Is 3rd place in the Euros better than QF's in the World Cup? I don't know if thats a better peak.
Also, we've been by far the most consistent. We've been to the Round of 16 at the WC in 3 of 4 WC's and got second place at Confed Cup, along with winning 4 of 9 Gold Cups since then.
The previous version of the Euros is more impressive than the new expanded format, and I believe the old Euros were more difficult than the WC. The WC get bogged down with teams from regions with not much talent, it's why the Gold Cup is meaningless. The Copa at times is arguably more impressive than Euros as well.
Gold Cups are meaningless, it's ultimately should be a USA vs Mexico showdown and an utter failure if we don't make the finals.
Confederations Cup is completely meaningless.
While the UEFA qualifying argument mostly makes no sense as an argument against he US, it does have validity if you use qualifying for the WC as an argument for why the US has been better. While if you flip the countries, the results would flip as well based on situations, but if we magically put the US in UEFA, do they also get the talent allocation that the UEFA countries get or does the US still see a lot of the athletic talent go to baseball, basketball, football, etc.? I mean if we magically can move a country to another continent/region, then surely we can reallocate their talent pool based on the region they move to.
A 4th place finish at Copa with competitive loses against Colombia while being in what we consider a "down" time is a good result. We are vastly inferior to Argentina, but proved we are just a tier below Colombia.