A friend forwarded me this link to Fareed Zakaria's article in the New Yorker on the nature of America's status in a unipolar world.   Overall, the article is Good but not necessarily one of Zakaria's better works (of which I'm a huge fan).    A few excerpts:

...America's relative position in the world has no real historical precedent. Imperial Britain, which at its peak reigned over a quarter of the world's population, is the closest analogy to the United States today, but it is still an inadequate one. To take an example, the symbol of Britain's supremacy was its Navy, which—at great cost to the British treasury—was kept larger than the next two largest navies combined. The United States military today is bigger, in dollars spent on it, than the militaries of the next largest fifteen countries combined—and those expenditures amount to only about four per cent of the country's gross domestic product.

This is a critical point.   Although we spend more in absolute dollars on military than the next 15 nations combined, this investment is against the backdrop of the strongest economy in the world (equal to the next 3 economies combined).   The ratio of US military expenditures to GDP is ranked at ~50 out of 190 countries surveyed.

AND, more importantly, there are critical military / technological doctrines that provide us with huge force multipliers (ranging from quality of the individual soldier, empowerment of the NCO, frequency/intensity of training, joint arms tactics, etc.).  

Overall, there are fewer Americans in uniform now than at any point since WWII, and, they are many times better than their foreign counterparts per individual at what they do.   It's often pointed out that the bulk of the work done by American forces in overthrowing the Taliban was done by fewer than 300 ground troops.

...Despite these claims [that the EU could significantly affect foriegn policy], however, foreign problems, no matter how distant, seemed to end up in Washington's lap. When the crisis in the Balkans began, in 1991, the President of the European Council, Jacques Poos, of Luxembourg, declared, "This is the hour of Europe. If one problem can be solved by the Europeans it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country and it is not up to the Americans." It was not an unusual or an anti-American view. Most European leaders, including Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, shared it. But several bloody years later it was left to America to stop the fighting.

This, of course, touches the heart of American resentment towards Europe.    Even when they claim to have a policy to execute, they lack the political will and means to truly execute.   And, where/when we have the will/means to execute, they can't wait to carp at us without proposing realistic, constructive alternatives.  And when we do something that actually solves a problem, the gratitude is incredibly fleeting (motivations for this are eerily reminiscint of this article from Ralph Peters).

Zakaria ends with a key point:

...Thus, when America was even more powerful than it is today [at the end of WWII] —by some measures it had fifty per cent of world output—it put into place a series of measures designed to rebuild its adversaries, institutionalize international cooperation on dozens of global issues, and alleviate poverty [in the form of the United Nations, etc]. No other nation would have done this: Churchill and Stalin were busy carving out spheres of influence.

And here, we have a description of a key part of the American international character.   Power -- even power which almost approaches absoluteness -- isn't applied towards acquisition of new Territory, preserving our Pride, or finding new sources of Wealth.   Is there any doubt from anyone (Islamofascists aside) that the US wants to be out of Afghanistan as fast as it possibly can?

At the end of the day US foriegn policy is truly dedicated towards the advancement of democracy and improvement of Global GNP.   Tactically, this has in the past resulted in the transient support of non-democratic / wealth-destroying regimes in specific countries.   However, the global, long term goal remained.  

Many critics (here and abroad) may take issue with this and almost absurdly accuse the US of imperialism.   I simply respond, imagine what the world would look like if the other guys won the cold war.   Then you'd get a taste of what real imperialism is all about.   God Bless America  ;-)

---