> The decline of the Roman Empire, depending on how you define it, played out over centuries, if not a millennium.

Sure, and before COVID-19 pandemics often took years/decades to spread around the globe. Agriculture took thousands of years to develop; iPhones were invented twenty years ago.

Things move faster in a world of eight billion people who can get anywhere on the planet in 24 hours.

Historians today tend to emphasize that, even if the Western Empire ended in the fifth century, ultimately everything goes back to the Crisis of the Third Century. That took place with a short enough space that it must qualify as a within-our-lifetimes collapse.

Sure, but it's also likely that some (but not all) historians will put the peak of the American Empire in the 1960's somewhere, perhaps onat the moon landing. Declines often start out slow and are often indistinguishable from random noise until well after the fact, and there will be rises and falls after the peak.

> The decline of Germany as the leading scientific powerhouse in the first half if the 20th century

Go on? WW1 and its consequences?

It is highly unlikely that the US is going to collapse any time in our lifetimes. Or even those of our children.

Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most.

Trump has greatly stressed the safeguards in our system, but I don't think that he has broken them. That is actually an optimistic instead of a pessimistic signal -- an anti-statesman even in the highest office couldn't meaningfully damage the country.

The US isn't Rome, it's Constantinople. Rome was Europe, the 20th century was about the colonial appendage achieving supremacy over the former imperial centre.

If you want a lesson in what to avoid to maintain dominance, it's internal conflict, that's what wrecked the European empire.

Good luck with that. Trump and Co will dig in. When they fall, there will be blood.