"Not 'hardiness;' 'slavery and ethnic cleaning.' We lucked into one of the most fertile and resource-rich places on the planet at a time when the people who had been living here were too weak to keep us from dispossessing and murdering them, and then we used slaves from Africa on plantations and the wretched of Europe and Asia in factories and public works projects to throw the economy into overdrive. Then we were the only ones that hadn't been bombed into dust as part of the greatest atrocity in human history."

I won't deny this one bit, but that's what made us a *regional* power. We emerged as a global power after 1945, and that was mostly because we waited until 1941 to get involved (not by choice) and only really got fully involved come 1943 when Germany and Japan had already exhausted themselves in fighting and had their logistical supply lines stretched out. We only really fought in WW2 in earnest from about 1943-1945, but we came out of it on top of the world. Then you had Bretton-Woods and the US being the only unscathed large scale economy in the world as Asia and Europe laid in ashes while the US mainland was left unscathed at a time when we had our domestic production in full swing to support the war efforts. THAT is what made us a global power rather than a regional one. We also had the most intact standing army leftover having suffered "merely" 50,000 casualties in a global war that took the lives of over 50 million.