{"id":254712,"date":"2016-07-08T13:50:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T13:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/where-did-the-american-century-go\/"},"modified":"2016-07-08T19:20:49","modified_gmt":"2016-07-08T19:20:49","slug":"where-did-the-american-century-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/where-did-the-american-century-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Did the American Century Go?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Vladimir Putin recently manned up and admitted it. The United States remains
\n the planet\u2019s sole superpower, as it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed
\n in 1991. \u201cAmerica,\u201d the Russian president said<\/a>,
\n \u201cis a great power. Today, probably, the only superpower. We accept that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Think of us, in fact, as the default superpower in an ever more recalcitrant
\n world.<\/p>\n

Seventy-five years ago, at the edge of a global conflagration among rival great
\n powers and empires, Henry Luce first suggested that the next century could be
\n ours. In February 1941, in his magazine LIFE<\/em>, he wrote a famous
\n essay<\/a> entitled \u201cThe American Century.\u201d In it, he proclaimed
\n that if only Americans would think internationally, surge into the world, and
\n accept that they were already at war, the next hundred years would be theirs.
\n Just over nine months later, the Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor,
\n plunging the country into World War II. At the time, however, Americans
\n were still riven and confused about how to deal with spreading regional conflicts
\n in Europe and Asia, as well as the rise of fascism and the Nazis.<\/p>\n

That moment was indeed a horrific one, and yet it was also just a heightened
\n version of what had gone before. For the previous half-millennium, there
\n had seldom been a moment when at least two (and often three or more) European
\n powers had not been in contention, often armed and violent, for domination and
\n for control of significant parts of the planet. In those many centuries,
\n great powers rose and fell and new ones, including Germany and Japan, came on
\n the scene girded for imperial battle. In the process, a modern global arms race
\n was launched to create ever more advanced and devastating weaponry based on
\n the latest breakthroughs in the science of war. By August 1945, this had
\n led to the release of an awesome form of primal energy in the first (and thus
\n far only) use
\n of<\/a> nuclear weapons in wartime. <\/p>\n

In the years that followed, the United States and the Soviet Union grew ever
\n more \u201csuper\u201d and took possession of destructive capabilities once
\n left, at least in the human imagination, to the gods: the power to annihilate
\n not just one enemy on one battlefield or one armada on one sea but everything.
\n In the nearly half-century of the Cold War, the rivalry between them became
\n apocalyptic in nature as their nuclear
\n arsenals<\/a> grew to monstrous proportions. As a result, with the exception
\n of the Cuban
\n Missile Crisis<\/a>, they faced off against each other indirectly in \u201climited\u201d
\n proxy wars that, especially in Korea and Indochina, were of unparalleled technological
\n ferocity.<\/p>\n

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union imploded and, for the first time in historical
\n memory, there was only one power that mattered. This was a reality even
\n Henry Luce might have found farfetched. Previously, the…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vladimir Putin recently manned up and admitted it. The United States remains the planet\u2019s sole superpower, as it has been since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. \u201cAmerica,\u201d the Russian president said, \u201cis a great power. Today, probably, the only superpower. We accept that.\u201d Think of us, in fact, as the default […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-254712","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}