while most of their “peer” countries (most importantly pretty much all of Europe) have moved on from this sort of view of being “powerful” after WW2 by the latest.

There was a point in time when most of the economy was in the primary sector. Fishing, mining, farming, etc. There, economic potential is generally tied to the land. If you can get control of land, you increase your economic potential. And there’s a limited amount you can do to increase things otherwise. Farming has been around for (checks) maybe 13,000 years. The low-hanging fruit to improve things has been taken already – it’s not easy to improve things via just figuring out a way to farm better. So a lot of what matters, in such an environment, in terms of who gets money is who controls a given piece of land and can extract the wealth that it generates.

And so, for a long time, control of land was super-important. You had whole political systems structured around control of land, like feudalism.

Thing is that, subsequent to the Industrial Revolution, the secondary sector became dramatically more important. That’s not bound to the land in the same way – one can have a very large amount of wealth-producing economic potential even if one is, for example, sitting on a bunch of some rather small islands, like the UK was.

The primary sector still has a role, and there are still some places that can make some money from the primary sector and do fight over control of land, but in general, the incentives to fight over land are just a lot smaller.

You still need access to stuff produced by the primary sector – if someone can cut you off from something that the primary sector produces, they can crater your secondary sector, which gives them leverage over you and thus the ability to extract wealth from you – but then (a) transport got cheaper, which made it easier to get those inputs from other sources than nearby ones, and (b) the tertiary sector of the economy became more-important and further decoupled control of territory from wealth.

Economic potential is now more-linked to human labor (and especially skilled human labor). Thing is, human labor – unlike land – is mobile. If someone doesn’t like how things are shaping up in a country, they might just leave and take the economic potential of their labor with them. Avoiding that, if your country is a really unpleasant place to be, requires setting up something like the Berlin Wall or like what North Korea has going on on their borders – you jail your population, don’t let people leave. That’s kinda difficult and tends to have some pretty negative effects on the value of that human capital, since you may have to kinda cut it off from the outside world informationally so that you can tell it that things are way, way better locally and that that population definitely does not want to walk out the door, and not let them hear any information to the contrary. Access to information is kinda important for making people be productive, though, so if you want to cut people in the country you run off from the outside world to retain access to their labor, you’re likely gonna have to do things that…decrease the value of their labor.

So I don’t think that there was so much some dramatic shift in principles in Europe after WW2. It’s more just that the world and political institutions were kinda catching up with present economic realities. The land being fought over just doesn’t have the same kind of proportional value that it once did; the fighting was causing far greater losses than anything that one could win.

The Soviet Union invaded Finland in the Winter War. And they did take some of Finland’s land. But…virtually everyone in the occupied territories left. So, sure, you get access to some land. But what’s valuable isn’t Finnish territory, but the Finns themselves. If you can’t capture the Finns via an invasion, the land you slice off just doesn’t have a lot of value.

For France and Germany, one concern had historically been fighting over land with coal – not because they necessarily wanted the coal industry, but because they wanted to be able to have secondary-sector industries that depended upon coal. Creating the European Coal and Steel Community after WW2 meant that they didn’t have to fight over it.

I don’t think that governments have given up on being powerful (or, perhaps reducing this further, wealthy) at all. I think that they’ve generally rationally-recognized that in the present economic environment, lopping land off their neighbor generally just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense economically. If you have a given amount of capital, you’re gonna get a better return doing stuff like investing it in increasing your human capital, growing it, and retaining it than trying to slice some land off your neighbor, because that’s not where the money is anymore.

That’s just a function of labor – especially skilled labor – being the the bottleneck on production.

And I don’t think that those basic economic realities are gonna change unless (1) the world sees an enormous increase in demand for some primary-sector resource, such that control of land containing it becomes critical again, or (2) something – and maybe human-level AI could do this – greatly reduces our dependence on human labor such that we have some new bottleneck.