America, the Once Global Nation

America, the Once Global Nation

At 250, the country is struggling to come to terms with the world it created.

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Ever since its inception, the United States has been remaking the world in its image. Driven by relatively high economic growth rates, increasing predominance in its own hemisphere, and a peculiar knack for making useful innovations, the country has become not only powerful, but an object of emulation for many others. The expanding global influence of the United States was created not just by its own power in military and diplomatic terms, but by its economic, social, and cultural influence.

By the 20th century, the U.S. position in the world was unique. Not only was it powerful enough to act on its own inclinations, it was attractive and popular on a global scale in ways that many Americans have never fully understood.

Ever since its inception, the United States has been remaking the world in its image. Driven by relatively high economic growth rates, increasing predominance in its own hemisphere, and a peculiar knack for making useful innovations, the country has become not only powerful, but an object of emulation for many others. The expanding global influence of the United States was created not just by its own power in military and diplomatic terms, but by its economic, social, and cultural influence.

By the 20th century, the U.S. position in the world was unique. Not only was it powerful enough to act on its own inclinations, it was attractive and popular on a global scale in ways that many Americans have never fully understood.

The United States is, in many ways, the first empire that is also a global nation. Founded by European settlers, it has had close to 85 million immigrants arrive since 1870. Of its current population, roughly 51 million are immigrants, and close to half the U.S. population has at least one foreign-born grandparent.

Immigration has been America’s greatest strength and attraction. But it has also been politically troublesome at home. Americans have constantly worried about what new waves of immigrants were doing to the country—even if those doing the worrying only arrived on a slightly earlier boat.

For the world at large, America’s openness has been its most significant appeal. Anyone could become an American, whether through consumption, culture, or migration. Someone growing up in India could aspire to one day, through hard work, become a U.S. citizen. Someone at school in Lebanon could form a band playing music by Americans and imagine themselves in Los Angeles or Nashville.

The U.S. remaking of the world has been as much about these values as it has been about economic or military power. Moreover, no other country has had even close to this kind of appeal, at least not in modern times.

Of course, the United States has also intervened abroad in far more direct ways. U.S. presidents generally did so in what they viewed as the cause of freedom, however contested that concept may be both at home and elsewhere. The major U.S. interventions were against trade restrictions, authoritarianism, and expansionism—against Germany (twice), against Japan, and against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. World War I was a dividing line. It was the first time the United States sent its own soldiers to fight other major powers overseas. Even though the number of casualties were light compared to other powers—just over 300,000, compared to nearly 3 million Brits and over 7 million Russians—the psychological impact at home was severe, splitting the country between interventionists and anti-interventionists for almost a generation.

The combination of World War II and the Cold War that followed proved significantly more deadly. These conflicts saw about a million American dead and wounded in the world war and more than 300,000 in the Cold War, mainly in Korea and Vietnam.

The Cold War and its aftermath made the United States into the world’s hegemon. It was a global empire in all but name, with alliances, interests, and preoccupations spread across the world. The successful rebuilding of Europe and Japan, and their integration into a U.S.-led economic and political world order, formed the center of this enterprise, contributing to a rapidly globalizing, or Americanizing, international system.

Since at least the start of the 20th century, United States has wrestled with the question of how to employ its global power and attraction. Some of the answers were, if not given, then at least over-determined by America’s own historical experience. Spreading capitalism and consumerism reflected the 19th century U.S. experience—while also advancing U.S. economic interests abroad.

Promoting trade also fit with America’s experience and interests. U.S. leaders consistently pushed for access to foreign markets, opening the doors (sometimes by force) to countries and regions that had not previously been fully available to foreign commerce. Ironically, America only proved willing to open its own markets much later, starting in the 1930s. Despite Washington’s recommendations to others, the United States itself arguably did not truly practice free trade until the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

Some other elements of the U.S. approach to the world were more contingent, though here too there was a strong connection to the country’s own historical experience. U.S. foreign policy showed a consistent tendency to fear and oppose social revolution. At the end of the 1700s, many U.S. leaders saw the French Revolution, with its emphasis on equality and social justice, as the evil twin of their own revolution. A century or more later, their successors viewed socialism in Europe or the developing world as the antithesis of Americanism. For Americans, an emphasis on individual liberty trumped social improvements. They often viewed systematic attempts at abating poverty and inequality as threats to the existence of freedom everywhere. Certainly, 20th century revolutionaries provided more than enough crimes and atrocities to turn people against them, not just in the United States. But the U.S. resistance to revolution was more instinctive, not just based on the terrible experience of some radical experiments.

Another preoccupation of U.S. foreign policy, rooted in the country’s own history, has been race. America’s founding contradiction, between freedom and slavery, has proven remarkably persistent, even after Americans began to seriously confront their own past in the latter part of the 20th century. The legacy of racism, alongside the resistance against social revolution, made the United States reluctant to support the anti-colonial struggles that in many ways defined the past 100 years. This shortfall helped tarnish the United States in the eyes of many post-colonial leaders, with consequences that are still in place today.

At the same time, America’s history of interventionism has produced a counter-reaction at home as well. This is not isolationism, but a widespread disengagement from overall currents in the world at large. Americans are not just tired of their country’s global role, which a significant number believe has brought little but forever wars, unfair competition, job losses, and unwanted immigration. They are also in many ways rebelling against the global system that the United States itself has put in place.

On matters ranging from security to trade to climate change and pandemics, the opinions of a large number of Americans—and a thumping majority among those who support the current administration—are out of whack with those in other countries. Less than one-third of Republican voters believe in human-driven climate change, or in electric vehicles, or in lowering tariffs. What’s more, relatively few believe that social inequality, whether at home or abroad, is a problem. On a global scale, an average of