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To What Extent Are the United States Still the Global Superpower

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To what extent are the United States still the global superpower?
The definition of the term ‘superpower’ has been up for debate for a long time, but the most popular belief is anything that reaches unmatched dominance to such an extent that we see no rivals. For example, it would be fair to say Apple inc are a superpower in the mp3 market or that Spain are currently the superpower in international football having won the last three major tournaments. However, things become even more complicated when trying to define a ‘superpower’ in the context of a country. The way I would like to define it is ‘the country which has the capacity to dominate power and influence global proceedings with almost global hegemony’.
For ease of understanding, it’s best to measure global dominance in four separate and distinct categories or ‘axis of power’. The first is military power which is relatively easy to quantify. This includes not only members of the military, paramilitary and reserved forces but also the willingness to use them. If a country has a large military but is not prepared to use them, it’d be hard to justify them as a leading military force. The second is economic, which once again, we can justify purely by looking at the stats of leading countries. The facts and figures which are of most interest to me are Gross Domestic Product (GDP), GDP per capita, national debt and trade deficit. The third is political power- which is now much more theoretical, however, there are some ways to quantify it such as looking at voting patterns in the UN and by looking at the number of alliances each country has. Also, we have to look at public opinions on potential superpowers as political pressure comes from those who have voted- they will want to see their country aligned to whoever they see as having the largest positive influence onto world affairs. The last type is the hardest to quantify, so called ‘soft’ global dominance can mean social dominance. This would include such things as quality of life, family size and immigration applications. However, it could also include such cultural and technological issues such as who dominates the world media, who makes the technological breakthroughs.

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