Power and Superpower: The Impact of Two World Wars on America’s International Role

Abstract

The emergence of the United States as a “superpower” was a phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century, yet it had been predicted long before. Perhaps the most distinguished prophet was Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, who concluded the first volume of Democracy in America with the forecast that one day the United States and Russia would each “hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.” But many others spoke in the same vein. In 1866, for instance, de Tocqueville’s compatriot, the economist Michel Chevalier, urged Europe to unify in the face of the “political colossus that has been created on the other side of the Atlantic” and foresaw future armed conflict between the two continents. In 1882, Constantin Frantz, the German political commentator, considered it virtually inevitable “that the New World would outstrip the Old World in the not far distant future,” while the English historian J. R. Seeley predicted two years later that within the lifetime of his students, “Russia and the United States will surpass in power the states now called great as much as the great country-states of the sixteenth century surpassed Florence.”1