I agree with the main thrust of your statement. My understanding from my synthesis of reading the experts is that the U.S.' current economic success and interna

I agree with the main thrust of your statement. My understanding from my synthesis of reading the experts is that the U.S.' current economic success and international power comes down to: 1) Political stability and the rule of law: No point in investing much in a farm, factory, or infrastructure (fiber!) if it will be burnt down the next day by bandits or seized by someone more powerful (government, the rich family in town, etc.). The same applies to human capital (education): No point in studying computer science if there is no electricity and your life will be a fight for survival with guns and knives. 2) Free people and free markets (as a general principle, not taken to logical extremes): The system that produces the most aggregate wealth from the same labor and capital inputs. 3) Scale: Of developed nations, the U.S. has by far the largest internal market. ~325 million in the US, second is Japan at ~125 million. The UK market is 60 million, for example; that's why the Beatles sang with American accents (AFAIK - and also because the UK and Europe probably were still recovering from two massive wars). Note that Europeans are roughly as productive per capita as Americans. Scale by itself isn't sufficient; China and India have probably always been larger, for example. 4) Geographic security: Protected from enemies by two oceans, and with neighbors too weak to do anything but be friendly. To get a sense of what those oceans mean, look at how hard it was to attack across the English channel in WWII. If the U.S. was in continental Europe, WWI and WWII would have devastated the U.S., twice, just like the rest of Europe - and who would have provided a Marshall Plan to bail out the US along with the Europeans? Instead, thanks to geography, it's only a slight exaggeration to say that not a foreign shot was fired on US soil - and hasn't been since 1812. 5) Geographic economics: According to one geopolitical analyst I read, the U.S. has the largest navigable river system and the largest contiguous area of farmland in the world, and they are in the same place, the Mississippi River basin. Remember that most of the world economy was agricultural for much of U.S. history; imagine the impact of that geography, an almost guaranteed economic engine. Consider how critical controlling New Orleans and the Louisiana Purchase were and are.