Hey, have you ever wanted to really annoy all those stupid foreigners out there, and as an added bonus remove that terrible burden of World Supremacy? Follow our easy step-by-step guide and you will soon be basking in mediocrity and the disdain of the rest of humanity!

Step One: Ensure that the majority of citizens in your country are as ill-educated about the rest of the world as possible; teach them only about your own nation's history and society, and almost nothing about anywhere else. From a cultural perspective, make sure that all your films ignore the rest of the world. If foreigners must be included, make them villains who always lose to good guys from your country. That'll cement the fact that your country is the only one that counts in the minds of the average movie-goer.

Step Two: Vote (or by another method if necessary) in a leader who has little to no understanding of the rest of the world - preferably someone who doesn’t feel the need for a passport. If you have implemented Step One effectively, this step should pretty much take care of itself.

Step Three: Ignore the rest of the world in your media. At the same time however, ensure that your companies gradually creep into every corner of the globe, insidiously spreading all the worst elements of your culture. This will ensure that foreigners are only aware of the negative aspects of your nation and build up a lovely level of resentment.

Step Four: While your companies are engendering negative views of your culture through their far-flung operations, ensure that they siphon off as many natural resources as possible. It would help if your political leaders have vested interests in these companies, as this gives the resentment foreigners are feeling pleasant personal overtones.

Step Five: Make sure that you use your political, economic and military muscle to bully other nations into doing what you want. If all the other nations agree on something, ensure that you disagree, and do everything possible to demonstrate that you don't need to play by anyone else's rules because you’re the biggest and the best and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Step Six: Ensure that your political leaders refuse to listen to any sane, rational or balanced viewpoint from within your own nation, particularly in regard to foreign affairs. Ignore the vast intelligentsia your nation possesses and in addition, if your intelligence agencies find out important information about foreign organizations' intent toward you, make sure your political leaders ignore it, because it doesn't suit their interests. If you have done Step Two and Step Four right, this step should follow smoothly.

Step Seven: Demonstrate righteous indignation when a resentful, extremist group of foreigners attacks you. Bask in the sincere sympathy of the rest of the world and expect it to last forever, despite the fact that others have to go on living and dealing with their own disasters and issues.

Step Eight: Invade some foreign nations. Again, don't listen to your experts, military professionals, or intelligence organizations, just do it the way the top politicians think is best, even if they have no military experience. Make sure you have vague objectives in your invasions, which can be changed swiftly if necessary when the media produces irrefutable proof you were wrong. Back up your strategies with unbalanced, generally incorrect research and innuendo. Ensure too, that you do not have an exit strategy, just to demonstrate that you have learned nothing from previous military campaigns your nation has undertaken. It would also help if you invade a nation whose leader had a personal feud with the father of your current political leader. It gives it all a nice personal touch.

Step Nine: Get angry at those nations that refuse to follow you in your invasions. Imply that those nations are cowardly, hate world peace, democracy, freedom, liberty, types of fast-food, and anything else that you can think of that will make the general public support you and hate those foreign nations who dare refuse to spend money and risk the lives of their citizens in support of your vague causes.

Step Ten: Do everything possible to reduce casualties in your military (at least from appearing on the evening news anyway), while killing thousands of innocent civilians through your shock and awe campaigns. Get defensive if the bodies of those civilians are shown on foreign television.

Step Eleven: Tell the citizens of the nation you've invaded and reduced to rubble that you did it for their freedom. Meanwhile, ensure that your national companies get all the juicy contracts to rebuild the invaded nation and begin fleecing the place as quickly as possible. Once again, ensure your political leaders have vested interests.

Step Twelve: Claim victory before the war is over. Use overt patriotic themes that imply you are the best at everything and no one had better mess with you in the future.

Step Thirteen: Forget about providing law and order in the newly conquered lands. Allow the criminal elements to loot national treasures and instil fear in the local populace.

Step Fourteen: Arrest thousands of people who may or may not have been associated with the previous regime or insurgent groups. Sack the military of the defeated nation and create a vast mass of unemployed, desperate people with military training and private arms.

Step Fifteen: Pay little attention to prisons managed by your troops. Refuse to accept that soldiers from your nation could commit crimes until irrefutable proof is presented in the foreign media. Make scapegoats of the lowest paid, most poorly-educated people involved in the crimes and refuse to accept that government policy could have contributed to the crimes.

Step Sixteen: Keep claiming that you are winning while maintaining a never-ending low intensity war that grinds the conquered nation's public amenities and services to dust and encourages deadly rivalries between religious and ethnic groups which gradually dissolve into civil war. Rather than addressing these rivalries, ignore them and hope they go away.

Step Seventeen: Bog down your military in a protracted conflict, draining human and material resources steadily over a number of years so that you are unable to effectively respond to any additional threats. Watch while other foreign nations, emboldened by your inability to contain the insurgencies, increasingly become more assertive.

Step Eighteen: Make aggressive yet basically empty threats to newly assertive nations who suddenly have developed nuclear capabilities while you have spent your time, money and other resource battling rag-tag insurgencies with Kalashnikovs and old Cold War ordinances.

Step Nineteen: Run out of money. Put your nation so far into debt that it would take decades to recover. Now there is no fuel to run the tanks and no wages for your soldiers.

Step Twenty: Watch China enjoy the spoils of misfortune and think of your children and the lovely history lessons they will have about how your nation was once great.