At what point in history did the US take the leadership of the world? What led it to this point?
post-wwii to both questions
>>1187209
In terms of Industry, they were the China of the world by the late 19th Century.
Its overwhelming global hegemony started at the end of WWII.
As for "leadership of the world" well that's a loaded term, as the USSR existed.
>>1187209
Look, you people need to realize something. When they say the US is not the world police, what they mean is that the US is the world's police.
And the police do not call the shots. They go where they're told to go.
Find out who tells the US to go and fight, and you have found the real power brokers.
The US started an aggressive foreign policy with the Spanish-American War. It probably isn't a coincidence that this happened in 1898, only 8 years after the western frontier was officially closed.
That period, at the turn of the century, left the US with Cuba, the Philippines, and most importantly, the Panama Canal.
By WW1, the US was a huge industrial power, and she took advantage of the war to offer steep loans to the Entente to keep their war machine going.
Over the 4 years of the war, the world financial center shifted from London to New York.
The US spent the 20s fucking with central American and Caribbean countries on behalf of corporate interests, in what became known as the Banana Wars, but cut it out after the Great Depression dried up funding.
The US really didn't like the idea of being in another European war, but Pearl Harbor solved that question for them, and they ended up mobilizing 16 million servicemen at the peak of the war.
This number was scheduled to draw down aggressively at the end of the war, but US policymakers quickly realized that they still needed a large military, both to protect against the Soviets, and to ensure a successful occupation.
The events of the immediate postwar era, especially the coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, and the fall of China to communists, hardened attitudes towards the USSR even further, and the Korean War just deepened it.
The last gasp of the old empires as a relevant global power was the Suez War, where Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and England and France, using Israel as a sock puppet, invaded the Sinai to take it back.
MacArthur wouldn't stand for US allies acting like they were still colonial powers at a time when the West and East were competing ideologically, and forced a withdrawal by threatening to sell bonds and tank the British economy.
This is considered the end of Britain as a superpower.
Obviously, the fall of the Soviet Union left the US in an even more dominant place.
>>1187209
Well the USA never took complete leadership of course. You could say ww1, when Europe went to ruin. You could also say ww2 when Europe went to ruin even more and the colonial empires of Britain and France fell as a result. But the sovjet-union was a huge rival in those times, especially post ww2. So you could say after the fall of the sovjet union. But now China is on the rise so...
>>1187247
>when the perfidious albion gets the eternal anglo treatment from the us
>>1189429
KEk
>>1187267
Why did the US not support their arguably closest ally? Fear of Global war?
