What NewsClock is
NewsClock is a global dependency & risk engine. It models the trade routes, ports, and chokepoints that move the world’s energy, and the military and economic capacity each country brings to the table — so you can close a chokepoint, like the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal, and watch how that ripples through trade routes and country-level risk in real time.
What it covers
148 ports, 10 chokepoints, and 187 trade routes across 181 countries. Close a chokepoint and watch route status, scenario totals, and country risk scores update together.
Full profiles for every tracked country — military overview, economic overview, energy dependency, chokepoint exposure, trade routes, risk score, and a hardware breakdown — plus a side-by-side comparison of any two.
Group countries into two sides and compare their combined military, economic, and hardware totals — illustrative only, not a conflict-outcome predictor.
The most at-risk countries by category, and the trade chokepoints the most modeled volume actually flows through — both computed from the same underlying data.
Countries ranked by tanks, aircraft, helicopters, artillery, armored vehicles, personnel, and defense spending — the raw hardware data itself, independent of the trade-risk model.
Top arms-exporting and arms-importing countries, and who each major importer’s main suppliers are — sourced directly from SIPRI, not modeled.
Recent coverage of shipping chokepoints, trade route disruptions, and energy security — the real-world events the risk map is meant to help make sense of.
What’s real vs. illustrative
Military personnel, hardware, and defense spending are pulled from independent, real-world sources — not estimated. The “Composite index” you see on country profiles is our own weighted blend of those real inputs, not itself a published statistic.
Energy, food, and tech dependency (how reliant a country is on imports for its own energy use, food supply, and technology goods) are now sourced from the World Bank for the majority of countries — energy for 143 of 181, food for 149, and tech for 167 — every country in the dataset has now had a research pass, plus a live World Bank API refresh pass (a handful of trade-hub economies, conflict-zone economies with no current trade reporting, true microstates the World Bank doesn’t track, and a number of countries with only very stale data were left on their placeholder rather than publish a number that would mislead — see Data sources for why). GDP is now real and IMF-sourced for 179 of 181 countries. Oil and gas production volumes are now real (EIA-sourced) for most countries, oil and gas import volumes are now real (EIA-sourced) for 175 of 181 countries, and the digital infrastructure score is now real (ITU-sourced) for 161 of 181 countries. See Data sources for the full citation list.
Status
NewsClock is phase 1 and under active development — more countries, more routes, and more real (rather than illustrative) economic data are on the way.
The site’s code and data-sourcing research are built with AI assistance. See the Disclaimer for details.
NewsClock is built and operated by TUBrothers LLC.