As a Canadian (and therefore somewhat neutral) I would like to point out that the greatest country that existed based on RL's criteria must have been Imperial Rome, then 19th century Britain. Total and effective world dominance of the known land resources, populations and oceans. History has its own warnings, both empires fell, under ignominious circumstances. It is way too early to say whether the US will reach the heights or become just another contender. I suspect that the center of gravity in the 21-century will move away from the US towards Asia, or perhaps a joint Eurasian block (current EU plus a revitalised Russia and its Asian satellite states). But what REALLY bugs me about this post is the implicit proprietary ideal that science somehow belongs to any one nation. It doesn't; that is one reason why it is so powerful, it transcends the purely local issues of country, race, politics and creed. There has been no other human enterprise that does this. If say Mendel publishes a paper in Brno, and it is valid, it doesn’t make one iota of difference that the big centers of political and intellectual power of the time were in London, Vienna, Paris, or Berlin. Good science is good science no matter where it comes from, what race the authors may be, what their politics are, their philosophy or religion. If someone today publishes a brilliant paper from, say Guatemala, it is still; a brilliant paper. If someone in Washington publishes garbage, it is still garbage,

RL also states "We unleashed democracy on the world". Not really. Democracy is a Greek concept, that originates in Athens and some other city states about 2500 years ago. Republic is a Roman concept (Res publica, the thing of the people) a form of government effectively abolished by the Caesars (lessons for the Bushites -let's hope not). The earliest Western European democracy (that I know of, there may well be others) was probably in Medieval Iceland, the Althing. The modern version of idea of one man one vote appears to have emerged from the debacle that followed England's civil war and the rise of Oliver Cromwell- notably in the Putney debates between the New Model Army (pro-Democracy)and Cromwell's cronies (pro the landed gentry). Certainly England maintained a parliamentary system that approached Democracy well before the American Declaration of Independence - notably in the Bill of Rights (I think 1688 but don't jump on me if I've got the date wrong) that constrained the Monarchy and made it pretty clear that in all important matters i.e. taxes, it was parliament that counted.