[jammies]

I don't think some of you are living in the same parallel universe as I am.

Militarily, the USA spends more than the rest of the world combined, can project its power worldwide (no other nation can), leads an alliance of states who are beating a major world power just by sending money and weapons, and has the most technologically advanced weaponry in almost every military field.

Economically, it is still significantly richer than China (with 1/4 of China's population), its dollar acts as the world's reserve currency, it has the #1 and #2 stock exchanges in the world with as much market cap as #3 through #10 combined, and of the 9 companies worldwide with more than a trillion dollar market cap, 7 are American.

Culturally, American content is like their military, it has a global reach no other country can emulate, its movies, television and music are the most popular and influential, and its lifestyle is the one other countries imitate. Pop culture is ascendant culture, and its genesis and apotheosis is American.

Politically, add those three factors up and America dominates - they have the hard power and the soft power. I say this as someone who wishes they didn't have that preponderance of power, but the idea that we already live in a multi-polar world is laughable, unless by multi-polar you mean "other nations can achieve their limited foreign policy goals as long as those goals don't directly conflict with America's".

A true mulit-polar world would be more like imperial Europe from 1815-1914, where four to six powers were all roughly equal, and none of them could act unilaterally without care for the others' reactions. We don't have that, we have one dominant power that all other powers must take into their calculations.