The United States: The End of Global Leadership?

Abstract

All countries have distinctive, long-standing traditions concerning appropriate relationships between government and private business, which tend to hold whatever political party is in power. The United States has, like the rest, its own unique perspectives which result from a particular mix of historical circumstances and ideological justifications. Yet the United States is not just any other country. Since its foundation, it has conceived itself as existing to show the rest of the world the path to free government, free individual enterprise and free markets. Once it had become the richest, most powerfuJ country on earth, it took a dominant global leadership role in ordering and supporting trade relations and fostering economic development. ln the post-World War II period, the United States economy was the engine that pulled other capalist countries out if ruinous conditions and into unprecendented prosperity.