i’d say based solely on military spending, the u.s.a. is the world’s sole superpower — america still spends more on defense than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil — combined. china is making very smart cultural and business inroads in Africa but the us still operates something like 800 military bases around the world.
And seemingly still can’t protect its elections from Russian influence, sort out the Middle East, send a gunboat to the South Seas, prevent the EU from continuing to trade with Iran, put pressure on re Hong Kong … and I’m not even gonna start on Afghanistan.
Superspender, sure … but superpower?
And China … well, in a global village in which many are armed to the teeth with nukes, it’s not quite as simple as people might like to think but, at the same time, if China were to turn around and say “Fine, build your own consumer tat”, the US (if not all the West, in fact) would fall flat on its face: our entire way of life is founded upon our economies being fuelled by cheap imports and cheap outsourced labour — there’s no point bringing that industry or those jobs back: none of us could afford to buy the goods or services we’d supply … and our economies would collapse from the shock, if we tried paying ourselves a decent wage.
There’s a lot more to being a superpower than military spending, believe me … especially as your troops aren’t actually as welcome in other places as you might think: in Germany in the 1980s, US troops weren’t seen as staunch defenders of Europe against the Soviets but as an occupying force that hadn’t left since the Second World War; US ‘soft’ power wasn’t actually as powerful, as you may have been led to believe — you weren’t liked, there was just no way to kick you out by force.
And, today, people pop over the border from Berlin to the markets in Poland without worrying that the Russians are nearby (you could remove every last US soldier stationed in Germany and all that would happen would be people would heave a sigh of relief and say “Finally.”)
France? They don’t care about Russia — it’s over there somewhere … behind Germany somewhere … or is it Finland? … wherever … it’s far away in any case and nobody cares (people don’t live in fear of getting nuked by them any more and aren’t sure if they even have any tanks or whether they sold them all in the 1990s).
Spain? Portugal? They’ve never really concerned themselves what goes on in Northern Europe — what goes on beyond the Pyranees might as well be happening on another planet for all the difference it makes to everyday life — it took a huge amount of propaganda to persuade the Spanish people to vote in favour of joining NATO in the 1980s (there was a lot of resistance to getting involved in America’s fight with the USSR).
Italy? Greece? The Netherlands? Switzerland? Austria? Denmark? Sweden? Norway?
Here in Europe, apart from Hollywood films, Coke and (maybe) Levis (I don’t even know if Nike are a US firm or just yet another multinational), we don’t buy US made produce and goods, we lease US franchises (like McDonalds) and sell on European products and servces. Our tech might be labelled ‘Apple’ or whatever, but it was made in China.
US soft power might’ve been something in the 1950s and maybe … maybe … in the 1960s … but its been a long time since the political World Series involved anything like the amount of the world you seem to think (since the 1970s, its basically been military and financial, not political — raw clout, not personal influence, as it were).
Whether China will define the century or not depends upon a number of factors, I think, not least climate change and it’s possible that latter will mean that the North (Northern Europe, the UK, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia) becomes the seat of power as it finds itself the only place with sufficient water to support its population — China can have as much manufacturing and labour as it likes, but, if there’s a population exodus because people literally can’t live there, its influence might be shorter lived than we currently imagine.
