I get what you're saying, but the only way to get there is to heavily expand our population so our sphere of influence becomes significant enough that we can exert some control of a situation.
We barely extract the resources we have aside from oil, our population is miniscule, we spend all our money on housing, we stagnate wages, barely manufacture anything and brain drain talent to the US due to lack of wages/opportunities.
Until we reach a critical mass of population and are able to mine + manufacture our resources and establish some form of market specialization, we will remain insignificant on the global scale.