"a unipolar world" that benefits you is a good thing, I get it. But that kind of thinking is the reason why the US isn't very popular on the world stage, even with its allies. Most of them would backstab the US if they could afford it. Thankfully, politics is a coward's game, keeping everyone a little bit more alive unless your ambitions are absurdly grand.
The US is not very popular anymore because it kept abusing it's unique position as the #1 military power, starting wars it had no business starting, not because it is(was?) #1 as you are suggesting.
> People like to see themselves as edgy. It's edgy to be in the rich world and decry imperialism of America's system of allies.
I suspect that's just your rationalization to make it easy to dismiss people who have a real problem with the status quo.
I don't know a single adult who likes to see themselves as edgy just for the sake of it, but I do know many adults who hold deep disagreements with the status quo and who're not afraid to express it.
> that's just your rationalization to make it easy to dismiss people who have a real problem with the status quo
No, someone saying they don't like the status quo make sense. Global politics are anarchic. It's obviously better to be on the winning side. Where I get credulous is when someone claims their preferred actor, especially if an autocrat, would be superior for disinterested parties.
Since the US effectively became a unipolar power sometime in the late 1980s, the share of the human population living in extreme poverty has fallen off a cliff [https://ourworldindata.org/poverty#all-charts]. Yes, that has come with mind-boggling inequality, but I doubt the middle class people from Asia and Latin America would prefer to go back to subsistence farming just to erase billionaires. I'll never understand why some people seem to think Americans are the only people who benefited from the Pax Americana period (which is now ending -- be careful what you wished for!)
