An Army alone doesn't make you a great power

Of course, being a technological-economic leader isn’t enough. Today, for instance, Germany and Japan would qualify as such countries, but they are not great powers, because they have not translated that capacity into military force, though Japan is looking like it might head down that path. Why some technological-economic leaders become great powers and others don’t is thus down to what can be called shaping factors. These are the key social, cultural, and political characteristics of these countries, elements that translate the capabilities of the states in question into military power.

During the 20th and 21st centuries, the general (but not absolute) rule of thumb has been that the freer and more flexible a state, and the more functional its rule of law, the better this process works. States with committed populations, with political systems that work against one-person rule, and that encourage scientific and general philosophical inquiry have a higher likelihood of translating their technological-economic strength more effectively into military power—the product. These nations will not simply have advanced weaponry, but are more likely to have better-trained soldiers and better-maintained equipment, and be guided by more sensible strategies, ones that are not skewed by the whims of an autocratic leader.

Using this model, we see that only one country has consistently met the “great power” threshold since 1900: the United States. Britain and Germany—the two largest technological-economic powers in Europe, and the anchors of their various alliances in both world wars—also fulfilled this definition from the beginning of the 20th century through the end of World War II. And from the end of that conflict onward, the Soviet Union more narrowly could be considered a “great power,” so long as we recognize that its economic and technological dominance was based largely on industrial production and science, rather than other forms of innovation or growth. The Soviet Union began losing this status sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, however: Soviet shaping characteristics, as Mikhail Gorbachev realized, were not capable of creating an open and flexible-enough system to compete in the era of computing.