Has Economic Power Replaced Military Might?

At the Cold War’s end, some pundits proclaimed that “geo-economics” had replaced geopolitics. Economic power would become the key to success in world politics, a change that many people thought would usher in a world dominated by Japan and Germany. Today, some interpret the rise in China’s share of world output as signifying a fundamental shift in the balance of global power, but without considering military power. They argue that a dominant economic power soon becomes a dominant military power, forgetting that the United States was the world’s largest economy for 70 years before it became a military superpower.