Reply #8: Power more than anything makes a "superpower". [View All]

Actually, the United States constituted a sort of empire, from the end of WWII up through the Cold War years. Not quite the same sort of empire as the empires of old, true, but an empire nonetheless; our vassal states in Western Europe were used as proxies against the Russians, in most cases willingly supporting the NATO alliance and allowing US troops on their soil due to the perceived threat of evil Russia. Communism imploded in the early nineties, and the system of alliances made by the US muddled on, briefly, through the civil wars in Bosnia; but, now that US intersts are divergent from and in some cases diametrically opposed to the interests of Europe, those alliances are crumbling and America's erstwhile junior partners are re-asserting their own sovereignty in matters of defence and so on...and the perceived commonality of interests of the US and Western Europe/Japan (and the resulting cooperation on the part of our allies or client states in allowing US foreign policy to shape theirs) was really what allowed America to become a "superpower" in the first place.

As you've seen, Bush & Co. tried to get the rest of the world to buy into this "global war on terror" as a NEW shared cause, mainly to allow the US to maintain its global dominance (its imperium, if you will) through strategic coordination and direction of this "war on terror"...but most of the world decided they weren't buying.