You reason in industrial terms, though: nation-states "won" because they were bigger and more resorceful. In a situation where this is not necessaily advantageous, or even disadvantageous (because of centrifugal forces), those considerations are somewhat irrelevant. The URSS had the bigger army (and in some areas, the bigger industrial capacity) and lost the cold war. Turkey has the biggest army in NATO and still struggles to stay together.

In a world where everyone sorta-speaks English and the power is in know-how and transnational market access, it counts very little that you can mobilise this or that amount of tanks. It counts even less if those tanks are coordinated at a higher level anyway.