Sovereignty is what a nation can build alone; leverage is what nobody else can get anywhere else. The Score measures the first, and this page is about the second.
01The theory
Mahan’s argument had two halves.
Mahan, 1890: sea power came from two things that could not be traded for one another, the fleet and the positions.
The Machinepower Index borrows its shape from a book about ships. Alfred Thayer Mahan was an American naval officer whose lectures at the Naval War College in Newport became The Influence of Sea Power upon History in 1890, and his argument was that sea power rested on two different things. The first was what a nation could build and keep up for itself: its trade, its merchant shipping and the navy that grew out of them. The second was position, the “stations along the road”, as he put it, such as Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope, where ships sheltered, took on supplies and had to pass. A nation needed both, and neither could be bought with the other, because a great fleet with nowhere to put in was as stranded as a fortress with no fleet behind it.
Mahan’s chain of sea power
What a nation makes, and needs to exchange.
The merchant ships that carry it, and the navy that grows from them.
Stations along the road, like Gibraltar and the Cape, for refuge and supplies.
The fleet
The positions
Source: A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), chapter 1, which names production, shipping and colonies as the links in the chain of sea power.
The book was read like scripture by the ambitious powers of the day. The Kaiser said he was not so much reading it as devouring it and trying to learn it by heart, Japan translated it for its naval officers, and Theodore Roosevelt was one of its earliest champions. Most of those readers took away only the first half and raced each other to build battleships, which was the expensive way to read Mahan.
If Mahan was the theorist, Admiral Sir John “Jacky” Fisher was the man who had to make it work. Fisher became First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy, on Trafalgar Day 1904, and over the next six years he remade the service: he built HMS Dreadnought, the battleship that made every other battleship obsolete, scrapped scores of ships that would have been no use in a war, brought much of the fleet home from distant stations and pushed the Navy from coal towards oil. In a paper written that year he put what Britain’s power rested on into a single line.
“Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.”
Admiral Sir John Fisher, Naval Necessities, 1904
The five positions Fisher named
THE MARITIME POSITIONSc. 1904
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01 / THE CHANNEL
Dover
A short passage beside a great naval base.
Dover sits beside the route between the Atlantic and the North Sea.
What the position offered
A fortified base and naval presence could influence traffic using the passage.
Could ships go around it?
Ships could sail around the north of Britain.
1 / 5
Select a position for what it offered, and whether ships could go around it. Routes are schematic.
Fisher’s first night in office showed what the keys were worth. Within hours of his taking up the post, Russia’s Baltic Fleet, setting out on an eighteen-thousand-mile voyage to fight Japan, opened fire on Hull trawlers on the Dogger Bank in the belief that they were Japanese torpedo boats. Russia had the ships but held almost none of the places on the road east, and Britain, Japan’s ally, held most of them.
The Baltic Fleet’s voyage, 1904–05Main bodyDetachmentFisher’s key
15 Oct 1904LibauSails from the Baltic for the Pacific.
21–22 OctDogger Bank and DoverFires on Hull trawlers, then runs south through the Channel.Dover
3 NovTangierDivides at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar.Gibraltar
Nov–DecRound the CapeThe main body takes the long way round Africa.the Cape
Nov–DecThrough SuezA detachment takes the Mediterranean and the canal.Alexandria
Jan–Mar 1905MadagascarThe two halves meet again at Nosy Be and wait for orders.
8 AprSingaporeSteams past in sight of the port, barred from taking on supplies.Singapore
27–28 MayTsushimaDestroyed by the Japanese fleet.
18,000miles from the Baltic to the Pacific
c. 60German colliers hired to coal the fleet at sea
7months between leaving the Baltic and the battle
Schematic, not to scale; the two branches are the two routes on the globe above. Sources: Mikasa Memorial Museum, route of the Baltic Fleet; US Naval Institute Proceedings, “The North Sea Incident of 1904” (1974); The Straits Times, 10 April 1905.
The fleet had to take on coal at sea from hired German colliers, and by the time it reached the Tsushima Strait it was worn out; the Japanese all but destroyed it in a single battle. Mahan’s two halves fit into that one voyage: a great fleet, no positions, and a defeat that settled the war.
The keys came with a warning that runs through everything on this page: a position is leverage only for as long as you can hold it, and only for as long as the world still needs to pass through it. Fisher also showed how quickly keys move: he was the Navy’s most persistent advocate of oil, and once the fleet began to burn oil instead of Welsh coal, British sea power depended on oilfields in Persia that Britain did not control, which is why the government bought a controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914.
This Index applies the same split to AI. The Score measures the fleet: what a nation can build, power and run on its own, across Watts, Weights and Will. The register maps the positions: the few places in AI that every other country has to come through, and who could close them. The rest of this page takes them in turn, starting with the fleet, where two nations stand apart from the other twenty-four, then a single key, the lithography machine that every advanced chip has to pass through, and finally what it costs the nations that hold no key at all.
02The fleet
Two machinepowers, and everyone else.
For twenty-four of twenty-six nations, sovereignty is not on offer at any budget this decade.
Two nations stand apart. The gap from second to third is bigger than the gap from first to second.
For a middle power, the real choice is between dependence and leverage: build something others need, then use it to widen your choices.
03The positions
One machine, four keys.
The clearest key in AI is the machine that prints leading-edge chips: none can be made without EUV lithography, and four countries control what goes into it.
ASML in the Netherlands is the only company that makes the machines, the patterns they print are drawn with American design software, the mirrors inside them come from ZEISS in Germany, and Japan supplies the resist and the tools that coat it. Like Mahan’s, it is a chain in which every link is necessary, and taking out any one of the four stops leading-edge chipmaking. Scroll to open the machine.
1 of 4 · Netherlands
The machine that prints it.
EUV lithography. The only supplier in the world. ASML is the only company that makes extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. No leading-edge chip can be made anywhere without them, so Dutch export licensing decides who is allowed to build advanced silicon at all.
Chip design software. Two firms, most of the market. Almost no advanced chip is designed without American electronic design automation tools. Withdrawing them stops a design programme before any silicon exists, and Washington has done exactly that.
EUV optics. The only supplier to the only supplier. ZEISS SMT makes the mirrors and optical columns inside every ASML machine. ASML states in its own annual report that without them it would effectively cease to be able to conduct its business, and that its output is capped by ZEISS capacity.
Resist coating and developing. One firm holds all of it. Tokyo Electron holds about 92% of coater and developer track systems worldwide, and all of the EUV track. Japan put exactly this tool class under licence in July 2023.
Photoresists and specialty chemicals. A handful of firms, all Japanese. Japanese suppliers dominate the chemicals that lithography depends on. Tokyo restricted three of them against South Korea in 2019 (fluorinated polyimide, photoresist and hydrogen fluoride), which is what proved the chokepoint was real.
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04What is at stake
When a position closes, the nations without one have no answer.
Middle powers depend on the positions others hold. The holders have already shown they will use them.
19
of the 26 nations hold no chokepoint at all.
The 7 that do, in Score order: United States, China, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Netherlands. Counted from the chokepoint register at the time of this update.
In 2019 Tokyo restricted three chemicals that chipmaking depends on, against South Korea. In September 2023 the Netherlands put its EUV lithography machines under licence, and has withheld licences since. On 12 June 2026 Washington ordered a frontier model licensed for foreign users, and its maker switched it off worldwide until Commerce withdrew the order on 30 June.
Britain holds no chokepoint. When Washington turned its frontier-model lever, the AI Security Institute reportedly lost its early access to the newest models overnight.
That is the difference between leverage and a favour.
Discover your leverage. Then build it.
The cold hard reality is that nobody outside Washington or Beijing gets to be sovereign this decade. Everybody gets to decide what the world must come to them for.