Why is USA so ridiculous powerful?

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

No matter if it is economy, technology and military, US seems to ridiculous dominant.

For economy, per person US economy is far more productive than any serious competitor to it: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US-CN-IN-EU

This mean US economy is very large even given its limited population compared to its competitiors: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?locations=US-CN-IN-EU

A strong economy likely lead to strong technology growth as the economy can pay higher wages and thus attract a highly skilled workforce as well be able to take more risks: https://share.america.gov/who-leads-world-science-technology/

Having a strong technology base and strong economy help alot with maintaining a strong military https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.asp

US is for example the only nation with a serious amount of stealth Aircrafts and these are of much higher quality than the ones used by russia and china. US navy is probably in its own League as far as navies goes and so on.

Also keep in mind that US have been the most powerful nation for maybe 150 years now so its not a recent thing.

 

[Rashiminos]

Also keep in mind that US have been the most powerful nation for maybe 150 years now so its not a recent thing.

The US only rose to world ascendancy shortly after WWII in which a host of nations bombed each other's economies apart. The lead was never going to last, and now the US is accelerating towards decline in several of those areas.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The US only rose to world ascendancy shortly after WWII in which a host of nations bombed each other's economies apart. The lead was never going to last, and now the US is accelerating towards decline in several of those areas.

US was already in terms of economy far ahead of any other nation long Before ww2, which was why it had so massive industrial output during ww2.

 

[Zardnaar]

Resources of a continental scale and lots of cheap oil.

 

[Commodore]

Resources of a continental scale and lots of cheap oil.

I'm not discounting that these things contributed greatly to our success, but we aren't the only nation that had access to those things, but we are the only ones that leveraged them into global hegemony. Russia also had access to a continent's worth of resources and cheap oil and while they certainly became powerful, they never really came close to global hegemony.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I suspect the resource help but its how you spend them that make the difference between being powerful like USA or not. Also keep in mind that US economy is nowdays mostly service focused.

Also while US avoided the destruction of the World wars, it was already richer than any europan country since like 1870 or something like that and richer than the whole British empire by like 1890 or so. This mean the World wars was not needed for US dominance but they may have moved the country to become more Active in international politics.

People in the 1800s knew that USA would be the most dominant country in the future, like we have with China today.

 

[EnglishEdward]

USA had a good written constitution with:

(a) clear divisions into the powers of the individual states and the federal government

(b) separation of executive, legislative and judicial functions.

It also had a common spoken language.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

This is I think the third thread you open with a very similiar topic, ex: "Why Europe's economy is so bad compared to the USA", "Why is Europes GDP so low compared to the USA", "Why is the USA so powerful compared to everyone else".

Not sure what you want to achieve, there is only one answer to your question and that answer is: Global relations are so incredibly complicated and are results of hundreds of years of historic, cultural, environmental, economic and societal developments that interplay in often chaotic and unpredictable ways. Asking questions like these will only give you superficial, reductionist answers like these:

Resources of a continental scale and lots of cheap oil.

or this

USA had a good written constitution with:
(a) clear divisions into the powers of the individual states and the federal government
(b) separation of executive, legislative and judicial functions.
It also had a common spoken language.

The reason "Guns, Germs and Steel" was such a successful book is because Diamond tried to explain a super complicated phenomenon with a single, coherent, simple explanation. That is also why it failed as a work of serious science and is nowadays only considered popscience, rightfully. What Zardnaar or Edward say is not categorically wrong, it's just one very small part of an infinitely complex whole. Commodore is right when he says that Oil and natural ressources is not enough to explain the history of US hegemony.

If you really want to understand global hegemony, you will definitely have to read lots of history books, not ask a very wide-reaching question on a forum. Maybe start with "A People's History of the United States" or something like that. Questions should be succint and specific, not so wide-reaching as to be unanswerable. One could write perhaps hundreds of volumes of books to answer the question, I do not see the thread going anywhere for that reason.

 

[Rashiminos]

I'm not discounting that these things contributed greatly to our success, but we aren't the only nation that had access to those things, but we are the only ones that leveraged them into global hegemony. Russia also had access to a continent's worth of resources and cheap oil and while they certainly became powerful, they never really came close to global hegemony.

Russia is really cold compared to the more temperature regions of Western Europe and the continental United States. Shorter growing seasons and piles of ice tend to drag the economy a bit (at least until you can reliably de-ice railroads and oil wells and so on)

 

[Colon]

Perhaps it's time for you to start reading Why Nations Fail (amongst other books). As Cutlass explained to you before, these things are a matter of great debate amongst economists. Continually posting threads that are variations on the same theme isn't really going to give you the answers you seek.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

It also had a common spoken language.

That is a good Point, having a common language vs EU 20+ languages is a huge advantage, although being a united country mean stuff is smoother with laws and moving goods around. I suspect China have the same advantage here and maybe India which make it interesting to see how far they can get in the future.

Russia is really cold compared to the more temperature regions of Western Europe and the continental United States. Shorter growing seasons and piles of ice tend to drag the economy a bit (at least until you can reliably de-ice railroads and oil wells and so on)

Yes, climate have to do with stuff like waterflows, western Europé is in a great geographical position compared to Russia in that case.​

 

[yung.carl.jung]

That is a good Point, having a common language vs EU 20+ languages is a huge advantage, although being a united country mean stuff is smoother with laws and moving goods around. I suspect China have the same advantage here and maybe India which make it interesting to see how far they can get in the future.

China is known for having several hundreds of languages that are still spoken today, and the most common one being standard Mandarin, is not spoken by everyone. Your claim that China has the same advantage as the US is not correct, as in the US there are only fringe cases of communities where people do not speak English, while in China there are entire regions or ethnicities that do not speak standard Mandarin.

 

[EgonSpengler]

All of the above.

Add to the pile: Overseas trade, and the enforcement enabled by the US Navy. Things like the Panama Canal deal, which I think has been worth billions (trillions?) of dollars over the life of the deal; United Fruit in South America; the seizure of the Philippines from Spain. Remember, the war with Japan didn't happen just because they hated us, it happened because of oil and rubber and control of maritime trade in the Western Pacific. Some of it had to do with the "Open Door Policy" imposed on China around the turn of the 20th Century. I'm also thinking about the "Monroe Doctrine" and Teddy making it official foreign policy ("The Roosevelt Corollary") when he was in the White House. irc, we were ready to go to war with Great Britain over Venezuela, but the British decided the Germans and Russians were a bigger concern and withdrew. I'm fuzzy on the details of all this stuff, so I don't want to say too much without looking it up. But the point is: Staggering amounts of wealth from overseas trade, much of it predatory, all before WWII.


EDIT: Pop culture trivia footnote: In the Russell Crowe film Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, Crowe's adversary is a French frigate. But iirc, in the book, it's actually an American ship, not French. At that time, the US Navy was the rising power giving the Brits something to chew on on the Western Atlantic. The film changed the nationality of the ship so it wouldn't offend our delicate sensibilities, I guess. You can't quite say that this is a whitewash of history, since the book the film is based on is itself fiction, but maybe it's illustrative.

 

[EnglishEdward]

China had a common written language, not a common spoken language.

India never had a common language, although English became quite common there.

The USA had a low population density. This meant that there was, once slavery which was not
particularly efficient, had been abolished,;very good business reasons to develop and deploy
machinery, whereas population dense countries could just throw more labour at the issue.
And mechanisation is much easier with crops such as wheat compared to paddy field rice.

And there is nothing wrong with using a thread here, to gather a brain storm list of factors.

 

[Commodore]

Staggering amounts of wealth from overseas trade, much of it predatory, all before WWII

I think we were just following in the footsteps of our parent empire. Kinda like the Sith in Star Wars. You could say the British Empire was Darth Plagueis and the US is Palpatine. The British taught us everything they knew about building an empire and then we killed them in their sleep.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I think we were just following in the footsteps of our parent empire. Kinda like the Sith in Star Wars. You could say the British Empire was Darth Plagueis and the US is Palpatine. The British taught us everything they knew about building an empire and then we killed them in their sleep.

Yep, pretty much. I forget exactly when, but the Royal Navy decided at some point that it would build enough Ships of the Line/Battleships to face down the rising powers of the United States, Prussia and Russia at sea simultaneously. They wanted to have as many battleships as those three regional powers combined, +1. By the time Roosevelt called them on Venezuela, I guess they'd realized it wasn't going to work. In Destined for War, Allison used Great Britain and the US as an example of when the hegemonic power and the rising power managed to avoid "Thucydides' trap."

 

[Truthy]

If you really want to understand global hegemony, you will definitely have to read lots of history books, not ask a very wide-reaching question on a forum. Maybe start with "A People's History of the United States" or something like that. Questions should be succint and specific, not so wide-reaching as to be unanswerable. One could write perhaps hundreds of volumes of books to answer the question, I do not see the thread going anywhere for that reason.

This may be true, but I'm pretty sure most historians would agree that a fairly small number of high-level factors explain a lot of why the US rose to hegemony. It's probably harder to really understand why the US has so many seemingly-intractable problems.

 

[amadeus]

I'm not discounting that these things contributed greatly to our success, but we aren't the only nation that had access to those things, but we are the only ones that leveraged them into global hegemony. Russia also had access to a continent's worth of resources and cheap oil and while they certainly became powerful, they never really came close to global hegemony.

Russia had a number of political problems that stemmed back to the 18th century. The early U.S. had something much closer to the representative government and market economics that we are familiar with; Russia was stuck under the arbitrary rule of its despots, Tsarist and communist.

Yep, pretty much. I forget exactly when, but the Royal Navy decided at some point that it would build enough Ships of the Line/Battleships to face down the rising powers of the United States, Prussia and Russia at sea simultaneously. They wanted to have as many battleships as those three regional powers combined, +1. By the time Roosevelt called them on Venezuela, I guess they'd realized it wasn't going to work. In Destined for War, Allison used Great Britain and the US as an example of when the hegemonic power and the rising power managed to avoid "Thucydides' trap."

The need for naval superiority was what led to Britain breaking it's decades-old policy of no formal alliances to sign its first alliance with the Empire of Japan in 1902. While the Japanese on the one hand were happy to be accepted as a Great Power, they were also annoyed by the fact that Britain's outreach to them was basically Britain outsourcing its defense of the Pacific to the Japanese, keeping the bulk of the Royal Navy in the Western hemisphere.

 

[Kyriakos]

All in all the US hegemony didn't last for that long; some countries were #1 for hundreds of years.

 

[Rashiminos]

Political, economic, and militaristic factors can bottleneck each other. Attempts to narrow down and linearize systems have more to do with making iterative adjustments than redesigning the system from scratch. If you change just a few factors, you can get a relative improvement without having to wonder what portion of your changes had any perceptible effect, and whether those effects occurred independently or in tandem.