[pcl]

But the Westphalian system explicitly emphasizes the importance of the boundaries of the state vs the size of those boundaries. The HN usage tends to imply that “nation state” is something particularly impressive. But “an attack by a San Marino-level agency” doesn’t convey that same level of impressiveness.

[dragonwriter]

Yeah, in security, “nation-state level actor” is used to mean “the most capable category of attackers, most (all?) of whom are particularly powerful nation-states [0]”, not “attacker at the level of at least the least-capable nation-state”.

[0] In the “Westphalian sovereign” sense.