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In response to
"How is the US the #1 country in the world? Do we rank countries solely on the amount of money they make now?"
by
Guigue
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Countries are ranked by power - by what they can do. For example, America can launch two wars on the opposite side of the world simultaneously. They
Posted by
Roger More (aka RogerMore)
Aug 30 '12, 20:32
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can even build a coalition of other countries to help them.
I'm not talking about the justification for these wars - just that obviously, America is the only country in the world able to do that.
I'm not just talking about military power, but soft diplomatic and cultural power. Nothing multilateral gets done without the US, everyone watches Hollywood movies and TV shows, etc.
At the moment, no other country comes close in terms of power and influence.
And if you look at the last 100 years, we have seen the rise of America, and the decline of the other potential #1 countries - Germany and Japan were defeated, France and Britain were humiliated and Russia collapsed.
It means Americans look at themselves and think "What makes us special? It must be all of the things that are exceptionally American".
The next twenty years or so are going to be interesting - with the decline of America over the last decade, the stagnation of Europe and Japan and the rise of China (and other countries, like India, Brazil too - but China is the one that is changing everything because it has a competing model for how a country should operate).
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