Now the role of the United States as the leader of an anti-communist crusade is obsolete. But in a world that has gone beyond the Soviet-American balance of terror, there are new and pressing demands for the application of American power. By all accounts, the United States is the greatest power in the world. China must modernize while reducing the enormous economic gap between the city and the country. America's cultural hegemony is as overwhelming as its military power.
American entertainment ranks with the aerospace industry as one of the two largest U.S. exports.
Moreover, unlike aerospace, which at least has some degree of competition from Europe's Airbus consortium, there is no foreign entertainment industry that even remotely challenges the reach and influence of American movies and television. It is in the nature of things that the great powers resent any nation that tries to exert hegemony over the globe. That other nations, great and small, from Africa to Australia, are dependent on the United States is everywhere in evidence. That question was singularly evident at a meeting in April 1997 between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin. At a Moscow summit, they pledged to work together to limit American influence.