America Stays Unique

Even if the United States' (US') economic and military power declines over the coming decades, its cultural power will not.

- MIHIR S SHARMA

This has often been the case with declining superpowers: Their footprint in the world of ideas and culture stays long after their economies lose their edge. The US was already a larger economy than Great Britain in the 1880s, but it took another 40 or 50 years—and the growth of Hollywood—for the US' soft power to catch up.

Soft power is not merely about films and music. One interesting way in which a superpower's internal dynamics have an effect on the rest of the world is through its internal political debates. One way or another, they become the axis around which domestic political mobilization in the rest of the world revolves.

Let's look at two very different ways in which American politics has infected countries with very different social and economic structures.