It's very easy to attribute America's place in the world to our creation myths. You know, things like "Manifest Destiny", frontier spirit, "Don't Tread on Me", or even the honor-cruelty dichotomy of America's warrior hicks Jacksonians. The truth of course much more complex than what we like to tell ourselves. I would like to emphasize that one of the structural reasons that has made America strong is shared by all the countries of the West. I like to call it Sustainable Development. It's a confusing term, really. I don't mean that form of environmentalism that restricts entrepenuership in the service of a condescending worldview.
To me it's a more organic notion. It means that economic activity is self-perpetuating. That longevity is not due to adherence to psuedoscientifc truisms, but instead to the very nature of the economic activity. Kind of like, planting trees to replace the ones you log, only so that you can log them and replace them again. Or making cars cheap enough, and paying your employees more than enough to make sure that your cars become indispensible. In government that means following reasonably sane anti-trust policies, and ensuring a level playing field for healthy competition (not just targeting your campaing contibutor's rival that's kicking his -- and everyone else's -- ass).
This is not a viewpoint exhbited by Liberian President Taylor's Life of Crime. After he came to power, he wrecked his country so that he could be rich. Then he pissed off all of his neighbors. What a jackass. But it serves to highlight a basic, and most fundamental difference betweent the West and the Rest: When we compete to see who's at the top we don't screw it up for everybody else, because that only undermines the winner's future growth and destroys potential. Bernard Lewis illuminates the difference far better than I do as he contemplates economics and government corruption in What Went Wrong?, pg. 63:
In the West, one makes money in the market, and uses it to buy or influence power. In the East, one siezes power, and uses it to make money. Morally there is no difference from the two, but their impact on the economy and on the polity is very different.
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