George Friedman
The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of what had been a bipolar world order raised the question of what exactly constitutes a superpower. The question has been bandied about even more over the past few years, given some people’s perception that U.S. global influence is weakening relative to the rest of the world’s. China, after all, is seeking to emerge as a major player, and Russia has clawed back from destitution to become more than merely a shadow of its former self.
Indeed, the term “superpower” has been used to describe Russia – occasionally in the context of its partnership with China. Whether or not either is a superpower in its own right, there is an assumption – and a particularly vexing one in the West – that together the two would be a decisive force in the world. But this is a flawed or at least premature assumption.
To understand why, consider the nature of a superpower. After World War II, the term was reserved only for countries that had a nuclear arsenal – that is, countries that possessed a decisive means of victory against even the strongest of enemies. Certainly the public saw them as such. But the military never had a clear definition of what a superpower was. This is largely because the military understood that the concept of mutually assured destruction was baked into any equation of confrontation, and why both largely worked to confine their grievances against each other into smaller threats.
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