The World Power Web

Reading it: the bigger a node, the more connections it has. Circles are countries, squares are blocs and organizations, triangles are armed non-state actors. Line color shows the kind of relationship; dashed red lines are rivalries, dotted purple arrows run from patron to armed client. Country nodes carry their flag as a circular badge — Twemoji vector art (© Twemoji contributors, CC-BY 4.0) clipped into the node, inside a thick ring in the country's region or alignment color — rendering the same on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android, online or offline. Blocs, organizations and armed groups carry their own real emblem — the flag, logo or seal held on Wikimedia Commons, resolved through Wikidata, loaded from Commons and credited on hover to the exact file. Nothing is redrawn. The G7, the Quad and Five Eyes are informal groupings with no official emblem at all, so those keep a neutral stand-in mark rather than one being invented for them. All of these scale with the node. The Ranks button opens a weighted influence index — six scored components you can re-weight live between Balanced, Hard-power and Network views, with GDP, income, military and resource-share columns. Selecting the UN Security Council node opens a ledger of its latest recorded votes — each with the tally, every P5 position, and links to the original UN records (meeting coverage, resolution texts, the veto dataset). Pale-blue dotted lines among the five permanent members show who habitually votes and vetoes together, and every current Council member's own card carries an 'In the Security Council' section: its seat, its veto record, and its recorded position — for, against, abstain or veto — in each of the latest votes. Pink dashed lines mark structural leverage — upstream water, straits, sovereign stakes, irreplaceable companies — and country dossiers carry 'Levers & bargaining chips' cards for the quieter instruments: banking havens, student flows, chokepoints, rare earths, manufacturing chokeholds, each with sources. Each dossier's 2-hop ripple toggle lights the second ring of impact — the circuits by which, say, Iran and the West act on each other through energy, straits and proxies — and its 'Systemic reach' line counts that ring and names the main transmission channels. Peach dash-dot lines add the civilizational layer beneath the politics: shared languages, empires past, partitions and diasporas — the Persian-speaking world around Iran, the Francophonie and Lusosphere, the Raj's imprint, pan-Slav and Ottoman bonds, and the scars of 1947 and 1971.

Using it: tap any node to isolate its web and open its dossier; tap a name inside the dossier to jump to that actor, and hover over a relationship row — or tap its ‹i› button — for a fuller description with clickable source references (Wikipedia anchor articles and the books listed in the companion file). Search from the top bar, pinch or scroll to zoom, drag nodes to untangle, use Filters to hide link types (hiding "Bloc membership" declutters the picture a lot) to recolor nodes by alignment, or to widen node spacing with the slider.

Honest caveats: this is a snapshot as of early 2026 and a simplification. "Alignment" labels are judgment calls; many states hedge deliberately. Contested links (for example arms conduits to the RSF or M23) follow published UN panel reporting. Micro-states of Europe are folded into the EU picture. The companion data file lists every connection, the machine-readable edge list, and the books and reference articles the structure is drawn from.