the_dunk_tank

Imperialism is a specific word with a specific meaning, it's not "When a Bad Country declares war on a Good/Innocent Country and occupies them". Imperialism creates an exploited and exploiter, with a stark difference in the conditions of the imperialist and their new possession. For example, the European powers were imperialist during the Scramble for Africa because they occupied that territory and then created colonies were the native population was regarded as an inferior class to slave away (whether literally or figuratively) while the typically white population occupied higher positions and thus were exploiters.

It's why, for example, the argument that the USSR was imperialist (at least in the specific case of eastern Europe) is so obviously just liberals learning the word "imperialism" and then implying it to every situation that they think was bad, as they do so very often with leftist vocabulary, and in actuality have literally no idea what they're talking about. The eastern European nations were not exploited by the Russians, and USSR massively increased the quality of life and infrastructure of the people living there - which is why the later shock of capitalism was such a complete disaster. That was the point in which eastern Europe was conquered by an imperialist - the United States - because they were treated as an inferior people to be exploited (and so their quality of life and life expectancies plummeted).

Sure, the Americans are imperialist. But the Russians are even more so given that they’re trying to take over a sovereign nation.

By my previous explanation, you can now hopefully see why this statement is wrong. As the United States is the hegemonic capitalist power, they are able to manipulate the world via institutions like the IMF and World Bank to create debt crises and force countries into subservience. They force countries to cheaply export their resources abroad, and take special care not to allow them to create food agriculture, instead making them focus on cash crops like coffee, which has the dual effect of increasing the value of exploitation and making it so that those countries are reliant on food imports (usually from the United States) to survive. If all that fails and the country still wishes to rebel, the United States maintains 750 military bases around the world in lots of different countries. The threat of violence is implicit.

The United States doesn't need to physically occupy foreign territory if those countries are already within its orbit and doing its command, either because the leadership is in ideological agreement (e.g. Europe) or because they cannot rebel without being overthrown by coups or even invasions.

No one country has a monopoly on imperialism.

This is technically true, but the United States far and away is the dominant world hegemonic power and so is by far the largest imperialist power on the planet. We aren't talking "The United States is a little more imperialist than Russia", I'm talking one, two, maybe three orders of magnitude.