The United States, once a backwater colony of Britain, has surpassed it in every way. By a massive margin too.
The GDP of the United States of America is ~18 trillion, and has been for many years, the single largest national economy on the planet.
Only when you take a combination of every single nation in the European Union can you get something that can even compete with the US.
We are an intellectual hyperpower. By any ranking, whether it is the Chinese, the Brits, or some good ol' American news agency, America has an absurdly disproportionate share of the best universities.
This is reflected in our scientific output: We completely dominate science. American aerospace, biomedical, heavy industry, defense, and information technologies industries are without equal.
Look at any list of the most profitable and innovative companies, and the stars and stripes are everywhere:
Apple
Tesla
Microsoft
Gilead
Amazon
Walt Disney
Johnson & Johnson
Exxon
Ford
GE
DuPont
Cisco
Pfizer
...it goes on and on and on.
The greater international peace and order that has existed for 70 years, that makes people in their 20s and 30s think of the eruption of war as a novelty instead of understanding that like polio, it was a plague kept damped down from being common by those before them, has been upheld by the single most widely deployed military force in the history of the planet. There has never been a global hegemony like America.
Global trade on the magnitude it exists today exists because of safe shipping, because Europeans are never really going to need to go to war with one another, because even the Russians understand their people would be annihilated if they broke the sanctity of the post-Cold War Hegemony that is the United States' Department of Defense.
Here is the list of operating aircraft carriers by country
The DoD doesn't even consider half our fleet to be "true" aircraft carriers, and they alone nearly outnumber the rest of the world's non-carriers combined.
We are tremendously diverse, in language, religion, culture, and ethnicity. Despite the rhetoric that America hates immigrants because Trump wants to build a wall to stop illegal immigration, we have more immigrants than anywhere on the planet. Mexicans crossing the desert of foot to sneak in are literally willing to risk death to get here.
To this day people from all over, not just Mexico, come to live and work in the United States because they realize no matter where they are from, their children being born Americans gives an unparalleled edge in life (often via admission as US nationals to those top universities previously mentioned).
We have the largest proven coal reserves, and we are now the largest oil and gas producer too
That advantage of our natural conventional energy sources are why many manufacturing industries are thinking of coming back to the United States; away from Asia, and even our Teutonic cousins the Germans and their heavy industries.
But we also are the largest producers of nuclear energy by far
Our financial power is insane: We are simultaneously the holders of the most foreign direct investments to economies abroad while being the nation with the single greatest total foreign direct investments here. After our debt vote ceiling crisis in 2013 people bought US bonds.
After a crisis as to the payment obligation of US debt, people bought more US debt holdings.
Coupled with the US Dollar being the longtime greatest reserve currency in the global economy, it would take assumptions of stupidity and perverse worship (like the Chinese state official newspapers often make) on the part of the global economy to explain this behavior, sans the acceptance of this fact:
There will likely continue to be no reasonable military, economic, or political threat to American hegemony.
We are the most charitable country on the planet.
We give more than any other country in developmental assistance to other countries, and its not even close.
And we lead by a crushing margin in humanitarian assistance as well.
We don't just have the means to extinguish human life wherever we choose - - we often, and have for decades, worked to improve and protect it across the planet.
As a share of official development assistance spending globally, the United States makes up nearly a quarter of the entire global spending as of 2015.
There isn't a single nation that comes close to the US in terms of total scientific output, humanitarian spending, peacekeeping, warmaking, economic production or financial dominance.
It takes the combination of 30 different nations with accumulated centuries of opportunity many times our existence to come anywhere near.
The US doesn't always live up to its ideals, it's history, like many other nations, has genocide and war and racism, and a whole parade of terribles that should give everyone pause. The failure to hedge as close as possible to the lofty notions of freedom, and unalienable rights is one we experience over and over.
But no other nation has an obsession with being the best, a national pasttime of moral and ideological self hatred and critique and policy contest, as neurotic, intense, or as strong willed as Americans do.
I haven't even mentioned the food, music, movies, television, and language of the US, which have come to dominate human culture in ways no one could have predicted in 1776.
Call us fat, we'll crush you in the Olympics.
Call us stupid, we'll make human beings play golf on the Moon, and then have our robot scientists do stuff on the face of Mars, while killing terrorists with the press of a button 5000km away.
Attack us without cause and we'll nuke you. Twice. And then rebuild your country into an economic power and establish a massive network of troops, bases, airfields, nuclear submarines, surveillance satellites, intelligence officers, etc. so that we never have the specter of invasion threaten ourselves or allies again.
Ask for help, and we will float a metropolis of scientific advancement in clean water provision, food distribution and medical care towards you, or send you the greatest marvels of our warmaking that we have labored over for your use, or more money than God; whichever is appropriate to your economy.