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By Root 1871 0

westward expansion was based in part on military conquest, the true key to America's success has always been its ability to attract and reward talented, motivated, and enterprising individuals of all backgrounds. From the beginning, immigration has been the fuel of American wealth and innovation, providing the United States with a continuing human-capital edge that has proven equally decisive in the industrial, atomic, and computer ages. In an important sense, then, the United States is a hyperpower on the Dutch model, but taken to entirely different orders of magnitude. The Dutch Republic was receptive to immigrants; the United States is a nation of immigrants—and thus the first nation of immigrants to rise to hyperpower status. Moreover, like the Dutch but far more so, America built its world dominance not through conquest but commerce.

Historically, while the British were “planting the Union Jack on one territory after another,” America for most of the nineteenth century “contented itself with carving out…[an] ‘empire of the seas'—an informal empire based on trade and influence.”12 In 1942, the historian Rupert Emerson observed, “With the exception of the brief period of imperialist activity at the time of the Spanish-American war, the American people have shown a deep repugnance to both the conquest of distant lands and the assumption of rule over alien peoples.”13

Even today, as John Steele Gordon writes, “ [i]f the world is becoming rapidly Americanized as once it became Romanized, the reason lies not in our weapons, but in the fact that others want what we have and are willing, often eager, to adopt our ways in order to have them too.” English is today's dominant global language not because of the threat of U.S. stealth bombers but because of the prospect of U.S. dollars. Notwithstanding the United States’ terrifying nuclear arsenal, “[t]he ultimate power of the United States”—like that of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century—lies “not in its military,” “but in its wealth.”14

The United States thus represents a kind of culmination in the evolution of hyperpowers. In antiquity, the only way to become the richest society on earth was through military conquest. Today, the links between economie and military power, while still important, are far more attenuated; not even the most hawkish supporter of U.S. militarism calls for the annexation of foreign territories. Commerce and innovation—not plunder and expropriation—have proven to be the greatest engines of wealth creation. At the same time, the face of strategic tolerance has changed, with immigration replacing conquest as the most effective way for a society to incorporate the world's best and brightest.

The good news, then, is the emerging possibility of a much less militaristic form of global dominance in the modern world, which the United States—as the world's economic and technological leader rather than its military overlord—could exemplify in the decades to come. There is, however, a catch. Precisely because of this transformation in what it means to be a hyperpower, the United States today is ill equipped to deal with the one crucial challenge that has confronted every hyperpower in history—and will necessarily confront every hyperpower to come.

THE DEMOCRATIC HYPERPOWER AND THE

ANCIENT PROBLEM OF “GLUE”

The United States is not only the first nation of immigrants to become a hyperpower. It is also the first mature universal-suffrage democracy to do so. This is not a coincidence. For all its imperfections, democracy in America has been, in addition to a source of strength and liberty, part of its tremendous appeal to outsiders. Like its relatively open free market system, which has allowed untold numbers to rise economically, the United States’ democratic system of government is part of its distinctively modern brand of strategic tolerance, in principle providing Americans of any background, creed, or skin color—and regardless of when they or their families became citizens—an equal opportunity to participate and rise in politics. As such, democracy