Tensions between the US and Russia boiled over this week regarding Russian election meddling in 2016, as well as potential Russian meddling in the 2018 midterms. The Trump Administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats it says were known spies. Russia retaliated by expelling 23 US diplomats it similarly claims were spies.
Given this context, I thought it would be useful to compare the relative strength and power of the US and Russia, and see whether Russia really is the global nemesis that America makes it out to be.
To start with, we’ll look at GDP. GDP is the size of the whole economy, its total wealth. The GDP of Russia is $1.3 trillion dollars. By contrast, the GDP of the United States is $18.6 trillion, or more than ten times larger than Russia.
Next we’ll look at per capita income. Per capita income is how much money the average citizen makes in a year. Russia’s per capita income is $8,700. By contrast, US per capita income is $57,000, or more than six times greater.
Clearly, though, in economic terms, America is a vastly wealthier country with a much higher standard of living for its citizens than Russia.
The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) gives us an alternative way at looking at the relative wealth and prosperity of each nation. The HDI combines per capita income with the health and educational level of its citizens. It’s considered a more realistic way of examining a nation’s development.
The US ranks 10th among the 188 nations in the HDI. Russia ranks 49th. Life expectancy in America is 79. In Russia it’s 70.
Another important measure of the health of a nation is its distribution of wealth. We all know the US has become a very unequal country in the past several decades. The top 1% of Americans now control 38% of the nation’s wealth.
But Russia is way worse. You may or may not have heard of the word “oligarchy,” but it means government run by the few. These few use government to enrich and benefit themselves at the expense of the majority of citizens.
Well, Russia is a major oligarchy, one of the most notorious in the world. The “oligarchs” are the men who run the oligarchy and control the nation’s wealth. And they are indeed nearly all men.
They’re made up of a small group of people who basically stole most of Russia’s wealth when Communism collapsed and the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991.
So in Russia, with oligarchs running the show, and Putin as their master, around 100 men control a full 1/5th of the Russian economy.
Another way to measure inequality is the GINI coefficient. This is a measure of the distribution of a nation’s wealth among its citizens. 0 means perfect equality and 1 means perfect inequality.
On this scale, the US gets a score of .35. Russia scores .38. So Russia is closer to 1 than the US, meaning it’s even more unequal than America.
Because of all these statistics, I’ve had some level of doubt for a while now about just how powerful Russia really is. I’ve also wondered whether they’re absolutely and 100% positively responsible for the 2016 election meddling.
I mean, could a nation so much weaker than America in every measure of economic power, as well as its citizen’s health and prosperity, really be such a threat to the US?
Then there is the military side. It’s true that Russia has a formidable nuclear arsenal, as does America. But that’s not really a true measure of military strength, for two reasons.
First, if you have to go to nuclear war, then you’ve lost already, and both countries will be devastated for generations to come.
And second, to get to complete and total devastation of each country, you only need, oh I don’t know, a few hundred nukes to do it. Russia and the US both have over 4,000 nukes. So the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal is pretty meaningless.
A better measure of military strength is how much a country spends on its military in a year. The US spends the most in the world on its military, around $600 billion. Russia spends $60 billion, or 1/10th of what America spends.
In fact, the US spends more on the military than the next 14 countries combined. China is actually number 2, but at only $145 billion, or less than ¼ of the US.
America also has the most military bases around the world, at more than 800. Russia has less than 50.
So once again I’m wondering, if Russia is such a weak military power in relation to the US, can it really be inflicting all the damage to America that we hear and read about everyday? Is it really that much of a threat that it can make mighty Facebook shudder?
Can it really get past all of Facebook’s security systems again in the 2018 midterm elections, which are designed by the best and brightest Silicon Valley has to offer?
I mean Facebook’s market capitalization, which means how much the company’s worth, is $464 billion. Facebook itself is worth nearly a third of Russia’s entire economy!
Yet somehow this is the nation that has the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the other US government agencies cringing in their boots? Something doesn’t seem right to me.
Then there’s the fact that Russia’s economy is almost entirely dependent on its oil and natural gas exports.
John McCain said in 2014 that Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country.” President Obama famously said in 2016 that Russia was a “smaller, weaker country,” and that its economy doesn’t “produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms.”
So now we have two leading and widely respected American politicians, President Obama and Senator John McCain, saying that Russia is weak. What they’re really saying is that Russia is just Saudi Arabia with more and better weapons.
Now I’m kind of like, WTF? How can Russia be taking over the world, much less the US, when it’s so small and weak and poor and backward?
Finally, there’s the question of cyberwarfare, and of Russian hackers planting fake news on Facebook and in major American media. We’re hearing they’re trying to undermine elections in the rest of the world too.
Well you know what? The US has been doing this for a hundred years. Just google “CIA interventions around the world” and you’ll see what I’m talking about. You may not know about it, but trust me, the rest of the world does.
What about the fact that the Russian government and its hackers are supposed to be so powerful?
Well in 2013, US General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency at the time, and Commander of US Cyber Command, told the House Armed Services Committee that “We believe our [cyber] offense is the best in the world.”
This stance has also been reiterated more recently in testimony before Congress by US intelligence officials.
In addition, since Trump’s been President, we’ve known how important the midterms will be for at least a year and a half. And our best cyber minds, who are the best in the world, still can’t come up with a way of preventing Russian meddling, for the second time? I find this hard to believe.
So if US officials are saying the US has the strongest cyber warfare capabilities in the world, and if the US is much stronger economically and militarily than Russia, then once again I have to ask, why are we so scared of Russian hacking?
In fact, why are we scared of Russia at all?
