics, you know, GDP, military size, alliance structures and so on, these are often misleading.

They reflect the appearance of power, not its realistic functionality or its operation, you know. Because a country might be rich but dependent, a military might be large but strategically irrelevant, a government might be in office but not in control, so the RPI, is designed to identify real influence. It includes factors like, decision making authority, can you impose binding outcomes, control of inputs, do others rely on you for what you control, narrative control, can you define reality for others, immunity to retaliation, in other words, you act without facing consequences, And your adaptability reserve, can you survive and pivot through disruption? And it also measures negatives, the vulnerabilities like direct dependence, how directly dependent are you, what's your exposure to disruption, and what's the perceived vulnerability of your state or your power? And this model is not static, necessarily so, it evolves because power is not frozen, it flows.

And as the world shifts from the West to the South, from centralized empires to distributed blocks, the tools that we use to understand power, I have to try to keep up with those new dynamics. And like I say, everything that they gave us to measure power, well, designed it so that we would always mismeasure power. So that we would see power where there isn't power and see a weakness where there isn't weakness.