USA the Most Successful Nation in Human History?

Great Debates
1

I’ve had a think and this is probably the best forum for this. Sorry if I’m wrong.

So, there’s a IMHO thread about the 3 most important issues in the US elections. It’s been fairly interesting. However in one aside Cisco, in post 43, says this:

Maybe I should have left it, but in post 65 I called him on it:

Then in post 69 silenus agrees with him:

So I have!

First I want to point out that I’m not having a dig, and I’m not an ‘America-hater’. But seriously, “the most successful nation in human history”? If he’d said the US was the most powerful nation on the planet, I’d have no objection. There are arguments against this, but it’s certainly a tenable position.

It does depend on your definition of successful, I suppose, but I can’t think of one that works.

If you mean ‘biggest influence on the world’ then you are competing with several huge, historical empires.

If you mean ‘most powerful army’ then this is only really true because of modern technology, which is a bit of a cheat.

If you mean ‘best standard of living’, or ‘happiness of citizens’, then there are present day nations that beat the States, let alone going back into the historical record.

So, if anyone really believes this is true, then what do you base it on? I’m interested, because otherwise it is the kind of statement that convinces the rest of the world that the US is unthinkingly arrogant. I’m not saying this about the US, or any of its citizens, myself. Just pointing out the perception.

2

Economically, we haven’t had a depression in 70+ years. We also have the most amount of people living in middle class. I believe that is the longest period of prosperity in all of history.

Standard of living is higher in a few smaller European countries, but that is because of high restriction on immigration, so few poor people can get in.

As far as world power goes, then I would think the Roman Empire had us beat. They controlled the entire known world at the time.

3

But nor have a lot of other places.

By numbers or by percentage?

I may be wrong, but surely it can’t be. All of history is a long time and things were far more stable in the past. Civilisations survived and prospered for thousands of years. The USA may still do that, but it’s way early days.

4

I don’t think that there was ever a nation that ruled the seas as much as the USA does - our Navy is more powerful than all other navies combined. The British Empire may have come close at some point in it’s history, but I think even at it’s peak it was not as dominant as that of the modern USA.

Other than that, I don’t think we are special in a way that was not exceeded by some other nation in the past.

5

How is a technological advantage a cheat? Long bows were once considered a technological advantage and a major factor in the outcome of any battle. Yet technology alone does not simply determine the winner, just as numbers alone don’t. The U.S. had vastly superior technology to North Vietnam, even with Soviet and Chinese aid, yet didn’t win. The Iraqi army in early 2003 (on paper) nearly outnumbered the invasion force by 2 to 1 or more. Combining superior technology through superior training and superior leadership is what makes the U.S. armed forces arguably the most powerful on the planet. Countering guerilla warfare certainly isn’t a strength, but then it really isn’t for any large army.

How about ideology? While the U.S. certainly did not invent democracy or a representative republican government, without the American revolution, democracy would likely not be the norm or aspired-to norm throughout the world. Even authoritarian countries like Russia or China or totalitarian ones like Iraq under Saddam put on elections (regardless of fairness or openness to different candidates) because even the pretense of being a democracy is important to them domestically and internationally.

6

I suppose it partially depends on whether we’re saying most successful overall or most successful in context. I mean, if we’re going purely by general success, Andorra today is more successful than the Roman Empire. I think it would be more fair to ask which nation is the most successful in terms of the general context at the time - in other words, which nation did the most with the basics they had to work with.

That said, i’d probably go with the U.S. anyway.

7

This is not true. It would be truly remarkable if no one in the Roman Empire knew anything of the peoples beyond their borders. Not only would they have to be blind and deaf, they would have no defense and no trade partners.

“Most successful” is a hopelessly vague term, but direct U.S. influence certainly reaches farther than Rome’s influence did at its peak (although the indirect influence of Rome has spread greatly in the centuries since its fall).

8

I’m not saying the USA is perfect (far from it) or has all the answers, but we are the most militarily powerful nation (and yes I think technology does count because we spend a shitload of money on it) with the highest overall standard of living the world has known. Life is easy in the USA. Almost too easy.

9

I would say it’s arguably true by virtue of being the most successful nation in an era when humanity is at its highest point.

Plus, it’s the only nation to have achieved overwhelming military domination and general influence on a global level.

Other major powers in the past either achieved only local overwhelming domination or were only slightly more powerful than their competitors, or only dominating in specific areas, but not in others.

My guess is also that it will stay the only such example for quite a long time, based on my belief that the USA is on the decline and that we’re heading towards a multipolar world where no nation will benefit from such an overwhelming dominance (and my guess that in the long term, either we’ll have some kind of world government or the world’s dominant power will be some large ant hill somewhere).

10

I disagree. I think that it was one of these things that would have happened anyway in the western world, given the context. Following the enlightenment, it was a Pandora’s box waiting to be opened. Had the American revolution failed, the French revolution would still have taken place. And then the European revolutions of the 1840’s. It wasn’t avoidable given the way things were headed in the western world. And since the western world was so overwhelmingly dominant, if would have become the norm.

The greatest challenge to democracy, IMO, didn’t happen during the late 18th and 19th century, but with the rise of Communism and Fascism. IOW, the critical moment regarding democracy wasn’t the American revolution, but WWII.

11

We need to agree on a definition of ‘successful’. Although the US has loads of rich people, it also has a lot of poor and homeless people. Other countries have better literacy, less crime etc.

The US can certainly win a war against one other country. But it’s struggling to cope in fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment.

The English language, McDonalds and Hollywood (for example) have spread indeed world-wide. But does this count as most successful?

The British Empire was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. It was a product of the Age of Discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires. By 1921, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world’s population. It covered about 36.7 million km² (14.2 million square miles), about a quarter of Earth’s total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread.

Apart from being far more dominant than the US today, the British also kept friendly relationships with most of its Empire after it granted member countries independence.
Sadly I don’t believe that President Bush (for example) is liked or respected anywhere.

12

I don’t think so, if we’re speaking relatively to other countries (If we don’t ,then even developing countries of today are way more prosperous than the mightiest empires of the past). On the overall, the Roman empire was prosperous for a veryyy looong time, for instance. So was the Ottoman Empire. Or even Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. I don’t know if they had “70 years without depression” periods, but certainly were highly prosperous on a relative basis for durations significantly longer than the whole existence of the USA.

If by “standard of living” you mean GNP, then actually, the only countries with a higher standard of living than the USA are countries with a low population and an huge, single-sourced income, like Luxembourg (banking and off-shore companies) or some oil monarchies of the Gulf.

Besides, in Europe, there’s no relationship, as far as I can tell, between prosperity and restriction on immigration. Actually, a prosperous nation generally not only attracts but also needs immigration.

Sorry, I disagree again. They controlled a very small bit of the world, and not even all the world they knew. They never controlled what is now Scotland, or Germany, or Ethiopia, and most certainly not Persia or India.

And the influence of the Roman empire besides its borders was minimal, while today’s USA, besides controlling a pretty large chunk of territory, most importantly can exert its influence essentially everywhere.

I think the Roman Empire is generally overrated because we’re too familiar with it.

13

The U.S. certainly has its problems - what country doesn’t? But as a long-stable constitutional democracy with a huge middle class, high living standards, global economic clout, enduringly attractive to immigrants, “conceived in liberty” and still committed to it, with an extremely powerful military, a hugely influential popular culture, cutting-edge technology, Nobel Prize winners out the wazoo in every discipline, and having landed men on the Moon and sent out the now-farthest objects in deep space (the Voyager spacecraft), I’d say the United States has an excellent claim on the title “most successful nation in human history.”

But pride goeth before a fall, so I wouldn’t want to brag too much. There’s also no certainty we’ll keep the title indefinitely, even if we could definitively claim it now.

14

I’m not sure what the right answer is, but why is military prowess considered a measure of success? It is without a doubt a measure of power, but is the success of a country somehow based upon how many wars it can win, or how many wars it might have deterred?

If we’re broadening the scope of what a successful country ought to be, I would contend that more success means maintaining economic and political power while engaging in a minimum of wars, and probably a low investment in military power. After all, wars may be politically unavoidable from time to time, but certainly there are better uses of manpower and riches than sinking them into an enterprise that, when mobilized, have extremely high opportunity cost.

If I were coming up with criteria for a successful nation, I would hazard that maintaining a secure country with minimal numbers of wars and lesser military spending are most preferable; especially compared with the alternative of a country with high military spending that can enforce its will on others. That’s not a very enlightened view of “success.”

So, I think for all the advantages the US may present to the title of most successful country, I’m not sure that military power is actually a good measure to compare. Otherwise, we end up with highly militarized countries being put higher on the list of successes: because the Soviet Union could crush dissent in Eastern Europe and elsewhere on its borders, did that make it more of a success, especially considering the costs of being able to do so?

15

The British Empire never was vastly more powerful than other major European powers.

The pound sterling during the late 19th century was the major currency, but not even remotely as much as the dollar is today.

The UK “ruled the wawes”, but not in the way the US navy does today. The French navy was a significant threat to it, and the UK became very worried when the German empire began strengthening its navy too. Nowadays, as already mentionned, the US navy could take on essentially all the world’s navies combined.

The British army wasn’t considered as on par with continental armies during the 19th century, while, once again, no country today could take on the US army.

The UK had a significant technological advantage during the first half of the 19th century, but northern European nations quickly caught up, while relatively recently (say, during the 60s) the USA had a technological edge in essentially all domains (not true anymore nowadays), and a production output dwarfing any other nation. The US GDP is still more than 25% of the world’s GDP. The British empire was never close to that.

Despite the English language being spread in its colonies, French was displaced as the international language only with the rise of the USA, not with the rise of the UK. The UK never was a cultural reference (compare with 16th century Italy, 18th century France, 19th century Germany), while USA’s cultural exports are all over our TV sets.

The only thing I’ll grant you will be the 36.7 square kilometres.
No way the UK at its height was comparable to the USA at its height.

16

Well, I was going to quibble about it but Clairobscur talked me into it.

The modern world is richer, healthier, safer, better educated and better run than any other time in human history. And the US has at present the largest single economy of any country in the modern world. Therefore, the US in 2008 must by elimination be the most successfuly nation in human history.

The nice thing is that improving on this record doesn’t look very difficult.

17

I respectfully disagree. Sure, the French Revolution may well have happened without the US Revolution (though perhaps not) - but the French Revolution was a bloody, nightmarish mess. It strangled itself with its own entrails, put Napolean in power, and damn near put Europe to the torch - hardly the sort of thing to give democracy a good name. Absent an example of how to run a democracy well, the French Revolution alone would have been only another bloody footnote to Europe’s very bloody history.

I think a better version of the “democracy would have happened anyway” argument would be to claim that the Brits would have done it, and popularized the parliamentary democracy system exclusively (that is, we’d have no, or very few, presidential democracies). The Brits were already well on their way at the time of the Revolution, and their continuing reforms during the 19th century seemed to have damn-all to do with the US.

Nope. Maybe the Cold War, but not World War II. That was basically a war between two totalitarian systems - Communism and Fascism. Communism won, at least in Europe. The Soviets broke Hitler’s back, then steamrolled over Eastern Europe, and held it for half a century. WWII left the democracies weakened and impoverished, the Soviets in a position of unassailable strength, and the US as the only serious player left in the free world. That led to our rise to prominence, but you can hardly call it democracy’s finest hour.

18

About ten years ago it was.

19

Let’s not try it. We certainly have a peerless navy, and our aircraft carriers are incredible power-projection platforms. They’re also very vulnerable to relatively inexpensive weapons, such as ship-to-ship missiles and modern diesel subs. I doubt there’s anyone else who could use the seas to project power to anywhere near the same degree that we do - but if Russia or China spent a few years building up their fleets, they could probably impair our own ability to do that.

Actually, we see strong evidence every day that this just isn’t so. We live in an era where powerful, effective weapons are fairly cheap. This means guerrillas can pose a serious threat to conventional militaries, even quite powerful ones. Iraq is a perfect example. Sure, there are damn few countries that could defeat us in set-piece battles - but that’s not the point. Cheap, easy-to-use weapons like AK-47s and RPGs dramatically level the playing field between US and guerilla forces, particularly in urban combat, and even more particularly when the other guy doesn’t mind taking a lot of casualties. And there’s no reason for the bad guys to mind, really - you can get an effective AK-47 gunman with relatively little training, which means it’s no great loss if your gunman doesn’t make it through his first engagement. He’s easy to replace. Heck, that’s why child soldiers are so disturbingly effective. (See: Peter Singer’s “Children at War”).

In some eras, fielding an effective fighting force has been an expensive proposition. Back when mounted knights dominated the battlefield, for example, this was the case. Knights are expensive - they need armor, horses, feed for the horses, extensive training, and so on. However, it turns out that pikemen are relatively easy to train and cheap to field - so they (along with archers, and eventually gunpowder) put the knight out of business. And war became cheap again. We’re on, I think, the “cheap” end of the war-making cycle again.

20

I disagree. The French revolution didn’t fail. It did got rid of the king, of privileges, etc… It showed that the population was willing, and able, to overthrow the traditional monarchies and take over. Terror or not, it showed that popular armies could stand and win against organized royal armies, even a coalition of them. It showed that the population could put in place a functional government. Even in a large European country. It showed that there was support, everywhere in Europe, for a new order. It showed that no monarchy was safe. And Napoleon didn’t rule like the French kings had. Even the latter and last French kings couldn’t rule like their predecessors had. The success of a bunch of colonists on the other side of the ocean wasn’t remotely close to the warning call the French revolution has been for European monarchies.
The failed French revolution had more influence in the 19th century movements in continental Europe than the successful American revolution. The liberals remembered it for a long time. Having heard of the people governing themselves in a small remote place isn’t the same as seeing the people kicking your emperor’s ass and your bishops fleeing. The coronation of Napoleon has been perceived by many as a betrayal, actually much more so in other countries than in France itself (because, IMO, the French had to deal with the realities of the French revolution, while in other countries they just had listened to the hopes it offered) and even Napoleon’s rule was exemplary liberal by comparison with what was existing previously in continental Europe. The European courts remembered it all too well. It wasn’t a handful of colonists in some faraway place, it was a major European monarchy that had completely crumbled and all other European courts that had been at risk of being wiped out by the hands of a previously mostly irrelevant populace. From this point on, kings knew they had a sword of Damocles (or a guillotine) over their heads. They had to (and did) take this threat and these liberal aspirations into account.
Anyway, my main point was that it showed a trend. The Americans wanted power to belong to the people. The French wanted power to belong to the people, and it got a non insignificant and enthusiastic support in other countries because in those other countries too they wanted power to belong to the people. The revoltees of the 1840s wanted power to belong to the people. The Brits eventually, as you mention, did it (and during the same period), certainly more peacefully, but for the same reason : they wanted power to belong to the people. Other European countries also were slowly evolving towards it during the 19th century. The power of the kings faced growing opposition, occasionally violent, and they had no choice other than reluctantly grant more and more liberties or face revolutions. They couldn’t ignore it.

Had the American revolution failed and the French revolution succeeded, the end result would have been the same. Had both failed, I’m convinced the end result would still have been the same.

The enlightenment ideals, and more widespread literacy and education had sowed the seeds. The fields were ripe for harvest starting in the late 18th century and they would be harvested, peacefully or forcefully, regardless of how many failures it would take.
That’s my opinion at least.