Mises Institute By José Niño
“What starts here changes the world.”
The University of Texas at Austin’s motto not only applies to the research university’s overall impact on world affairs, but also to the outsized role cultural and political developments within the United States have on the rest of the planet.
Ever since it became the world’s premier superpower after World War II, the US has left its mark from New York City all the way to Tokyo. Doubly so during the Cold War, when the US used, as geopolitical analyst Niccolo Soldo described, the “four cultural ICBMs” of Coca-Cola, rock ’n’ roll, Bugs Bunny, and Levi’s Jeans to project soft power abroad in its struggle with the Soviet Union.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the US entered a unipolar moment in the 1990s when it seemed that it had no peer competitors on the horizon. However, the rise of China and Russia as more assertive geopolitical actors in the last fifteen years has gradually whittled away at this state of unipolarity.
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