alt Hacker News>Unipolarity has however also seen considerable brutality, in the places the empire cares about (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) and the places it doesn't, like Rwanda.
We should probably view these in context to alternatives. Just looking at Afghanistan, the 20 year “War on Terror” is estimated to have killed approximately 200,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In contrast to the Soviet Afghan War, which was half a long, but resulted in between 1.2 and 2 million people killed, an order of magnitude more bloody.
Your comparison of the US and “every other empire” and equating Ukraine to the War on Terror is the same lack of context argument. The US “soft empire” of economic pressure, military protection, and clandestine regime change is not comparable to empires that literally would invade, conquer, and rule over other countries. The US does not own land in Afghanistan, did not annex and take control of oil or other natural resources in Iraq. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it is equivalent to other bad things and I think it is very clear that the US has been much “less bad” than the previous alternatives.
I'm sorry, but going back to my very first post on here, staying in living memory, the US has a vast litany of egregious human rights offences to its name. This is an objective fact of record.
The notion that it's any better than a hypothetical does not address the core point that the US government, has in actuality caused more suffering, to more people, in more countries, over a longer period of time than any other since the end of WW2.
I don't want to see another empire, but the world won't be sorry to see the back of the US.