The Long-Run Dynamic of the Nexus between Military Strength and National Power: An Econometric Analysis

A number of literatures suggest that military strength has been losing centrality and importance to nonmilitary factors of national power. In this paper, logistic regressions and data from the Correlates of War COW project are used to investigate whether over the 1820–2000 time horizon, for the great powers and their proximate contenders, the importance of military capabilities to national power has declined vis-à-vis that of economic capabilities. Estimation was carried out using generalized estimating equations GEEs . The overall picture that emerges from the analysis is that of a transition in progress from a systemic state in which military capabilities were the dominant determinants of national power to a state in which economic capabilities will become the dominant ones. The analysis is concerned with long-run trends, and its results are not necessarily applicable to specific countries and circumstances.