"The United States is the world’s overwhelming military power, and it’s not even close. The country controls about 750 overseas bases (China, by comparison, has only one foreign base, in Djibouti). It spends around $730 billion on its military, which is more than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil combined."

The first centuries of U.S. history underline how strange the country’s bid for hegemony was. As Wertheim notes, before the mid-twentieth century Americans tended to claim that “their nation was exceptional because it did not covet armed supremacy over the rest of the world.”