So how many of these episodes happen before the USA is no longer considered a super power?
I feel like this is almost inevitable.
Well, the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and collapsed in 1991. So I'd say a matter of months at this point.
A super power or the super power? We'll be a super power for awhile even with these. We're already not the super power imo.
We'll be able to defend ourselves from China or Russia for a while (possibly a very very long time). But if we turn inward to increasing political strife while running increasingly large deficits and choose not to intervene overseas are we a superpower?
EDITed to add:
su·per·pow·er
noun
a very powerful and influential nation (used especially with reference to the US and the former Soviet Union when these were perceived as the two most powerful nations in the world). - Oxford Languages
I mean when given that definition, it's hard to definitively argue that we still are. I would say that comparatively speaking we are in the top 3 of influential nations in the world, but our influence is diminishing rapidly.
US GDP is about $20 trillion, China is about $13 trillion, #3 is Japan down at $5 trillion and Russia is at #11 at $1.5 trillion just below Canada and ahead of South Korea.
The only thing that ever made Russia a superpower was their outsized military relative to their economy and population.
People commonly throw around the statistic that the US spends more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. That's BS for multiple reasons such as the fact that an American soldier is paid multiple times what a Chinese Soldier is paid. However, it's very telling from an influence standpoint. I found an article saying a Colonel in Beijing would be paid about $3,200 per month (20,000 yuan) - plus presumably some benefits like housing that would bring that to an equivalent of $40-50k/year. A Colonel (typically would command a few thousand people) in the American military will be paid about $120k in base salary alone and if they were stationed in Washington D.C. would get an annual housing allowance (completely tax free mind you) of about $40k/year. With other benefits (free medical, etc.) that's more like $170k+ or about 4x their Chinese equivalent.
English is the most common second language in the world with dozens of countries teaching it to most students. American culture/media dominates the rest of the world. How many Chinese or Russian movies, tv shows, songs, etc. are exported compared to their American equivalent? That's pretty influential and has been for many decades. Does a bright kid from Nigeria or Paraguay dream of going to a university in America or China? Where do people try to immigrate to? It's not Russia unless you're trying to get out of somewhere even poorer like Tajikistan.
US-developed technology dominates the world. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, Visa, Intel, Oracle, Qualcomm, etc.
China is certainly catching up - though I question how much of that GDP will evaporate if/when people finally realize the emperor has no clothes and their life savings that have been invested in an empty apartment in a poorly-constructed building is not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Chinese real estate market is the largest asset class in the world, but a lot of it has been propped up by the government and is a huge bubble waiting to burst. Developers can only build so many empty buildings and sell them to investors. The second largest real estate developer in China, Evergrande, is in default and is on the verge of bankruptcy. They can't find enough suckers to put a deposit on a new apartment when they have thousands of unfinished projects they can't afford to finish. They can't borrow on the open market and all of the shadow banking is drying up as well.