Amy Zegart
When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appeared imminent in early 2022, U.S. intelligence officials were so confident that Russian tanks would roll quickly to victory that staff evacuated the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. Based on traditional measures of power, the intelligence assessment made sense. In 2021, Russia ranked fifth in the world in defense spending, whereas Ukraine was a distant 36th, behind Thailand and Belgium. Yet more than two years later, Russia and Ukraine are still fighting their brutal war to a standstill.
Ukraine’s resilience is a telling indicator that power is not what it used to be. The country’s surprise showing is in no small part a result of its highly educated population and a technology innovation ecosystem that has produced vast quantities of drones and other homemade weapons on the fly. Ukraine has even managed to wage naval warfare without a navy, using homemade drones and other devices to destroy nearly two dozen Russian ships and deny Russia control of the Black Sea.
For centuries, a nation’s power stemmed from tangible resources that its government could see, measure, and generally control, such as populations that could be conscripted, territory that could be conquered, navies that could be deployed, and goods that could be released or restricted, such as oil. Spain in the sixteenth century had armies, colonies, and precious metals. The United Kingdom in the nineteenth century had the world’s strongest navy and the economic benefits that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. The United States and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century had massive nuclear arsenals.
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