In 1945, the United States became the guarantor of an international political and economic system that, by the end of the Cold War, was global. Today, America sustains that position primarily through two elements of its national power: its peerless military and its dollar currency, upon which the international monetary and economic system is largely based. A third element initially enabled that hegemony in the 1940s: the national economy—that is, the Nation’s industrial might. Much of that element is no longer present today.