Planned. CNP is designed but not built. This page states the intent and the influences so you can see where Atlas is going. Nothing here is available on the API yet.
What it is
Atlas CNP measures capability — how much power a state can actually bring to bear — as distinct from how tense it is (GPR) or what condition it is in (Posture). Where Posture asks whether a state is functioning, CNP asks how much it can do. A country can be well-governed and stable while being strategically minor, or badly governed and unstable while being globally consequential. Those are different measurements, and conflating them produces a ranking that is useless for both purposes.Why you should care
Capability determines who matters. Most geopolitical monitoring implicitly weights by media attention, which tracks English-language news interest far better than it tracks strategic weight. A capability index is the honest weighting for “should I care about this actor.” The inputs are unusually well-suited to our stack. Comprehensive national power has historically been hard to compute because it spans domains that live in different datasets — energy, industry, compute, finance, trade, military. GDELT Cloud already carries most of those in one place: energy and heavy-industry assets, AI compute, corporate filings, macro series, and government awards. CNP is the composite those primitives were always pointed at.What it is useful for
- Weighting. A defensible answer to “how much should this country’s movement move my world view.”
- Strategic-competition analysis. Tracking capability trajectories rather than event counts.
- Supply-chain and industrial-base assessment. Physical capacity by sector, joined to the assets that constitute it.
- Counterparty and sovereign context. Capability as a slow-moving input beside condition and tension.
Design intent
CNP is expected to be a transparent composite over capability domains rather than a learned score, consistent with the rest of Atlas:
The same principles apply as elsewhere in Atlas: fixed published weights, absolute anchors rather than a zero-sum rank, decomposable sub-scores, and null rather than a fabricated zero where a domain cannot be measured.
Influences and references
Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) — Correlates of War
The canonical quantitative national-power measure: six components across demographic, industrial, and military dimensions, expressed as a share of the world total. The direct methodological ancestor — though its world-share construction is exactly the zero-sum design Atlas avoids elsewhere, a tension we will have to resolve explicitly.
Comprehensive National Power (综合国力) — Chinese strategic studies
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and CICIR traditions of computing an explicit multi-domain national power score, and a significant influence on how strategic competition is discussed. RAND’s Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age is a useful English-language treatment.
Lowy Institute Asia Power Index
A modern, well-documented multi-domain power index with published weights and a public methodology — the closest contemporary analogue to what Atlas CNP intends to be.