Have you been to America? Maybe you live there. It's an amazing place. I have plenty of family there - in Washington DC, Marcellus (NY), Houston, St Louis, San Antonio, Quantico and Los Angeles and have also visited the IEEE cement industry conference in many places too (Rapid City, South Dakota, was one of my favourites). I've also travelled all the way down the East Coast, and from LA to Winnipeg in Canada, visiting National Parks along the way. It's a big place - like 50 countries - whose size was brought home to me when my identical twin brother and I took the 36-hour Greyhound bus trip from Houston to LA and it took 19 hours to cross from one side of Texas to the other.
It's an amazing place - but is it exceptionally amazing? There is a concept - perhaps you already know of it, or already believe in it - called 'American Exceptionalism.'1 This tenet holds that America is different from all other countries because of its history, because of its resources, because of its society and way of life and because of its people. Of course, it is different from everywhere else - everywhere is different from everywhere else - but is it exceptional?
America was colonised by Europeans starting in the 1500s - similar in some ways to that other huge country Brazil, for instance. After a huge amount of debate over decades and indeed over centuries, the US now has a dual system of state-mandated laws (almost as if each state was a separate country, making its own laws) and Federal laws coming from lawmakers in Washington. The battle for supremacy between state and federal laws has been going on for over 200 years and is not expected to finish any time soon. It brings to mind the battles now being fought over European federalism. The Americans settled for a bicameral parliament, composed of a Senate and a Congress (echoing many other countries' systems) but with a powerful president (albeit with powers limited by four-yearly terms and the requirement to bring their supporters and 'the people' along with him or her).
The US is blessed and cursed with an extraordinary geography (my father, who lived in the US for more than a decade, said that there was a natural disaster somewhere in the US every day). It has giant mountain ranges (in the Rockies and the Appalachians), vast plains, huge rivers, colossal lakes, verdant forests, parched deserts, deep canyons - in fact, much like Russia or China (The Yenisei–Angara–Selenge, Ob–Irtysh and Amur–Argun river systems are all in the top-10 longest in the world,2 passing through Russia and China - but who knows of them?). The US is unusual in that it has a continental hot-spot (under Yellowstone, which could yet turn into a super-giant volcano), but it turns out that there are other continental hot-spots, including one just up the road in Canada.3
The US sure does have abundant natural resources: Depending on how you count them, the US has over 30 billion barrels of proven oil reserves (putting it outside the top 104) and huge amounts of shale gas (but dwarfed by the amounts of shale gas that exist outside of the US5). The US does have the world's largest coal reserves, at approaching 500Bnt, around 27% of the world's total, but they are followed by almost-as large reserves in Russia and China. Many valuable minerals and ores are found in the US - almost none of them uniquely. China has a near-stranglehold on Rare Earth Elements, for example. The US cement industry is vast, with production of nearly 80Mt in 2013 (compared to, for example, 75Mt in Iran, 280Mt in India or perhaps 1Bnt in China), despite a number of its plants still being mothballed. America has - of course - lent its huge industry and manpower to winning two world wars and is still the world's largest spender on defence - spending as much as the next 10 countries combined.6 It 'speaks quietly and carries a big stick:' No doubt about that.
The US economy is the world's largest (by some measures, but by others China has already overtaken it7) and is growing strongly (but not as fast as more than 100 other countries).8 It is the world's most indebted country and the originator of the world's largest economic crashes.
Its people, of course, are undoubtedly special. They are gathered from every other nation on the planet, creating a vast melting pot that can be seen as a microcosm of our world. They come to America to pursue the American way of life through education, hard work and entrepreneurship. Just as people seek a better life in Lagos, Karachi, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, Wenzhou or Kiev.
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1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_length
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotspot_(geology)
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil_reserves
5 http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures7 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-304837628 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_growth_rate