National power
sum of all resources available to a nation in the pursuit of national objectives
National power is defined as the sum of all resources available to a nation in the pursuit of national objectives. Assessing the national power of political entities was already a matter of relevance during the classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and today. Classics Shang Yang, Guan Zhong and Chanakya, widely discussed the power of state. Many other classics, such as Mozi, Appian, Pliny the Elder, also concerned the subject. Herodotes described whence derives the power of Babylon. The considerations of Hannibal on the matter is found in Titus Livy.
Elements of national power
National power stems from various elements, also called instruments or attributes; these may be put into two groups based on their applicability and origin - "natural" and "social".
Natural:
Geography
Resources
Population
Social:
Economic
Political
Military
Psychological (National morale)
Informational
Geography
Important facets of geography such as location, climate, topography, size and resources play major roles in the ability of a nation to gain national power. The relation between foreign policy and geographic space gave rise to the discipline of geopolitics including the concepts of lebensraum and "grossraum". The latter is a region with natural resources sufficient for autarky.
The public source identifies “National power” as sum of all resources available to a nation in the pursuit of national objectives. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around National, power and resources.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3275668. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “National power” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.