Much has been written under the heading: dynamic population, wise leaders, education and technology, size of territory, nuclear deterrance, military weaponry, etc. I think that all of these factors are not the cause, but the accelerator of the process leading to the point where the cause has reached.
So you can have some or even all of these qualities and not become a superpower. I think that the concept of superpower, more traditionally called 'global empires', is much deeper than that. But even it is not enough, in trying to understand this concept, it is also necessary to understand the global elites in the shadow of states.
Even leaving aside the issue of these elites, the basic conditions for the legitimacy of empires are necessary. First and foremost, global empires are the protector and guardian of a religion, an ideology or a worldview on earth. Their state is the state of God, or the state of a world without God. You don't have to go back to the Crusaders and the Christian-Muslim wars, basically the Communism-Capitalism war reflects a similar situation. Two empires fighting for sovereignty and the patronage of their subjects. The empire that championed Capitalism was the USA and the empire that trying to patronage Comunism was the USSR. These two ideologies have clashed in more than 50 different countries of the world last century, some of which have seen revolutions/military coups and popular uprisings, and some of which have even been subjected to de facto occupation.
That is, superpowers have in common that they offer the world a vision and a path, or are the globally recognized guardians of one of these paths. This legitimacy globalizes their political influence.
