I always wondered too if, given enough time , Native Americans would develop into and what kind of this North Anerica country would be like today?
Time, by itself, is no guarantee of (technological) progress. Most of the rest of the world proves it, unfortunately. It is just as likely that they would have been fighting each other to this day.
That sounds very fundamentally true. Also, the ruthlessness with which the Anglos did not fail to treat the native Americans.
As others have pointed out, the natives themselves cut each other down to size, making the takeover easier for offshore invaders.
The other factor was disease: Europe being such a small, crowded place, the locals had developed immunity to a huge array of diseases. The Native Americans had their own diseases, but the European diseases won out over the American ones and decimated the Native Americans.
Why I say this is because the Latinos also did that; ground the native Americans under an iron heel. So, no difference between them; the Anglos taking over the geographical phenomenon known as the prairies was possible only due to the cold-blooded and unrelenting war they raged on them, comparable, in modern times, only to the way the state of Israel is treating Palestinians. By itself, that would NOT have been enough. What helped the Anglos was the parallel drive towards excellence in everything they did, including building a phenomenal grip over precision machine tools, and building the railways.
Ultimately, then, given that both were given rich continents to exploit, it was the Protestant work ethic that took one set forward, and the lack of it kept the other set backward.
I remember an interesting segment where the historian compared languages. I English, we commonly say "I dropped the glass" but in Spanish, they apparently say "The glass fell from me". The narrator pointed out how the Spanish version put the blame on the glass, avoiding taking responsibility for one's actions/failures. Extrapolated, it signals a tendency to look elsewhere for someone else to do things. This is an all too familiar trait in many parts of the world, including South Asia.
It is always funny to see Pakistanis and even Indians claim US is a dying empire. It's been dying for 20+ years now, still as strong as ever, and the only power capable of fighting on 3-4 fronts at the same time.
The reason the US is a hyperpower, and will remain so for decades is not just about the military. The US is the only country that rules the globe militarily, economically and culturally. No single other country can match those three dominations.
Russia has more nukes and China will catch up militarily in quality if not in quantity. However, neither China nor Russia currently holds economic sway to match America. Finally, Chinese and Russian cultural domination is nonexistent outside their circles and they haven't made any dent in American cultural dominance.
