The United States of America is the richest country on Earth.

There are two reasons for this. First, the U.S. systematically attracted more immigrants than any other developed country. Second, its GDP per capita is the highest in the world among big countries. It surpassed all other empires sometime in the late 1800s:

In fact, the U.S. has followed an uncanny trend of nearly two percent growth in per capita GDP for over two centuries:

Why are we so rich?

Some believe it’s the result of democracy, rule of law, the U.S. dollar, a strong military, an entrepreneurial culture… but what if these factors are threatened, as many believe they are now? Will the U.S. keep growing or fall due to mismanagement? Will China surpass it?

Fortunately for the U.S., it sits on the most advantaged piece of land in the world — and this is not changing anytime soon, so its power will likely keep growing.

Here’s why geography is the United States’ superpower.

1. Size

The U.S. is the fourth largest country by surface area. It spans an entire continent and reaches two oceans. Only China, Russia, and Canada are larger. But as we’ll see, Canada is directly neutralized, and China and Russia are indirectly neutralized. Much of Canada and Russia are unproductive, and the U.S. has a series of advantages that China could only dream of.

Two maps are enough to highlight this; the first explains our impregnability:

The second map explains America’s wealth:

The Mississippi Basin is the fourth largest drainage basin in the world and occupies 40 percent of the contiguous 48 U.S. states¹, touching 32 states in total. Eleven states directly take their name from it.² It’s formed via the incredible funnel effect of the Sierra Nevada / Rocky Mountains to the west and the Appalachians to the east.

Why is this so useful? Because it’s unbelievably fertile.

2. Farmland

The entire Mississippi Basin is naturally well irrigated.

It’s also super flat, making the Mississippi Basin the world’s largest contiguous piece of farmland.

As a result, the U.S. is the third largest producer of food worldwide, after China and India, and the largest exporter.

3. Mississippi Trade

This huge and flat river basin contains many navigable rivers.³ Together, they give the U.S. more commercially navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Here’s one awe-inspiring fact: The head of navigation of the Mississippi (the farthest you can navigate upstream) is Minneapolis, a brutal 3,000km (~1,800mi) inland.

This is extremely useful, because moving goods over water is 10 to 30 times cheaper than moving them overland.

Cheap transportation is one of the main reasons why Rome, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., and the U.S. got rich and created empires. Conversely, even in modern times, it’s common for Russian and Kazakh crops to occasionally rot before they can reach market due to long, unreliable connections and poor infrastructure. It’s not unusual for a significant portion of the Russian grain crop — millions of hectares, some years — to remain unharvested!

Most countries require massive investments in transportation networks to reach their full potential, but not the Mississippi Basin. The vast majority of our prime agricultural lands are within 200km of a navigable river. Road and rail are still used for collection, but nearly omnipresent river ports allow the basin’s farmers to easily and cheaply ship their products to markets not just in North America but throughout the world.

Rivers are more useful than coastlines because:

• Navigable rivers service twice the land (rivers have two banks, coasts one).

• Rivers are not subject to tidal forces, easing the construction and maintenance of infrastructure.

• Storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, forcing oceanic ports to evacuate.

Basically, the Mississippi Basin has the best farmland in the world and supports the most efficient way to transport crops, making the region fabulously rich.

4. Political Integration

The center of Europe is mountainous, containing many rivers flowing in various directions. Each river system created its own society, giving rise to the relatively small-scale individual European nationalities we know today.

Now look at rivers in the U.S. Compare the Mississippi with the Atlantic Seaboard to the east.

Because the Appalachians Mountains run parallel to the Atlantic coast, rivers flow from the mountains to the coast and seldom cross. Each river developed its own economy, its own hinterland, its own port city on the coast. This is one of the reasons why there were once 13 relatively independent colonies. Without this natural division between them, the Civil War would have been much less likely.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi is one large and interconnected system, which makes political integration easy. All of the peoples of the basin are part of the same economic system, ensuring constant contact and common interests. Regional proclivities obviously still arise, but this is not Northern Europe.

We see this as early as the 1700s, when the entire basin was claimed by Spain and France.

Incredibly, despite the Mississippi’s vast length (over 3,000km), it barely slopes 200m. This makes its water slow, and hence, navigable. It also gives rise to another boon: the basin is navigable until just a few miles from the Great Lakes.

5. The Great Lakes

America contains the largest freshwater lake system in the world. The region’s de facto capital, Chicago, ballooned because it’s the hinge between the Mississippi Basin and the Great Lakes region.

This means the gigantic Mississippi Basin and the Great Lakes are seamlessly integrated through cheap water transportation — which got even better after canals were built in the area — and both connect to the ocean. This network of rivers and lakes turns dozens of major inland U.S. cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland into virtual seaports. U.S. goods, again, gain an advantage.

Unlike the Greater Mississippi Basin, the Great Lakes are not naturally navigable due to winter freezes and obstacles such as Niagara Falls. But over the past 200 years, extensive hydrological engineering — mostly thanks to Canada — has allowed us to fully navigate the lakes. Since 1960, the Great Lakes region itself has functioned as a secondary, self-contained water transport system, opening up even more lands for productive use and accelerating North American capital generation even further. The U.S. benefits more from this system than Canada, because our lands are warmer and more fertile — but because the Great Lakes constitute Canada’s only maritime transport option that connects to the ocean, they financed it.

6. The Intracoastal Waterways

Ships can travel from Boston to Mexico barely touching open seas, protected instead by barrier islands that cover nearly the entire Atlantic coast.

Here’s what one of these intracoastal waterways looks like:

If you combine the rivers of the Mississippi Basin and the intracoastal waterways, you’ve got more internal navigable waterways than in the rest of the world combined. And, in addition to serving as a sort of oceanic river, the intracoastal waterways’ proximity to the Mississippi Delta extends Mississippi shipping further, supporting the political and economic unification of the Mississippi Basin and the eastern coastal plain.

This is why most of our biggest ports are in the Mississippi Basin or on the Gulf of Mexico — but not all of them.

7. Natural Coastal Ports

The East Coast also contains gigantic natural ports, thanks to rivers flowing down from the Appalachians, which form estuaries ideal for protecting ports from tides and storms:

The same is true on the West Coast, with the San Francisco Bay and Seattle’s Puget Sound:

These ports enable heavy trade with limited investment in port infrastructure, and (again) cheap transportation. A great way to get rich!

So, the Mississippi Basin is the continent’s core, and whoever controls it will dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes, easily producing lots of food and other goods, which it can trade anywhere in the world cheaply and fast, making it a world superpower.

But in the 20th and 21st centuries, a superpower also needs power. It needs energy to dominate. Luckily, the U.S. has plenty.

8. Energy

The United States is the #1 producer of both oil and gas in the world.

We got there by exploiting our enormous oil and gas resources.

We have the fourth largest number of natural gas reserves in the world and the ninth largest number of oil reserves.

Why does the U.S. have such incredible hydrocarbon resources?

Because it used to have a shallow inland sea! Such seas are ideal for breeding life. Nutrients can’t fall too deep, remaining accessible to sea life. Their corpses eventually do fall, pile up, and become oil and gas a few million years later.

With inland navigable waterways, abundant farmland, natural ports, and fuel reserves, the U.S. is ideally positioned to produce wealth.

Luckily, it’s also ideally positioned to defend itself, because it’s a naturally impregnable fortress.

9. Oceanic Barriers

The United States sits between the world’s two largest oceans, making any invasion by sea virtually impossible. Germany couldn’t even invade Britain across the 15-mile English Channel during World War II; the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are massive 2,000-mile-plus barriers.

Maybe you’re thinking American history disproves this, because:

1. Japan attacked Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor.

2. The U.K.’s navy led two wars to U.S. soil (the War of Independence and the War of 1812).

But Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it couldn’t reach farther, and it was an aerial attack. It would have been impossible for Japan to put boots on the ground across such a great distance. Even the U.S. had a hard time during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, given the distance.

The same is true on the Atlantic. The U.K. carried out two attacks on the U.S., including blockades that starved our local economy. But at the time, the U.K. was the most powerful country in the world, with the strongest navy, yet it still couldn’t beat a weak, fledgling U.S. Not only that, the U.S. was limited to the East Coast, and most battles stayed close to it.

Why?

10. Eastern Mountain Barrier

To the east, the Appalachians are not too high (~max 6,700ft / 2000m), and yet they were enough to stop the Brits from penetrating deeper into the interior.

Essentially, the East Coast is exposed to seaborne attacks, which is one of the primary reasons the U.S. expanded westward. Settlements to the west of the Appalachians could utilize the buffer of both the coast and the mountains, guarding against naval attacks.

And, to the west, the enormous Sierra Nevada and Rockies are both high and dry. Anyone who manages to get a foothold on the West Coast would still never be able to control those mountains, and would have been repelled soon after.

This is why a scenario like the one depicted in The Man in the High Castle, in which the U.S. is hypothetically conquered by Japan and the Third Reich, would have been impossible.

11. Ice Barrier

The U.S.’s population is eight times that of Canada because most of Canada is ice. On top of that, most of its soil is infertile due to the Canadian Shield, a large area of igneous and metamorphic rock, which means its agricultural potential is limited, and with that, its independence. The result? Eighty percent of its population is spread across three disconnected regions. Each region is tightly connected to the much more economically fruitful U.S.

This, in turn, makes Canada exceptionally exposed to the U.S. Hostility from Canada is impossible. And most of the border between the U.S. and Canada is made of lakes and forests: hard to pass, easy to defend. As a result, the U.S. is very safe from Canada.

12. Desert Mountain Barrier

Mexico is not Canada. It has a population of 130 million people, less than half that of the U.S. Per capita, it was just as rich the U.S. before the Industrial Revolution, and it used to be a mere 150km from our trade keystone: New Orleans. Whoever controls New Orleans controls the Mississippi, and with it the heartland of the U.S.

Not only that, New Orleans is swampy, which makes it hard to maintain an army there. Neighboring Texas, on the other hand, is made of forested plains and hills, ideal for hosting a foreign army.

Some U.S. statesmen probably thought: “Moving the border a bit farther south would be very convenient for us: Our neighboring country would be narrower, even more desertic, and farther from the key port of New Orleans.”

So, the U.S. supported English-speaking people settling in Texas, before fomenting a revolution against Mexico, and finally incorporating Texas as a U.S. state.

The U.S.–Mexico War didn’t only bring Texas to the union. It snatched 55 percent of Mexico, including land reaching to the Pacific, creating an even greater buffer with our southern neighbor, and effectively neutralizing Mexico as a potential threat:

What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports. Mexico’s north is too dry while its south is too wet — and both are too mountainous — to support major population centers or robust agricultural activities. Additionally, the terrain is just rugged enough — making transport just expensive enough — to make it difficult for the central government to enforce its writ. The result is the near lawlessness of the cartel lands in the north and the irregular spasms of secessionist activity in the south. —Stratfor

13. Global Buffers

The U.S. didn’t stop its defense at its borders. At the end of World War II, it deftly expanded its dominance at global scale.

• With the Monroe Doctrine, we claimed that no colonial power could set foot in the Americas — and largely succeeded.

• With NATO, we created a buffer to our east against Russia.

• Through our alliances with Japan and South Korea, and the purchase of Alaska, we created a buffer to our west against Russia.

• Through diplomacy with Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, we effectively expanded this buffer southward to contain China.

These countries are not just allies. They’ve been modeled on the U.S. system, so even under an antagonistic regime like Trump’s, they will remain firmly aligned with the U.S.

In sum, the United States has:

• Some of the best farmland in the world.

• The best naturally navigable waterways in the world.

• Amazing natural ports.

• All of these connect U.S. regions to each other, uniting them politically.

• It also has some of the best oil and gas resources to fuel its economy.

• It has several layers of defense to protect all this wealth, starting with the two largest oceans, one on each side.

• After the oceans, it has two insurmountable mountain barriers that further defend its heartland.

• Its neighbor to the north is sparsely populated because it’s too cold and infertile.

• Its neighbor to the south is weak and divided by a narrow mountainous desert.

• The U.S. has managed to extend its model to countries across the world, creating buffers that repel all the other natural superpowers: Russia, China, and India.

In a world that sees China climbing, and witnesses how the U.S. can shoot itself in the foot with policies like tariffs, it’s easy to fear that our country might be a has-been. But geography makes that impossible. The U.S. will always be rich, and nearly impossible to physically threaten.

I would personally never bet against the United States.

—Tomas Pueyo

This piece first appeared in Uncharted Territories.

FOOTNOTES

¹ 3.2M km² or 1.2M mi²

² The Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota, and Arkansas rivers are all affluents of the Mississippi. These 11 rivers thus take their name from the Mississippi basin.

³ The Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee and, of course, the Mississippi. And they’re not the only ones.