The long awaited five year update to the index of Comprehensive Military Power (CMP), my attempt to quantify military power in a way that's comparable across time and space, is here. unz.com/akarlin/cmp-20… 
You can read the original 8,300 word post, complete with detailed methodology, here. unz.com/akarlin/top-10…
Basic observation then was that China & Russia each at ~1/3 of US military power, while second-tier Great Powers were, in turn, at about a third of China & Russia.
Basic observation then was that China & Russia each at ~1/3 of US military power, while second-tier Great Powers were, in turn, at about a third of China & Russia.
Since then, China has continued forging ahead, and now accounts for 57% of US CMP. Hypothetical Sino-Russian bloc is close to parity.
China is in a much better position to effect military catchup than was the USSR during the Cold War, so America's main change of retaining hegemonic status - short of rolling the dice now - is to leverage alliances. NATO + Five Eyes + E. Asian allies + India = ~55%+ of world CMP.
Consequently, one may argue that the Great Bifurcation is important not just as a way of ensuring the US retains hegemony over half the world, but a way of ensuring that the Sinosphere+ as potential military bloc doesn't extent much beyond Russia and Iran.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1286761471263768580
Fascinating to observe fault lines harden & alliances coalesce just when critical milestones in relative military power are passed. Almost as if geopolitics is like a chemical soup, subject to natural law, all else (e.g. "Uyghur genocide") being sound & fury, signifying nothing.
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