Why the USA's Greatest Strength is its Geography

The United States is a massive superpower that dominates much of the world. Most of it can be traced back to geography. It is the single most important thing that allowed the USA to become the powerhouse it is today. The USA possess hundreds of unique advantages from water, to trade, resources, they have possibly the best geography in the entire world.

For starters, the USA is a massive country that possesses huge amounts of natural resources. The US is the top oil producing country in the world, 3rd in coal production, 1st in natural gas production, 1st in timber (wood) production, etc.  In addition, the United States has the 2nd largest amount of arable land (land good for food production) after India. This has allowed the US to stay more or less independently sustainable, and less reliant on the rest of the world.

Another massive advantage is the USA's access to water. The USA is connected to the world's 2 biggest oceans, giving them access to practically the entire world for trade. While landlocked countries such as Ethiopia, have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to use other countries ports, the USA avoids most of these expensive taxes by doing absolutely nothing. Water stress is another big problem that around 25% of the world currently faces. This is when the water resources in a region/country are insufficient to meet its needs. While some parts of the US do face water stress, specifically Arizona, California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nebraska, other regions have a ample supply of water, such as the region around the Great Lakes.

Due to the large supply of water in certain areas like the Midwest, food production can be extremely high. In addition to all this, massive river systems span across most of the USA and have been a constant in the trading systems since their independence.

The USA is the hardest country to invade in the entire world, and for very good reasons. Aside from it's massive military, and heavily armed population, the USA's geography gives it a massive advantage. For starters, the USA only borders 2 countries, both of which the US maintains very good relations with. So an invasion from a neighboring country would be quite difficult, and realistically not happen anytime soon, unless some massive change happens within the alliance systems of North America. Like I mentioned before, the USA also borders the 2 largest oceans in the world making any invasion expensive and very time consuming. Vice versa, whenever the USA wants to send soldiers somewhere, it is costly and takes extended periods of time to get them there. To solve that, the USA has military bases all over the world which makes it easier to some degree. While places like Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico, could be taken very easily (geographically speaking) any attempt to take the mainland would be a grueling, extremely long operation, that would cost billions of dollars.

The Rocky, Appalachian, and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges would all cause extreme difficulties for anyone trying to reach more inland areas such as Missouri, and the 4 deserts in the Western USA aren't really helping that. Lastly, the USA is a massive country of nearly 3.8 million square miles that span many different climates, which will make any invading army have to constantly change their approaches as they move to different regions with different climates and geographies.

To showcase this, lets take the Civil War as an example, it was the bloodiest war in US history with around 655,000 deaths. That was about 2% of the total US population at the time. WW2 for comparison, was the second bloodiest war in US history with 405,399 deaths. For comparison, that was about 0.3% of the population. Compare that to Russia who had around 27 million deaths. That's more than 66 times as many Americans. Apply this to basically every war that the USA has ever fought in. Its a simple fact of life. If the war is being fought in country A, where country B is attacking them, country A will have more losses because of civilian casualties, famines, disease etc, that are caused by the war there. Vietnam is a perfect example, 58,220 Americans died in Vietnam, while 1-3 million Vietnamese died. The comparison isn't even close. The USA has managed to dodge bullet after bullet, because they've just never really been invaded before.

Thanks to the USA's extremely overpowered geography, they've managed to flourish for many, many years, becoming the superpower we know them as today. Also I feel like I should mention this, but Argentina actually had a lot of similar advantages to the USA like climate, arable land, and lots of natural resources. It was pretty possible they could've developed like the USA, and became a superpower, but in the end, it just never really happened.

Anyway, that's all I have to say, and I hope you enjoyed this :)