In our new era of great-power competition, it’s important to identity the competitors. But it has always been easier to speak about the great powers than to define them. Disagreement over great-power status, and especially over which power is the “greatest,” characterizes today’s system, as it did in times past. There is neither a commonly accepted definition of what constitutes a great power, nor any consensus over such basic questions as how many powers there are. Nevertheless, we can