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During the Cold War, the British Empire dissolved, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union to dominate world affairs. At the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the world's sole superpower, [6] [7] a position sometimes referred to as that of a "hyperpower". [8]
The United States was the foremost of the world's two superpowers during the Cold War. After the Cold War, the most common belief held that only the United States fulfilled the criteria to be considered a superpower. [182] [303] Regardless of the debate on its status as a superpower, the United States is considered a great power.
A potential superpower is a sovereign state or other polity that is speculated to be or have the potential to become a superpower; a sovereign state or supranational union that holds a dominant position characterized by the ability to exert influence and project power on a global scale through economic, military, technological, political, or cultural means.
The history of the United States from 1991 to 2016 began following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dissolution signaled the end of the Cold War and left the U.S. unchallenged as the world's sole superpower. The U.S. took a leading role in military involvement in the Middle East.
The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort.
Since 1991, the United States has been the world's dominant military, economic, social, and political power (not to mention hosting the UN Headquarters itself in New York City); the United Nations was not designed for such a unipolar world with a single superpower, and conflicts between an ascendant U.S. and other UN members have increased.
Communist hegemony covered one third of the world's land while the United States emerged as the world's more influential superpower, and formed a worldwide network of military alliances. [7] There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism.
The United States remained the world's foremost power until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, at which point it became the world's sole superpower. Opinions differ on when China's rise changed the United States' position from an uncontested sole superpower to a contested one. However, most agree that this happened sometime in the ...