Frankly there are billions of people who would kill to speak English like a native American. It’s about economics, not identity politics.
Do you have any evidence of this? I would believe that it depends strongly on the language(s) you already know. Perhaps you are confusing prevalence with clarity. North America has tremendous soft power - more so than any other part of the world and their accents are ubiquitous.
Clarity is not necessarily function of the accent.
You're right about clarity not being a function of accent, at least not totally. There are some people that speak terrible English with a French accent, and others that speak clear and easy to understand English with a French accent. The same applies to pretty much every accent. I also agree with you on the soft power, however part of the soft power will mean that people are more used to the NA accent.
As a final point, I've heard multiple times that sometimes people that speak English as a second language can understand each other really well while Americans have a really hard time understanding them. If that's a real phenomenon, then having a non-American accent could be detrimental if you want to work in the USA.
Adding to that, I’m not confusing prevalence with clarity. The standard American accent is clearer and easier to understand than most other variants, including American subcultural accents like the Boston, Texan, or Southern accents.
>, I’m not confusing prevalence with clarity
...but you do that right here:
>American media (movies, news, etc.) is universal. People all around the world watch American shows and movies and are accustomed to the accent.
So it is prevalence and not clarity.
It is widespread common knowledge that the American accent is the easiest to understand. If you don’t agree with this, I’m sorry but you are not speaking from experience.
And yes, I have considerable experience of speaking English abroad, and whether I think the listener will understand me better if I exaggerate my British diction, adopt more General American-sounding syllables, pick up quirks of pronunciation and phrasing used in the local ESL lingua franca or pronounce a particular problem word as it is written is entirely situational, and generally based on what the person I'm speaking to is most exposed to.
I didn't know that this was established. I'd be curious to see a source for this — has it been studied?
So I don't think it's solely about American soft power, although that will undoubtedly play a part.
Probably, at least in poor and undeveloped countries. But a lot of people would kill even more to speak with a posh British Accent, it's really hard to sound sophisticated when speaking American English.