Um...hate to break it to you, but that's a mix of irrelevance, confusing outdated circumstances for current ones, spin doctoring and straight up
American exceptionalism.
that the US has the best resources to population ratio
Broadly irrelevant. The USA is not some unexplored frontier in which resources are free for the taking so long as you can plant your homestead there. It's a very mature capitalistic society in which those resources overwhelmingly belong to corporations. Farmers (who
nominally have large swatches of land to their name) need to be subsidized by the government to eek out a living because their Return on Investment is so low. And we have some of the most extreme wealth disparity on the planet, with the top 1% of households owning 31% of the country's wealth while the bottom 50% collectively only holds 3%.
You might as well have been arguing that Feudal Europe had a good 'resources to population ratio'. Even if we take that as true for the sake of argument, it means bupkis when those resources are claimed and so heavily concentrated under the aristocracy and nobility.
a net positive agricultural sector in terms of cheap food for all types of food, minus specialties
Cheap food due to the government putting its finger on the scale through the aforementioned subsidies to farmers. Never mind that, despite this, the availability of nutrition and quality (as opposed to simple calories) are radically uneven, resulting in the US simultaneously having both one of the highest obesity rates on the planet, and one of the highest rates of food insecurity.
has the military behind it
Which is only as good as the presumption that the military will be used well. Never mind that the US's actual military record is appreciably worse than commonly represented. E.g., the common story we're told in school is that the US almost single-handedly won World War 2, but the fact of the matter is that the Axis had overextended and momentum had been turning against them by the time the US got properly pulled in, and even then we had the unfair advantage of being half a world away from the enemy combatants, meaning that we got away relatively unscathed largely because both our allies and the ocean were a buffer between us and the enemies.
Similarly, we get cases like Vietnam and Korea which we bill internally as successes, but by any reasonably metric, were either failures or stalemates, despite our on-paper military superiority. Our claims of success were a function of getting frustrated with the stagnant war, and then looking for a small military success to end on, which we moved the goalposts to claim represented winning the
war rather than just that
battle.
Point being: our record is far from as flattering as we pretend it is.
...DUDE.
1) That's only relevant if you're at war with said neighbors (or are planning to be). Otherwise, weak neighbors are a
bad thing, because those neighbors
should be your allies.
2) That's patently false. Mexico and Canada may not be in the top 5 in terms of military strength, but they're both easily in the top quartile.
and the most disposable income for a country of its size.
Again, not what we pretend, due to the aforementioned wealth inequality concentrating that disposible income at the very top. In actuality, roughly 62% of americans are living paycheck to paycheck (
https://www.jpmorganchase.com/insti...lnerable-are-americans-to-unexpected-expenses).
And the fact that my parents, who worked blue-collar positions, were able to buy a 2,100-square-foot house with only savings from their work in China and the US in a top 20 city.
Good for them. Truly. But that's the circumstance from generations ago, which had a much more favorable housing market. Have you checked the housing market lately? It's not good.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/
And it's been getting worse at a positively idiotic rate.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2...res-50-more-income-than-it-did-five-years-ago
The market today is much more expensive than the one your parents bought their house in. When someone says "my parents bought X house on Y income," the relevant question is
could someone in the same class today replicate that? And the answer is overwhelmingly
no.
To put more concrete numbers on it, IIRC, my father said he got his starter home for somewhere in the neighborhood of $72,000. You know what the median starter home price was last year? $250,000. That's already an increase of around 350%. And in over 200 cities, you can't get a starter home for less than $1,000,000. You know how much real wages have risen since 1970? Less than 10%. Housing is enormously more expensive today than it was when our parents got their houses.
And this carries forward to a lot of the other perks you're citing: The veracity of the statements about living here have a big red asterisk of
if you can afford it attached to them.
Shall I go on?
The US certainly has its advantages, but the socioeconomic and political circumstances are increasingly ominously reminiscent of those of France by the time of Louis XVI, including the wealth concentration, the rising costs of living vs stagnant wages, and the fracturing legitimacy and loss of institutional trust, to name but a few examples.
There hasn't been a civil war in the US since the 1860s, minus the 1960s, which almost led to it. We are the kings of multiculturalism, immigration, and openness for a nation of our size.
...My dude, I seriously question your perspective and geopolitical awareness if "hasn't had a civil war in over a century" is something you perceive to be praiseworthy. Would you also indulge in French exceptionalism on the same grounds, considering that the French Revolutionary Wars ended in 1802?