America’s global military power is so commonplace that it’s easy to overlook how historically unique it is. What’s so unusual and world-changing is not the extent of America’s military, political and economic capacities — but the absence of countries that come anywhere close.
America’s historically anomalous position as a sole superpower with no near peer ended the balance-of-power geopolitics that organized much of world affairs for more than a thousand years — and will fundamentally shape a new geopolitics for at least the next generation.
The United States also derives geopolitical power from its singular capacity to develop new technologies and other valuable intellectual property in large volumes, especially in the software and Internet areas that drive so much economic change and the processes of globalization itself.
