[jnurmine]

The article sounded like the silly Stratfor ramblings by Friedman, but in a kind of reversed way, where USA ends up suffering. In the Stratfor fiction, USA grows and flourishes, while varyingly imaginative scenarios emerge all over the globe, harming others. This article was kind of the opposite.

Certainly the pax americana is at the end of its road, because of e.g. the costs of upkeeping the military, but will USA somehow implode and shrink to irrelevance and vanish completely? No, I don't think so.

China is emerging as the next big power. However, I am not so sure it will stay as a cohesive whole during this development as it reaches its peak. I believe technological advancements and ever-increasing interaction with other, continuously developing and changing cultures are incompatible with an increasingly tighter grip of the population (via e.g. the social credit system). Free flow of ideas & communication and an ever tighter "police state" in the physical world do not mix and will eventually collide, destructively. From extreme to extreme, then balance.

Long story short, I think in the future the world will be a multipolar one and this will be the "low energy state" of the global system. All of the current top players will eventually take a hit of some kind, and become different from what they are today, but not disappear nor sink into a Mad Max style world full of oblivion and despair.