WI: US becomes a military superpower early on?

The United States was a potential world superpower as far back as the 1880s, and certainly by the 1890s. It had a massive population, an abundance of natural resources, a heavily industrial economy (and was the top steel producer in the world), and perhaps most importantly for an aspiring naval power, lots of access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

My question is, suppose the United States recognized this potential early on, and began a program to make itself into a true world superpower? You can create any POD to make this possible, such as a hostile brush with a foreign power that shows the US' military weakness and scares it into arming itself, or a more approving Congress that in OTL largely restricted naval development.

In any event, the United States begins approaching Britain's level of military power, with the potential to eventually surpass it.

What happens next? How do the European powers, Britain in particular, react? And what is the effect on World War I and afterwards?
 
The US was still profoundly Isolationist regarding matters outside the Western Hemisphere, and was still essentially a "developing country" regarding some portions of the Old West in the 1880s and 90s. And people knew it. It took the US-Chilean Crisis of 1879 to finally shock the US out of its slumber and realize how woefully unprepared for war it was.

Even then, it was a slow process of US naval military expansion, from the first 1880 budget right up to the Spanish-American War, where the US still was neither qualitatively not quantitatively a first class naval power. Lucky for the US, they were up against a third (or even fourth) rate power in Spain.

OTL, if the US HAD engaged in a madcap naval buildup from the getgo, they would have risked what happened to the Soviets in the Cold War, or would have happened to the Nazis had they ever managed to do Plan Z.

The POD for such an action would require something like an insanely aggressive Chilean Navy carrying out their OTL threats to bombard the cities of the US West Coast, if that was even technically possible for them. They did have a powerful fleet at that time, but whether it was a true blue water navy with the range to reach California IDK. The point is that the US Navy at the time was a few broken down rotted out Civil War era Monitors that even if they could have been made servicable wouldn't even rate against the Chileans.

I really can't see a European POD, as the balance of power in Europe was such that no one outside of perhaps Germany :confused: was still interested in such anti-Monrovian adventurism. Anyone trying would run into the rest of Europe (led by the Royal Navy) defending their own trade interests in the Western Hemisphere.
 
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