Every few years, the same prediction returns: the American century is ending. China is rising. Europe is regulating. India is scaling. The Gulf is investing. The Global South is demanding a larger voice.

Meanwhile, the United States looks divided, indebted, politically exhausted, and often unable to repair even the visible things that are broken.  The argument is not foolish. America has real problems, and some of them are self-inflicted. But the decline story often makes one basic mistake: it looks at Washington and assumes it has seen America.

Power in this century is not measured only by land, population, or annual GDP. It is measured by the systems through which the world works: operating systems, cloud infrastructure, research universities, capital markets, artificial-intelligence platforms, pharmaceutical laboratories, military alliances, satellites, entertainment, payment rails, search engines, app stores, and social networks.

These systems form what I would call the American stack: a layered structure of mutually reinforcing advantages. Once seen this way, American power looks less like a single pillar and more like a web.

Start with the most ordinary layer: the device in your hand. The two dominant mobile operating systems are Android and iOS, both designed by American companies. StatCounter's April 2026 global data put Android at 67.35 % of the mobile operating-system market and iOS at 32.55%, leaving almost nothing for the rest.

On personal computers, Microsoft Windows remains one of the defining platforms of modern work. Whether someone opens a laptop in Paris, carries an iPhone in Beirut, or uses an Android phone in Nairobi, the basic software architecture of daily life is still overwhelmingly American in origin.

The internet itself has a similar genealogy. Its roots run through ARPANET, the U.S. government research network that sent its first message from UCLA in 1969. Even the very directory of the internet—the Domain Name System that translates web addresses into numerical IP addresses—remains anchored in the American stack.

While the U.S. government formally relinquished direct oversight of ICANN in 2016, the organization remains bound by California law, and the critical root servers and top-level domain registries are overwhelmingly operated by American firms. Moreover, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together accounted for roughly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure spending in late 2025.

This matters because cloud is no longer just a place to store files. It is where companies run databases, train models, process payments, deliver media, manage logistics, and increasingly conduct scientific work.

The United States still has the most influential higher-education system in the world, not because every American university is excellent, but because the top tier is unusually deep and unusually connected to money, laboratories, hospitals, companies, and global networks. In the QS World University Rankings 2026, 26 of the world’s top 100 universities in the United States with MIT again ranked first.

More importantly, American universities absorb ambition from everywhere. Open Doors reported 1,177,766 international students in the United States in the 2024-25 academic year. They made up 6 % of U.S. higher education, contributed nearly $55 billion to the economy in 2024, and supported more than 355,000 jobs. Those numbers matter economically, but the deeper effect is strategic.

For generations, the United States has attracted talent, financed it, trained it, and given it a path to turn ideas into companies, patents, therapies, and platforms.  This is also why the research story is more subtle than simple publication counts. China has made extraordinary gains and now leads in several measures of scientific volume.

But research impact, commercialization, medical translation, and institutional depth are different questions. Clarivate's 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list still placed the United States first, with 2,670 awards, or 37.4 % of the global total. Mainland China was second, with 1,406 awards, or 19.7 %. The gap has narrowed, but it has not disappeared.

The life-sciences layer may be the most underappreciated part of the American advantage. The United States does not merely publish biomedical research; it turns research into therapies, firms, regulatory pathways, and global markets. In 2024, U.S. firms invested about $153 billion in pharmaceutical and biotechnology R&D, roughly 54 % of the global total in that sector.

That is why so many of the decisive medical platforms of our time - from mRNA technology to cancer immunotherapies, obesity drugs, gene therapies, and neurological treatments - remain tied to American universities, American capital, American firms, or the FDA-centered ecosystem.

Then comes artificial intelligence, the layer that may reorganize all the others. The leading generative-AI ecosystem is still overwhelmingly American: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, and the cloud providers around them. Stanford's 2026 AI Index reported that U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025, more than 23 times the private investment recorded for China. It also counted 1,953 newly funded AI companies in the United States, more than ten times the next closest country.

This does not mean the AI race is settled. China has powerful models, enormous engineering capacity, strong state direction, and companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance, Baidu, and DeepSeek. Europe remains strong in science, regulation, and industrial applications.

But the American advantage is that AI is not isolated from the rest of the system. It sits on top of cloud, venture capital, advanced chips, elite universities, defense spending, enterprise software, consumer platforms, and deep capital markets.

The most important weakness in that layer is also clear: advanced semiconductor manufacturing. The United States dominates chip design, software, cloud deployment, and many of the firms that define AI demand. But the fabrication of the most advanced chips remains heavily concentrated in Taiwan. The U.S. International Trade Administration notes that Taiwan accounts for more than 60 % of global foundry revenue and more than 90 % of leading-edge chip manufacturing. Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and many other American firms depend heavily on TSMC's advanced manufacturing.  This is a strategic chokepoint.

The next phase of American power will therefore depend not only on designing the best chips, but also on hardening allied fabrication, advanced packaging, equipment supply, energy access, and regional resilience. The CHIPS Act and new fabrication investments are attempts to address this, but the work is far from complete.

The Energy Edge

There is another physical layer beneath the digital one: energy. AI, cloud computing, robotics, and data centers may sound weightless, but they are electricity-hungry machines. Here the United States has an advantage that Europe and China do not possess in the same form. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in May 2026 that American total energy production reached a record 107 quadrillion BTUs in 2025, driven by natural gas, crude oil, natural-gas liquids, and renewables.

A country that can produce software, chips, cloud infrastructure, and abundant energy is structurally different from a country dependent on imported fuel or exposed to maritime energy chokepoints.

Food Security

Food belongs in the same category. The United States is not autarkic, but it remains one of the world's great agricultural producers and exporters. Its farms, inland waterways, rail networks, ports, futures markets, seed companies, machinery firms, and agribusiness networks form a food-security layer behind the more glamorous layers of the stack. A digital superpower with energy depth and agricultural depth has more room for error than one without them.

Venture Capitalism

Capital is the engine that makes the system self-renewing. America does not merely have large companies; it has a machine for producing the next large companies. Venture capital is not just money. It is a culture of risk, a legal environment, a network of universities and founders, an exit market, an acquisition market, and a tolerance for failure that is still difficult to reproduce at scale.

In mid-May 2026, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla together were valued at well above $20 trillion. Market capitalization is not GDP, and it fluctuates daily, so the comparison should not be abused. But it is still revealing.

A handful of American firms command valuations comparable to the annual output of major national economies because they sit at the center of chips, search, cloud, smartphones, digital advertising, social networks, enterprise software, e-commerce, logistics, electric vehicles, and AI infrastructure.

Finance is another layer as well. Despite years of predictions about de-dollarization, the dollar remains the dominant global reserve currency. IMF COFER data put the dollar at 56.77 % of allocated foreign-exchange reserves in the fourth quarter of 2025, still far ahead of the euro and the Chinese renminbi. U.S. capital markets remain the deepest in the world. The world still saves, borrows, prices risk, raises capital, and settles crises through American financial architecture more than through any alternative.

The Military Dimension

Military power adds another dimension. SIPRI estimated U.S. military spending at $954 billion in 2025, compared with $336 billion for China and $190 billion for Russia. But the deeper American advantage is not simply the size of the budget. It is logistics, naval reach, air power, intelligence networks, nuclear deterrence, defense technology, and alliances across NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Gulf, and beyond. China has partners and clients.

Investmentsin Space 

Space shows how American power has changed. It is no longer only government power. It is public-private power. SpaceX, Starlink, satellite launch capacity, reconnaissance architecture, GPS, NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and commercial low-Earth-orbit networks have made space part of the same stack. Satellites now matter for broadband, surveillance, navigation, emergency response, battlefield resilience, shipping, agriculture, and finance. In this layer, as in AI, private firms and state capability reinforce each other.

Digital Soft Power

Culture is easier to dismiss, but it should not be. American power is not only imposed. It is consumed. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Apple TV+, Hollywood, American music, sports brands, gaming, animation, prestige television, and social-media platforms shape the global imagination. Other countries produce brilliant content. Some of it travels widely. But no country has matched the American ability to industrialize culture and distribute it at planetary scale.

The digital public square is even more consequential. Meta reported 3.58 billion daily active people across its family of apps in December 2025. Add YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, X, Snapchat, Threads, and other U.S.-origin platforms, and the point becomes clear: American companies do not merely host communication.

They shape advertising, politics, identity, news distribution, activism, commerce, and entertainment. The world argues with American power on platforms built or scaled by American firms.

American Dominance in a Changing World...

The strongest argument against American dominance is not that America lacks power; it is that several parts of the stack are under stress at the same time. Political polarization can weaken strategy. Debt can limit future choices. Immigration politics can damage the talent engine. Permitting delays can slow infrastructure. Semiconductor dependence exposes the system to Taiwan Strait risk. Critical minerals create new vulnerabilities in lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, gallium, germanium, and rare earths. AI will require massive energy investment. These constraints are the agenda for the next phase of American strategy.

The United States must maintain enough openness to attract talent, enough institutional competence to build infrastructure, enough industrial policy to reduce chokepoints, enough capital depth to fund new technologies, and enough political seriousness to keep allies aligned.

The United States remains powerful because it does not merely participate in the modern world. It built, financed, scaled, or governs many of the systems through which the modern world operates. To displace it, another power would have to rival America not in one field, but in many at once. That may happen one day. History is not kind to permanent dominance.

But for now, the American lead is embedded in the routines of the twenty-first century. The world may resent American power, regulate it, compete with it, imitate it, and predict its end. But every day, billions of people still live inside systems that are American-built, American-financed, American-designed, or American-scaled. That is not just influence. It is dominance.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar.