Leadership has never meant full control of world politics. There has always been a lot of fiction mixed with the facts about the American century. The peak of America’s share of world power resources was from 1945—when the U.S. had nearly half the world economy—to 1970, when the U.S. share of world product returned to its prewar level of a quarter of the world product. Yet even during this period of peak influence, the United States often failed to get what it wanted: Witness Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons; communist takeovers of China and Vietnam; stalemate in the Korean War; and Soviet suppression of the revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
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