Another Reason Why the United States is the Greatest Nation on Earth

I find it sad that lately there has been a lot of press regarding “The decline of the US Superpower.” No one has come straight out and said it, but there is that general feeling when reading or listening to the news. Personally, I think that part of that feeling comes from a 2 year long political campaign in which both candidates and their respective parties trashed on what the U.S. was doing domestically and internationally. Unfortunately the President still is trying to push an agenda that would have us believe that he is fixing the tainted image of the U.S. worldwide and how he is working hard to bring the U.S. back to greatness.

I would like to do my part in setting the record straight.

Obviously there are so many ways in which the U.S. is the greatest country in the world that it is shocking there is even a perception that it might not be. I won’t delve into all of those ways (i.e., the freedoms we enjoy, the spirit of capitalism, the envy of other nations, etc.), but I would like to point out one that I had, to my embarrassment, not thought of before. This note is brought from the folks at STRATFOR written back in June of 2009.

The United States and the Free Market

The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land – and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.

Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands and a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway – an Intracoastal Waterway – that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.

The beauty is that the two overlap with near perfect symmetry. The Intracoastal Waterway and most of the bays link up with agricultural regions and their own local river systems (such as the series of rivers that descend from the Appalachians to the East Coast), while the Greater Mississippi river network is the circulatory system of the Midwest. Even without the addition of canals, it is possible for ships to reach nearly any part of the Midwest from nearly any part of the Gulf or East coasts. The result is not just a massive ability to grow a massive amount of crops – and not just the ability to easily and cheaply move the crops to local, regional and global markets – but also the ability to use that same transport network for any other economic purpose without having to worry about food supplies. [Think of our massive road networks. Russia didn’t even have a intercontinental highway until this century, and even that is only two lanes for much of the way]

The implications of such a confluence are deep and sustained. Where most countries need to scrape together capital to build roads and rail to establish the very foundation of an economy – transport capability – geography granted the United States a near-perfect system at no cost. That frees up U.S. capital for other pursuits and almost condemns the United States to be capital-rich. Any additional infrastructure the United States constructs is icing on the cake. (The cake itself is free – and, incidentally, the United States had so much free capital that it was able to go on to build one of the best road-and –rail networks anyway, resulting in even greater economic advantages over competitors.)

Third, geography has also ensured that the United States has very little local competition. To the north, Canada is both much colder and much more mountainous than the United States. Canada’s only navigable maritime network – The Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway – is shared with the United States, and most of its usable land is hard by the American border. Often this makes it more economically advantageous for Canadian provinces to integrate with their neighbor to the south than with their co-nationals to the east and west.

Similarly, Mexico has only small chunks of land, separated by deserts and mountains, that are not useful for much more than subsistence agriculture; most of Mexican territory is either too dry, too tropical or too mountainous. And Mexico is completely lacks any meaningful river system for maritime transport. Add in a largely desert border, and Mexico as a country is not a meaningful threat to American security (which hardly means that there are not serious and ongoing concerns in the American-Mexican relationship).

With geography empowering the United States and hindering Canada and Mexico, the United States does not need to maintain a large standing military force to counter either. The Canadian border is almost completely unguarded, and the Mexican border is not more than a fence in most locations – a far cry from the sort of military standoffs that have marked more adversarial borders in human history. Not only are Canada and Mexico not major threats, but the U.S. transport network allows the United States the luxury of being able to quickly move a smaller force to deal with occasional problems rather than requiring it to station large static forces on its borders.

Like the transport network, this also helps the U.S. focus its resources on other things.

Taken together, the integrated transport network, large tracts of usable land and lack of a need for standing military have one critical implication: The U.S. government tends to take a hands-off approach [relative to other countries] to economic management, because geography has not cursed the United States with any endemic problems. This may mean that the United States – and especially its government – comes across as disorganized, but it shifts massive amounts of labor and capital to the private sector, which for the most part allows resources to flow to wherever they will achieve the most efficient and productive results.

Laissez-faire capitalism has its flaws. Inequality and social stress are just two of many less-than-desirable side effects. The side effects most relevant to the current situation are, of course, the speculative bubbles that cause recessions when they pop. But in terms of long-term economic efficiency and growth, a free capital system is unrivaled. For the United States, the end result has proved clear: The United States has exited each decade since post-Civil War Reconstruction more powerful than it was when it entered it. While there are many forces in the modern world that threaten various aspects of U.S. economic standing, there is not one that actually threatens the U.S. base geographic advantages.

Is the United States in recession? Of course. Will it be forever? Of course not. So long as U.S. geographic advantages remain intact, it takes no small amount of paranoia and pessimism to envision anything but long-term economic expansion for such a chunk of territory. In fact, there are a number of factors hinting that the United States may even be on the cusp of recovery.

They go on to talk about China and Russia more in depth in their article. Regardless of what you hear about the U.S. in the media, we are still the greatest nation in the world. We still have major advantages over every other country. I think that the above article highlights nicely the major reasons why this land is a choice and promised land. As long as we keep our freedoms the United States can’t help it but be the greatest nation on earth.