Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by BigFatBuddha (talk | contribs) at 00:34, 19 April 2003 (ss). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A superpower is a state with the ability to influence events on a global scale. In practice, this means one with strong economy, large population, and strong armed forces, including air power and satellite capabilities, and a huge arsenal of weapon of mass destruction.

During the Cold War the two superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union. With the political collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the world's sole remaining superpower, though a small minority refers to the worldwide peace movement or world public opinion as the Second Superpower .

America's position as the sole superpower

Critics of the United States describe the current state of affairs as the Pax Americana, with the United States as self-claimed guarantor of world peace. Harsher critics say that America is acting as an imperialist nation, despite its protests to the contrary.

This is in contrast to its position of isolationism with respect to global affairs outside the Western Hemisphere at various times in the first half of the 20th century, particularly between the World Wars.

American entanglement abroad

America's position as a superpower has entangled it in almost every major conflict world-wide, including the Middle East crisis and the situation in Kashmir.

Defenders of American foreign policy regard their interventions as forced on them by moral necessity or lately as self-defence. They generally see world affairs in moral terms, with "good guys" and "bad guys", rather than in terms of realpolitik and moral equivalence.

America was attacked by the Islamist terrorist network Al-Qaida in 2001, and is now fighting a "War on Terrorism" world-wide. America is, as of this update, undertaking a massive invasion of Iraq in order to smash the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Superpowers and asymmetric warfare

Whilst a superpower is in a position to win any all-out war against a lesser power, it is less able to fight an asymmetric war against a weaker opponent that is willing to use terrorist tactics. In this case, the extensive civilian, industrial and military assets of the superpower provide a wide range of targets to an enemy which is willing to attack from hiding without notice.

Military strategists have anticipated this situation for many years, but effective measures against asymmetric warfare have been hard to construct.

• Traditional military methods are also useless, as terrorists will hide among the civilian population.
• Weapons of mass destruction are unlikely to be used by democratic powers.
• Police tactics are only likely to succeed with the cooperation of the community from which the terrorists come - and heavy-handed police or military behavior will tend to radicalize host communities, increasing support for the terrorists.

However, many observers of the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq would conclude that the US military has proven its ability to resoundingly defeat enemies who are using asymmetric tactics. Likewise, the large number of Al-Qaeda arrested and the fact that their have been no major terrorist attacks on US soil since the War on Terror began demonstrate that conducting global terrorism is very difficult and subject to substantial disruption by an enemy with superpower resources.

Potential superpowers

Countries that could become superpowers in the coming decades include:

• The growing European Union, which is of comparable economic strength and has nuclear capabilities (France and the United Kingdom), but is still too fragmented to be considered a single power
• Russia, the most powerful of the countries of the former Soviet Union, maintains a huge nuclear arsenal
• China, which currently only has a small nuclear deterrent, but the world's largest army.
• India, which has a population of over a billion, and a small nuclear arsenal

However, the Bush Doctrine as spelled out in the National Security Strategy of the United States contends that the United States will continue to strengthen its military force to preserve in perpetuity its status as the world's sole superpower.