America’s new unipolar moment
Imagine in early 2001 you were told that over the next 25 years America would suffer the deadliest terrorist attack in history, fight two of its three longest wars (both ending in failure), endure the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression and be wracked by a decade of Donald Trump-induced political instability that challenged the very foundations of its democracy.
Now imagine you were next told that at the end of that stretch America would be in its strongest global position since World War II. Would that be believable?
According to nearly every hard indicator of global power it certainly appears the case. And while America’s soft power leadership of liberal values and institutions has been set back under Trump, the United States remains the world’s preeminent liberal democracy and the only one capable of shaping the direction of world affairs.
This is America’s third “unipolar moment” since 1945, along with the early post-Cold War. It offers Washington another opportunity to help fashion a world that safeguards America’s interests and values, along with stabilizing leadership. To succeed, it must contain the core elements of the Cold War era—strong U.S. military deterrence matched with global economic primacy—without the neoliberal “end of history” overreach of the 1990s. With the right mix of prudence and pragmatism, the United States is poised to remain the pivotal player of the 21st century.
To grasp America’s current global dominance, consider that 20 years ago the European Union and U.S. economies were roughly equal; today, America’s is 50 percent larger. In 2021, after two decades of sizzling growth, China’s GDP reached 77 percent of America’s; by 2025 it had plunged to 63 percent. The journalist Fareed Zakaria’s 2008 prediction that China, India, Brazil and other rapidly developing countries portended a coming “post-American world” has not only failed to materialize, it’s heading in the wrong direction. In 2008, U.S. GDP was 23 percent of world total, in 2025 it was 26 percent, same as during the 1990s.
On the other major indicator of global power—military spending—America maintains an even greater lead. In 2024, Washington spent $997 billion on defense, nearly 40 percent of all expenditures worldwide, and equal the next nine countries combined. Yet this was just 3.4 percent of the U.S. economy. By comparison, in 2005 the United States spent 4.1 percent on defense, and in the 1980s it averaged 6.3 percent.
Even if China, as suspected, is spending much more on its military than reported, the current trendline vastly favors the United States. Though China remains a manufacturing dynamo, it faces gale force economic headwinds thanks to a massive credit crisis that has already imploded tens of trillions in wealth, and the world’s most rapidly aging workforce. Worse, China’s increasingly Leninist tilt under Xi Jinping is strangling its once-booming private economy: foreign investment is at a three-decade low, and venture capital startups have collapsed from over 50,000 in 2018 to under 1,000 in 2024. Despite handwringing over Chinese advances in artificial intelligence (AI), U.S. firms capture more than half of global high-tech profits, with China barely earning 6 percent.
If cutting-edge technology holds the future of global growth, it is hard to envision China competing with America’s far more dynamic environment for investment and invention. It is no coincidence that the United States has been at the forefront of every major economic transformation of the past 150 years—the second industrial revolution, the internet revolution and now the AI revolution. This pace-setting explains why it maintains remarkably consistent economic returns even as challengers come and go.
But perhaps the most stunning thing about today’s unipolar moment is that it did not spawn from a U.S. victory in a world war (hot or cold), but during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent memory. This illustrates America’s unique ability to adjust and renew, and its potential to sustain this moment.
To do so, it must recognize that unipolarity does not mean impunity. Same as post-World War II, Washington requires robust trade relations and defense partnerships, particularly if China becomes increasingly belligerent as its relative power wanes. And, unlike the 1990s, America must envision leading a diverse and complex world, not a simplistic “new world order” built exclusively for liberal-capitalist states.
A good place to start would be leading a global transformation away from carbon energy and toward abundant fusion nuclear power. And it could establish a consortium to reduce the potential harms from generative AI, and share its commercial benefits with the poorest regions of the world, in ways 1990s globalization did not.
The United States is not without its challenges, including a large national debt and whiplash politics. But its unique advantages include tremendous national wealth (35 percent of the world’s total) and a hotly contested political system that often seems dysfunctional, but always manages to steady the course. For 250 years, America has been the world’s most consequential nation. Its best days may still lie ahead.
*Stuart Gottlieb teaches American foreign policy and international security at Columbia University. He previously served as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter in the Senate from 1999-2003.