This is very U.S. centrist, I'd grant you the relative peace and stability if you're in the West. But 70 years isn't that long and you could find empires with l

This is very U.S. centrist, I'd grant you the relative peace and stability if you're in the West. But 70 years isn't that long and you could find empires with long stretches of time where relatively nothing was fundamentally changing for the dominant population of some of the long-lived empires. The U.S. in its modern form and position isn't around even as long as the golden age of democratic Athens was around. Sure, there were historically always some tensions at the border regions of these empires, but there are pressures of such nature felt in Europe now too, (the U.S. has the advantage of being physically very, very far from the regions in unleashes its worst policies on, so of course it's less felt there). Also, all empires saw themselves as in some way policing, keeping peace and bringing their enlightened values to what they saw as the lesser. If we see that kind of thinking now as wrong, then I really don't see how the U.S. is so much different from the empire model of old. As for China, I agree its regional foreign policy is not great, the problem is the U.S. doesn't just keep it regional. It treats the whole world as its backyard. If you're a non-U.S. citizen, the unipolar world is not so great. I don't want China to say replace the U.S. as the dominant superpower, I want it to offer a counter-balance. I want the EU to be its own great power, offering counter balance to both, bringing both democratic values & a more humane treatment of its own citizens than the U.S. has, especially the less fortunate.