Yes, the US is not a traditional hegemon. Which would be a political entity controlling territory beyond it's own boundaries.
The reality is the US is simply humanity bumping up against the edge of the global petri dish, after about ten thousand years of, "go forth and multiply."
Our only real cultural imperative is personal success, aka, the American Dream. Riding a several hundred year wave of geographic expansion and technological complexity, turbo charged by the last forty years of compounding debt.
The problem is that debt doesn't matter, until it does. Then they come for your house and that American Dream is out on the streets.
When they do totally implode the dollar, the next level of civil authority with the size to issue viable currencies will be the states, then foreign policy goes to be between Texas and California, etc.
While those Old World countries might seem like boring old dowagers everyone wants to leave, for sexy America, the fact is they have the strength of several thousand years of the ups and downs of history, behind their national identities, that our melting pot does not have.
The physics of society is that government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking serve the function of blood and the circulation system.
The problem with public government and private banking is that it has given financial interests the upper hand, over the state functions of government.
To the point the government is effectively hollowed out, leaving bunch of flunkies, whose only real job is to create the debt the banks need to function.
People are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, feedback generated reality, so while we see money as signal to extract and store, markets need it to circulate. We see it as commodity, but it functions as a contract.
Even Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but consider that in the body, blood is the medium, while bone, muscle and fat are stores.
So as a contract, to store the asset side of the ledger, you need debt to back it. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Consider the Federal debt has been growing since the New deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. Then WW2 came along as the greatest public works project in history and the die was cast.
The advantage for the corporations to pouring all this public wealth into the military is that it doesn't empower any elements that would question their control, gives a veneer of patriotism and creates a tool of real control.
Yet the real function is simply to burn through this wealth, so more can be borrowed into existence.
Since you have some military background, can you think of any time in history where the degrees of real strategic ineptitude of the last 20 years wouldn't have had those responsible taken out and shot? Obviously the goal is not winning anything. Now all the media and Hollywood blather over Ukraine is starting to fall apart.
Russia and China have effectively gone back to private forms of government, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO's. While all we have is Larry Fink.
The mother of all reality checks is in the mail.
