The US has been annexing land almost since its foundation. Ask the original Native Americans. Or the people of Hawaii. Or Puerto Rico.

The US USP was essentially just its success as a consumer economy, with relative prosperity compared to Rest of World and nice things to buy.

And there used to be nominal free speech. You could criticise the government, and nothing would happen unless you became organised enough to start threatening capital, in which case you might well be murdered.

That's the good news. The bad news is that non-whites in the US have always had a much worse time of it, and the veneer of freedom has always been very thin for them.

Now the US has stopped pretending to be a creative economy and has decided not to hide its addiction to violent extraction.

So we'll see how that works out for everyone.

I'd guess it works out to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" — are you sure you're the other Hobbes?

I grew up in Eastern Europe. For 90% of people there at the time, US = paradise. Maybe it was propaganda, I don't know. Later in life I got travel a lot and meet a lot of Americans and for most, their moral and ethics are at the exact opposite of what the US is showing now.

Most Eastern European people I know have long associated the US with calamities such as the bombing of civilians in Belgrade.

In the former Yugoslavia maybe. But in the former USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, that isn’t even remotely true. The US was critical in supporting anti-USSR resistance, either directly with money or symbolically (“Tear down this wall”)

The image of the good guy USA had (at least in eastern Europe) has less to do with how they treated other countries and more with how they treated their own citizens.

Exactly it has more to do with which end of the stick you're on.

On the other hand, treating your citizens decently isn't that low of a bar. There are quite a few states out there where you can't have even that.

It doesn't have to be a paradise in absolute terms to be a significantly better place. EE to the US was definitely an improvement for a very long time. Even if many other places already didn't see the US as good guys.

its relative. The US was far preferable to the Soviet Union. Its now far preferable to its major global rival, China.

Yeah I believe you can make relative comparisons between the different empires around. A world dominated by Russia would probably be much worse

I don’t understand why this has been downvoted, it’s true that the US has done many interventions in the past based on vague rationale or simply by misleading public opinion. And it has always been a part of its’ state propaganda to make it look like they are on the good side, doesn’t mean they are though every time. The difference this time is that they didn’t even try that much to shape a proper narrative.