AIBU to want Americans to stop using the phrase "leader of the free world"?

[Mittens67]

The term originated during the cold war implying moral and symbolic leadership of democracy.
It has continued in common usage with America viewing itself as the centre of world.
I find this hugely arrogant at the best of times but given the current debacle with an orange megalomaniac in the white house, a person who has no morals at all and is intent on over turning democracy if he possibly can, it is utterly abhorrent.

Throwing nearly a trillion dollars at the military doesn’t make the U.S. an effective leader, nor does it mean the world is safer. The U.S. has spent decades waging costly, destabilising wars with little to show for it.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone cost over $8 trillion, with thousands of American and allied troops killed, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and entire regions left in turmoil. The 2003 Iraq invasion, based on false claims of weapons of mass destruction, toppled Saddam Hussein but created a power vacuum that fueled the rise of ISIS. Afghanistan, after 20 years of occupation, fell back into Taliban control almost immediately after the U.S. withdrawal.
Libya, Syria, and earlier, Vietnam follow similar patterns—massive U.S. military involvement, staggering human and financial costs, and no long-term stability.
Despite these failures, the U.S. continues to justify excessive military spending as a means of "global leadership”. The belief that throwing more money at the military makes the world safer ignores the actual results of U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades.

American in the US; we don't. It might be a media term not used domestically here, and we know it was used during the Cold War, but we're well aware that we have actual fascism afoot and certainly aren't a leader and aren't amongst the freest in the world. We're losing our freedoms by the day.

Agreed. He’s not my fucking leader.

‘The Land of the Free’ my big, white, ginger bird’s arse.

A country founded by religious fundamentalists by way of genocide and ethnic cleansing; a country which embraced slavery, going to war with itself to keep it; a country which armed its citizens; a country that enshrined racial segregation in law.

It was only ever going to end this way. It’s a failed state, and all the self-mythologising and self-promotion has annoyed me for decades.

American here. Agree that we are no longer the leader of anything, much less the free world (and probably never were). To be fair, I've mostly heard that term used by politicians. The last month, in particular, has been a dystopian nightmare.

By not voting on the side of the UN about Ukraine, they have effectively sided with a dictatorship rather than democracy so no longer "leader of the free world".