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Much like the common wisdom about political positions, under no circumstances should any country explicitly seeking a world empire ever be permitted to form one.
The problem about the American empire is that it doesn't actually work without Americans (or at least, the Americans of the past). And Americans are a real special lot simply because the founding of that country was, for the most part, one massive selection effect for those with genes expressing strong slave morality (something its geography and massive amount of natural resources also enabled).
"Slave" morality is a bit of misnomer (Nietzsche had great branding, but the branding really distracts from the underlying ideas) - it's more a statement that the ultimate good in the world comes from what you can do, and not who you are. It's the counterargument to "if you have freedom, what you get is seven zillion witches and three principled libertarians", and it's an attempt to solve the Iron Law of Bureaucracy in favor of the people who are actually providing the value; it's also why civil rights legislation and feminism [have had to] use that language to get anywhere, and wouldn't morph into the naked group supremacy movements they are today until they had stripped every branch of the "protection XYZ would make it easier for us to serve you" tree. ("Who you are" is inherently toxic to a society because it comes at the expense of "what you can do".)
But it's much better for the Americans themselves, which is what actually matters when it comes to keeping the empire operating and dominant. And the longer you can keep slave morality as the law of the land, the longer you can keep the parasites (an emergent property of any society) from strangling the golden goose that is the cultural milieu of "people actually want to serve others, serving is the highest good, and going the extra mile is godliness".
But the one thing slave morality can't solve for is "it's for your own good". You see this in the societal zeitgeist everywhere- a lot of rebelling against the people who believe they know better, and these people are never portrayed in a positive light.
Now sure, there's some master morality in America- this is why the term "Puritans" means what it means to American ears (though it wouldn't matter if they were just slightly more strict than the other three nations- not that it was, but still), and combined with the above, why that word being used is almost always meant as an insult. But it's never really been dominant- partially due to even its master-moralizers (for the most part traditionalists, but sometimes even the progressives of their day) having slave morality as a religion that could be appealed to, and partially because economic development in the US has almost never been zero-sum.
When those things are no longer true, or as they become less salient, you can expect American-specific parasitism to be pushed harder in every Western state. You can see the ones that are closest to the American orbit flying the New American flag in their government offices- typically a rainbow flag of some sort simply named "Progress"- and espousing the related social policies that the parasitic class in American power centers prefers.
I don't think this is completely true, and if anything a lot of 20th and early 21st century progressivism was imported into America rather than exported to Europe, Canada and other vassals. The US wasn't ahead of other Western countries in feminism or even racial politics, Fanon etc, Said taught at Columbia but he wasn't really a product of the metropole.
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