Although an opinion article, it references and quotes a lot of different and in some cases significant sources. My real question is: Would the US be better or worse off if we weren’t a “superpower”?
Twenty years ago posing this question would have seemed absurd. The United States was fully self-confident about its position as the sole surviving superpower in the world which faced virtually no obstacles or objections to its performance of “public goods” that brought order to the world either through the liberal international institutions that it helped to create after WWII and dominated, or unilaterally when necessary through “coalitions of the willing” aimed at bringing down one or another disruptive malefactor on a regional stage. Read more here.