The world has some problems. Chief among them are an addiction to fossil fuels, and to power – manifest in this case by an overabundance of nuclear weapons.

America used to maintain it's grip on global power (let's be honest here folks and not pretend, okay?) with the almighty dollar backed by the almighty US Military. Now, America seeks energy dominance as well, as a means to further back the US dollar, especially against the threat of a loss of supremacy in nuclear weaponry.

But would the playing field really be leveled if the world gave up it's addictions to fossil fuels and nuclear weapons?

Let's think about this and perhaps see if a formal analysis might be in order.

Absent nuclear weapons, it's clear that America would still maintain military dominance. In fact, I don't imagine how the power balance in the world even considers nuclear weapons as a realistic element. They're in the background, but they do not affect any decisions made by the major powers of the world. Perhaps a more in-depth analysis is in order, and perhaps it might find there would be some change of balance. Perhaps not.

And what if the entire world gave up fossil fuels. Besides the shock, where would America truly be?

Innovation has always defined America, and innovation has always been driven by challenge. While today that challenge seems to be strictly limited to making as much money as possible damn everything else; America used to actually be defined by true innovation, and not to long ago. My generation were probably some of the most innovative, but we also became lazy (probably because our effing jobs got shipped overseas to...China, India, and other targets of Trump's trade tirade), and the later generations seem to have a spark of innovation in them as well.

So in a world of no fossil fuels, innovation will be the source of real power. This is natural because the definition of wealth is the ability to create, not money. Money is a concept that is represented by tokens with no real value but what's written on them. You can't make anything with money, but you can buy what you need to create. Or, you could just create yourself, by learning and having the skills and drive to do so: innovation, in other words.

With a simple change in attitude, brought on by necessity and a reason to get people off the couch (they could sure stand to lose a few pounds anyway), American innovation can once again be put into play and lead the world in the creation of alternative energy sources. And reaching back again to my generation, our youth was filled with propaganda telling us to conserve; thanks to the embargo of and thus extreme restriction in the supply of fossil fuels ironically; so again, America can also have an edge in changing their use of energy, reducing it to a saner level.

While it may seem improbable on the face of it, America doesn't really need nuclear weapons or fossil fuels to be the greatest nation on the planet. After all, a nation is a people, not it's energy or weapons.