I’ve had my head in some IR/conflict datasets recently and came across something interesting (that I’m sure has been reported elsewhere but is news to me).

According to COW, China is the most powerful country in the world.

Let me explain that statement. The Correlates of War database – affectionately known as COW data – is one of the foremost sources of data on interstate and intrastate conflict, as well as a bunch of other stuff like alliances and geography. One of its datasets (available for free download) is the National Material Capabilities dataset.

The NMC dataset goes back almost 200 years, all the way to 1815, and essentially ranks countries in terms of hard power, or material capabilities. It essentially aggregates (a) a state’s population, (b) its urban population, (c) iron and steel production, (d) energy consumption, (e) total number of military personnel, and (f) total expenditure on defense, and comes up with a composite CINC score.

These measures essentially capture the big-picture capabilities of a state if it is to fight a war. As the researchers in charge of the dataset put it, “The project selected demographic, industrial, and military indicators as the most effective measures of a nation’s material capabilities. These three indicators reflect the breadth and depth of the resources that a nation could bring to bear in instances of militarized disputes.” One way to think about various CINC scores is that they are indicators of the likelihood of success in a land war against another state. Just indicators, mind, not predictors.

Yes, these measures are a bit crude, and yes, all the cool kids today are using the PRIO conflict data, and yes, it’s a bit strange that a dataset measuring power doesn’t include a measure for nuclear weapons capacity. But the NMC data do provide a pretty good sense of various countries’ trajectories over time.

Anyway, to get to the point, according the NMC dataset, China now has the highest CINC score in the world. Not just that: China has evidently been more powerful than the U.S. for 15 years. I had no idea this was true. I made a simple graph of the two states’ CINC scores since 1900 and this is what it looks like:

Source data: Correlates of War project

At the end of the day, this doesn’t really mean anything. For one thing, it completely ignores – as I mentioned earlier – the disjunct between the two states’ nuclear forces. According to a widely cited article in International Security by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, the U.S. actually possesses first-strike capability against the Chinese arsenal.

For another, this snapshot picture completely ignores the actual security environment the two states occupy: the U.S. is surrounded by friends (Canada), middling or weak powers (Mexico, Cuba), and two giant oceans. China, on the other hand, has three fairly powerful states right on its borders — Japan, Russia, India — all of which have checkered relations with it in the past, and at least two of which will grow as a power in the next two decades. China may well be “stronger” than the U.S. but it needs to be, given the neighborhood it lives in.

Still interesting to observe though, at least for me.