There's No Such Thing as a Great Power
How a Dated Concept Distorts Geopolitics
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/theres-no-such-thing-great-power
By Phillips P. O’Brien June 29, 2023
PHILLIPS P. O’BRIEN is Head of the School of International Relations and Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews of the number one in Scotland, number two in the UK
Ukrainian troops near the frontline in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, May 2023
In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, most Western analysts saw Moscow as a great power and Kyiv as a lesser one. Diminished though it was from its Soviet heyday, Russia still retained a large conventional military and a vast nuclear arsenal, earning it a spot in the top echelon of global powers. In January 2022, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley warned that Moscow was capable of dealing a “horrific” blow to Ukraine. Michael Kofman, head of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analysis, argued that Russia had “the power to challenge or violently upend the security architecture of Europe” and “the conventional military power to deter the United States.”
This view of Russian power was widely held in the United States and Western Europe, and it prompted many analysts to argue that the United States and NATO should either stay out of a conflict between Russia and Ukraine or strictly limit military aid to Kyiv. For instance, the realist scholars John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, and Stephen Walt all labeled Russia a great power and argued that Moscow’s need to dominate Ukraine should be indulged. Posen went even further, suggesting that Russia had the military might to impose its desired outcome. As he put it just days before the Russian invasion began, “Ukrainian units would no doubt fight bravely, but given the geography of the country, the open topography of much of its landscape, and the overall numerical superiority that Russia enjoys, it is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to defend itself successfully.”
But once Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his war machine, that narrative of Russian power swiftly unraveled. The Ukrainian army, supposedly outgunned and with little chance of resisting conventionally, fought back with brains and ferocity. And Ukrainian civilians, whom many experts thought to be divided over the question of the country’s relationship to Russia, rallied to defend their homeland. Meanwhile, Putin’s military floundered. Its weapons and doctrine proved to be lackluster at best, and its soldiers performed far worse than expected, thanks in part to corruption and poor training. Hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million, Russian men of military age fled the country to avoid conscription. And just last week, the Wagner paramilitary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin briefly seized control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and threatened to plunge the country into civil war, sending his mercenary fighters to within 120 miles of Moscow.
This stunning revelation of Russian weakness calls into question not just Moscow’s status as a great power but also the very concept of a great power. Even realists who frequently use the term have never provided a clear and convincing definition of what makes a power great. Rather, they tend to use the term to describe everything from true superpowers such as the United States and China, which wield the full spectrum of economic, technological, and military might, to better-than-average military powers such as Russia, which have nuclear weapons but little else that would be considered indicators of great power. Such imprecision not only distorts analysis of state power and its use in war but can also make countries seem more militarily threatening than they really are. For these reasons, analysts should stop asking what makes a country a great power and start asking what makes it a “full spectrum” power. Doing so would have helped avoid overestimating Russia’s might before February 2022—and will help avoid exaggerating the threat posed by China, going forward.
POTEMKIN POWER
The “great power” moniker has never been especially useful. On the eve of World War I, Europe was thought to be dominated by its great powers: Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But the war showed that there were really only two dominant European powers: Germany and the United Kingdom. The power differentials between these countries, on the one hand, and Austria-Hungary and Italy, on the other, were so great that the latter two quickly became dependent on other countries, both desperately needing loans and eventually troops from their more powerful allies to keep fighting.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, it created a whole new class of power, one that was basically impervious to outside threats. Washington remained the world’s lone superpower through World War II, when it was able to fight in every domain (air, land, and sea) in every theater—and provide massive aid to its allies. No other power came close to matching these capabilities.
By no metric can Russia be considered an economic or technological great power.
Russia today is not a great power from this perspective and has not been part of one since years before the Soviet Union collapsed. Assertions to the contrary were grounded in a false view of Moscow’s military strength, one based on the most obvious trappings of power: weapons and supposed capabilities, troop numbers, performance in military maneuvers, and stated doctrine. By these measures, Russia looked like a heavily armed nuclear and conventional power that was able and willing to impose its will not just on its neighborhood but on countries around the globe. But beneath this menacing picture of the Kremlin was a much shabbier portrait of the underlying social, political, economic, and technological elements of power, all of which suggested that Russia was anything but great.
Take the question of troop morale. Analysts assumed that Russian forces were both well trained and well led, capable of competently executing military operations. Although Russian forces had not performed particularly well in Chechnya in the 1990s and the first decade of this millennium or in Georgia in 2008, analysts nonetheless minimized such concerns and focused instead on Russia’s more impressive weaponry.
If the military analysis of Russia was skewed, the overall picture of the country was even more flawed. By no metric could Russia have been considered an economic or technological great power. In 2021, Russia’s GDP was smaller than Canada’s, Russia was not a player in high technology, and it was growing more corrupt and dictatorial. Its economy was powered by resource extraction rather than manufacturing. And it was a demographic mess, with collapsing birth rates and an average male life expectancy of just 66 years. U.S. Senator John McCain’s quip in 2014 that Russia was “a gas station masquerading as a country” might have been a little too demeaning—but only a little.
THE FULL-SPECTRUM CLUB
More useful than the concept of a great power is that of a full-spectrum power, which takes into account the diverse factors that create military might, not just its outward manifestation in weapons. Few countries have ever achieved all the fundamentals on which superior military power is built and sustained; most that have been described as great powers were in fact midranking Potemkin states whose militaries served as façades for otherwise weak power bases. This was true of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and it is true of Putin’s Russia.
In the last 150 years, there have been only a handful full-spectrum powers. One is obviously the United States, which became the largest economy in the world sometime in the 1890s and had few security concerns compared with most countries. The United Kingdom was certainly a full-spectrum power from the late nineteenth century until 1943, when it had to subordinate its preferred grand strategy to accommodate U.S. interests. Before then, the United Kingdom was capable of creating and deploying advanced and well-prepared forces almost anywhere in the world and maintaining a war economy that hardly any other state could match. Other countries that probably fit the full-spectrum bill were Germany from around 1900 to 1942, the Soviet Union from 1949 to the 1970s, and China from approximately 2010 to today. All three could compete in every strategic domain and produce high-quality military equipment. They did not always have true global reach, but they exercised great influence in a large part of the world.
What made them full-spectrum powers, however, was not only their military might but also the economic and technological prowess that enabled their armed forces. Military power is to a large degree based on the ability to make the best, most advanced military equipment, from small arms to highly complex aircraft and naval vessels. This ability cannot be faked, and it must have the capacity to scale up quickly when the need arises. A military is only powerful if it can be equipped—and then re-equipped. That is why the Soviet Union was in some ways the weakest member of this club and why it ceased to be a full-spectrum power sometime in the late 1970s.
Few countries have achieved all the fundamentals on which superior military power is built.
Not all economic powerhouses become full-spectrum powers. Take, for example, Germany and Japan, neither of which has developed into a major military power. That is because political and social factors matter as well as economic and technological ones. Politics and society shape the creation and use of power far more than many realist scholars acknowledge. Countries compete for global influence in different ways, and these differences often boil down to who leads, what type of system they lead, and whether their societies help or hinder the exercise of power.
Different leaders can perceive power balances differently. Often, they take actions that fit their particular worldview rather than those that reflect the actual balance of power or some abstract, objective national interest. Going to war, for instance, is almost always a choice that does not have to be made. Sometimes, leaders are more aggressive than they need to be, given the threats that they face. Often, their personal prejudices shape their perceptions of the national interest, leading them to make decisions that are not in the interest of the people they govern.
Politics and political systems also play a role in determining whether countries develop into full-spectrum powers. All leaders, from dictators to consensual democrats, operate within systems in which they want to maintain power. That imperative can either push them to act or restrain them. After France fell to the Nazis in May 1940, for example, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt believed that the United States would have to get into the war to destroy Germany’s power. But he was not convinced that the American public shared this belief—and he was right. So for a year and a half, he did everything possible to get the United States into the war but always stopped short of declaring war. In the end, it was Japan’s unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor that got Roosevelt out of his dilemma and the United States into the war.
Different leaders can perceive power balances differently.
The role that societies play in determining when and how military power is deployed is complex. Some societies are more supportive of military expansion than others. Some societies more efficiently and creatively transmit ideas and develop or adopt technological advances—both of which are key to generating military power—while others have different priorities. And some societies seem to favor military action that is far beyond what their governments are capable of undertaking.
Societal commitment is not easy to measure, but clearly it is making a big difference in the war in Ukraine. Although Russian leaders like to talk about national sacrifice, they have not asked elites in Moscow or St. Petersburg to take part in the war. By contrast, Ukraine has mobilized a far broader cross section of society. Such societal differences do not figure in the calculations of realists, whose writings before the outbreak of war seemed to deny the Ukrainians any agency in determining the future of their country. Thankfully, the Ukrainians thought otherwise.
But if societal commitment is an elusive quality, it is more often found in flexible and pluralistic political systems, which have had the most success in sustaining—if not achieving—full-spectrum power. Such systems create military power that is more adaptable and less prone to the whims of a dictator. Partly because they require societal support to sustain wars, they also create militaries designed to limit their own casualties, relying more on machines than on personnel. It is for these reasons that the United Kingdom and the United States have had the longest tenures as full-spectrum powers.
By contrast, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union failed to adapt to changing circumstances and so saw their powers wane. Germany was doomed by its dictatorial system, which allowed Adolf Hitler to launch a global war that was beyond the country’s means. The result was defeat so total that even after Germany regained its economic strength, neither its political leaders nor its people wished to restore its military power. For its part, the Soviet Union was brought low by economic weakness that was partly the result of an inflexible political system that had lost the support of much of the public.
FOOL ME ONCE
Misunderstandings of state power have had dire consequences in the last few years and could have even more catastrophic ones in the future. The tendency of Western policymakers to drastically overestimate Russian power no doubt influenced their decisions to severely limit military support for Ukraine before February 2022. Many argued that the West should not arm Ukraine, since Western arms would make little difference in a war—and even make things worse by giving Ukraine a false idea of what it could accomplish.
This mindset has helped limit aid to Ukraine throughout the course of the war, leading to higher casualty counts on both sides and a lengthened conflict. On February 24, 2022, Ukraine was armed almost entirely with legacy Soviet and Russian heavy weapons and aircraft. The only Western arms it had were lighter hand-held systems. It was thus severely outclassed by Russia’s more modern systems. If Ukraine had possessed anything close to the arsenal it has today—with its range of modern, NATO-standard weapons—the Russian military would already have been thoroughly beaten.
Western analysts and policymakers must not make the same mistakes in assessing Chinese power. China is certainly a full-spectrum power, with the ability to create and re-create powerful modern weapons and forces that far exceed Russian capabilities. That said, China would not fare well against a coalition of the United States, Japan, and Taiwan, perhaps supported by South Korea and Australia (with tacit or even overt backing from India and the EU). Such a coalition would boast productive capacities that are now almost twice as large as China’s, and its militaries have real experience conducting complex operations in war. It would also include societies that will want to fight for their freedom—something that would make a Chinese military defeat even more likely.
But if Chinese power should not be overstated, nor should Western prospects in any future war in the Indo-Pacific. Such a conflict would be a catastrophe for all sides. China would almost certainly suffer massive losses in military equipment if it tried to assault Taiwan. An amphibious assault is the most difficult and complex operation that a military can undertake, and China has never even attempted one before, so such an effort could easily turn into a fiasco. Even so, a U.S.-led coalition would suffer grievously in any such war.
A proper understanding of power would achieve two vital ends: it would make China seem less threatening to the West and puncture the illusion that power can be used decisively in war. The United States has no need to behave aggressively toward China. It leads a coalition that is in a superior position, one that China would take an enormous (and almost certainly self-destructive) risk by challenging. Far better to try to solidify the status quo with a nonconfrontational approach. For that reason, the concept of a full-spectrum power is not just helpful for understanding how states behave in the international realm; it can guard against the kind of analytical mistakes that led to the current catastrophe in Ukraine.
