America's status as a superpower

[Hatman 🍁]

Certainly it is not the "hyperpower" it was in the 1990s.  From a Canadian perspective, we're still a mouse in bed with an elephant, but I see there are other, perhaps smaller elephants in nearby beds. And that mouse is becoming a big rat.

[anvi]

We all seem to assume that superpowers have to be colonialist.  Well, China's control of its own interior, neighboring territories and the seas around it has only increased in recent decades.  But China doesn't need military bases in lots of countries across the globe to extend its influence; it does so just fine now through money and soft power (why use the military when you've got lots of cash, including, by the way, lots of other superpowers' cash?).  In China's history, even though particular dynasties have eventually fallen to mostly internal strife (the Mongols and Manchurians were the exceptions, and upon assuming power, they both adopted traditionally "Chinese" models of power anyway) after three or four centuries of supremacy at a time, they were only seriously militarily challenged in the 19th century, and it effectively took them just one century to recover.  Just what was it that happened in Korea again, and how many people here exactly would advocate taking on a country with a standing army of over two million?  In terms of China's "bubble," yeah, it's only lasted thirty years, and while there is certainly a great deal of economic disparity in it. their country can boast of lifting between 300 and 400 million people out of poverty in the same time period, and those people and their children have, as far as I can tell, become pretty nationalist.  Whether China is to be "feared" as some sort of immediate existential threat by the U.S. is doubtful, but that they are a power that will need to be reckoned with by the whole world for a very, very long time to come is not in doubt.  There are more paths to global political power than the one the U.S. walks on, and China has had a great deal more historical experience at power-wielding than we have.  Comforting ourselves with our supposed supremacy while riding a sinking ship won't change that.