[meri_dian]

The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.

Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.

Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.

[ItsMe000001]

> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

How so? I don't think so. AFAICS - and I lived in the US for a decade and would do so again, I have no beef with the country, just saying what I think I see/know - the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.

It's hard to prove or disprove your 2nd paragraph claim since we cannot have the experiment. I think that while you can certainly (as always) find plenty of examples in support the opposing side won't have any difficulties either. Overall the statement is way too fuzzy and broad to be either attackable or supportable.

> Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen

Sounds like a vote for a global dictatorship to me.

[rayiner]

> the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.

That’s not true at all, at least not in historical context. The US is the most powerful country in the world never to build an actual empire. It’s conquests are limited to part of Mexico, and some pacific islands. It’s predecessor, Great Britain, colonized India, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and turned China into a vassal state. The would-be challenger Germany occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, etc.

The US is interventionist—it intervenes in the political affairs of other countries to perpetuate the status quo. That’s very different from being expansionist or Empire-seeking. Take Iraq for example. The US toppled the government. But did it colonize the country? Annex the oil fields? Turn the oil over to domestic oil companies like Exxon? No. (Most of the development rights went to BP, a British company!) The US spent far more on Iraq then it got out of the country. That’s not how an Empire operates.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, the US does seem to be keen on transferring tax dollars to private entities.

[gkya]

It's a fallacy to think of global affairs as a competition for some funny vague rank or doing good or bad, and of figures that represent power as tragedies characters that aim certain things and act in accordance with their stereotypes. It's a game of economics. Rest is rhetoric.

[viraptor]

I'm not sure why:

> tremendous amount of good the US has done

Has any effect on:

> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

If I cure a 1000 people and kill 1, in still an evil killer. It's not like some kind of game system where karma is a single number. You can help some people and be abusive to others, and those will never balance out unless there's a strict cause-effect relation between them.