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.
With the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 and the end of the War of 1812, many Americans viewed the Federalists as traitors. The Federalist Party collapsed, leaving the Democratic-Republican Party as the only political party in the United States until the mid-1820s.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere.
