Superpower Collapse - United States

United States

See also: American Century

Some political scientists believe that when one superpower collapses, another must take its place so as to maintain a balance of power. During the Cold War, the U.S. fought many proxy wars against USSR-supported communist regimes, but after the Soviet collapse found itself as the world's sole superpower, even sometimes termed hyperpower. Members of the American right, such as some neoconservatives self-styled as the Blue Team, increasingly viewed the People's Republic of China as a military threat, despite strong economic ties. Blue Team members favor containment and confrontation with the PRC, and strong US support of Taiwan. While in the past international power might have been achieved through military might, it has increasingly shifted to relations through trade. The Chinese Government views the United States as "a superpower in decline."

Read more about this topic:  Superpower Collapse

Famous quotes related to united states:

    “An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
    —Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
    —Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)

    “Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
    —Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)

    “Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
    —Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    “In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)