September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:05 AM EST John Steele Gordon poses an enticing question about how we assess the relative strengths of nations: “Do we have 5 Great Powers, based on nuclear weapons, or 12, based on GDP?” I don’t know if he means this as a rhetorical question or whether it’s intended to invite a response, but I’ll take a crack at it all the same. This query follows a more challenging, broader question: What defines a Great Power? To this second question, Mr. Gordon essentially offers four potential answers. First is the reply of his former international politics professor, who said a Great Power is “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” Second is A. J. P. Taylor’s definition: “The test of a Great Power is the test of strength for war.” A third method is by asking whether a country has nuclear weapons. Fourth, and lastly, is by measuring a nation’s GDP. Taking each of these methods individually, I find them problematic. Mr. Gordon’s old professor’s definition probably works fairly well for defining the Great Powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in a world where nearly 200 countries interact with one another, is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one? Countries like Britain and France, which hold veto power on the United Nations Security Council, don’t necessarily meet this high bar. China might, but even if it does I think the list stops there. Maybe it should, or maybe this definition is flawed. I’m slightly more tempted by Taylor’s. This actually fits better with the example of Britain’s casual attitude toward Icelandic sovereignty in World War II. In that case, it seems that Britain was the greater power because it could act with impunity in military affairs, whereas Iceland could not even provide for a common defense. Yet in a world bound to an increasing degree by systems of international arbitration and law, range of military action doesn’t quite work as a definition of Great Power status, either. It’s much harder these days to disregard your neighbor’s sovereignty (ask Saddam Hussein, circa 1991). Even the United States, which remains, in military terms, the world’s most powerful country, lacks the unilateral ability to successfully invade a smaller nation and occupy it at will. In our time, when the international community has so many platforms from which to express outrage, and when every disgruntled ex-Baathist can find his way to a firearm, asymmetrical warfare just ain’t what it used to be. Counting Great Powers by their nuclear arsenals is a tempting third alternative, but it is also a limited one. Mr. Gordon says that five countries would qualify by this rubric, but that estimate is actually a little low. To the five nations that signed the original Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968, we have to add India and Pakistan, and probably North Korea and Israel. When you throw in those last two, this definition gets especially dicey. Kim Jong-Il can’t be totally ignored by other world leaders, but North Korea’s interests don’t carry nearly as much weight as those of nuke-free nations like Japan and Mexico. Nuclear arms empower a country to hold others hostage, or to trigger a global war, but they don’t necessarily increase the prestige or bargaining power of a nation’s government in general. The fourth option Mr. Gordon offers, GDP, is also an interesting measure to use, but the list of the top 12 nations, as judged by this statistic, leaves me with serious doubts. Some of the countries that come out on top, economically, are relatively insignificant by any other standard for national greatness. By any of the other suggested rubrics, countries like Canada, Italy, and Spain are decidedly less significant. I’m not sure that GDP alone can compensate for a comparatively weak military and diplomatic position. These are a lot of objections, so let me try my hand at a positive answer of my own. To some extent, I think you have to measure a nation’s power by a subjective mixture of these various standards. Is a nation economically robust? Is it heavily armed? Is it advanced enough to possess nuclear weapons? Is it empowered by international institutions to advance its interests? I think you have to answer all these questions to know if a country’s power is really extraordinary. On the other hand, though, we might just be dealing with an outdated set of vocabulary. The term “Great Power” comes from a time when the Western world was led by a set of competing nations with differing but matched capabilities. Today, no such set of countries exists. The United States and, to a lesser degree, China, far outpace their nearest competitors by most assessments of national power and potential. To pretend otherwise is to flatter countries like Britain, Germany, and Russia, but without good reason. Maybe it’s time to bury the term “Great Power” alongside the man who coined it.
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