Tripe? He asserts facts visible with a naked eye. US is the center of the political, economic, miliatry and cultural world. Calling undesirable facts 'tripe' will not change reality.
The only counter-argument against Hitchens' piece I can think of is that he incorrectly stipulates that all the economic/political/military/scientific/cultural success have the American origin. Nothing is farther from the truth. America owes its success to its immigrants, its cultural/ethnic mix, and its absence of traditional / feudal social institutions of Europe and Asia (and Latin America too) that acted as a major obstacle to capitalist progress. In that sense, America reflects a triumph of a capitalist economy and bourgeois culture developed elsewhere, but transplanted to a much more fertile ground. Marx was right when he equated capitalist progress with the destruction of the ancien regime.
wojtek