The end of the American empire is not up for debate. The timeline for this decline is also more or less agreed upon as less than a generation, at worst 15 years at best 25. The only thing that the corporate aristocracy and their political sycophants debate is how to ensure a soft landing for their class. It is not a forgone conclusion that it will be a soft landing for anyone, certainly not for the vast majority of Americans.
Even if you are loyal lever puller for the great machine, and accept your place in the hierarchy of power, your future is uncertain. Economic dislocation is something that happens to everyone who is not at the very pinnacle of power. It is a mathematic truth that a 40% reduction of net worth for a multi-millionaire is simply not the same as a 40% reduction for everyone else. In fact, it will be easier for the economic aristocracy to insulate themselves with a phalanx of hired help because unemployment will be so very high.
It must be remembered that wealth is not measured by accumulated possessions. It is the power to control your environment that is at the heart of wealth. A 10th century lord was not wealthy by a modern standard of possessions, but he was as wealthy has he needed to be to hold absolute power over landless peasantry. So too will the new aristocracy of wealth retain their power as the absolute net worth plummets.
While many might nibble at the edges of what would cause this massive economic collapse, it has already begun with the hyper-investment in security, both foreign and domestic, which is a hallmark of fading empire. The money sucked from the system by these expenditures will degrade institutions that help create the fiction of national identity. While unregulated capitalism will do its part in hastening the decline, it will finally arrive when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world.
That sounds much less threating than it is. It is because the dollar is the reserve currency that America enjoys certain benefits, chief among which is the ability to sell treasury bonds to the world and thus extend credit far beyond actual monetary worth. When that prop to our overextended military budget is knocked out a reckoning will arrive for which the nation is not prepared.
Most immediate will be the massive increase in cost for oil. America runs on oil. For all the fancy talk of renewable energy and future options, we will not be ready in 15 years or even 25 to be weaned from oil. Cities dependent upon oil for energy will be unable to compete on the open market to buy fuel and will sink into a marginalized status. They will sell off infrastructure to attempt to survive and such cities and towns will end as wholly own subsidiaries of Multi-national corporations. It will be a form of hostile take over that will dismantle civic life and sell off any valuable assets.
There will be work, but for the most part productive jobs will be done by automation, either actual robots or collection of algorithms. The one category of job that will last the longest and employ the most will be the Security Industrial Complex. The merging of Military and Police functions into a vast security apparatus to maintain the rights of the aristocracy that began in the last decade will be enhanced and strengthened. The process will take an ever-greater share of national treasure and become a feedback loop of decline.
The National Security Apparatus will ensure a soft landing for the privileged few as their enclaves are insulated from the restless multitude who are surplus to requirements. The cities who are crushed by corporate colonialism will sink into expanding slums. Cities who have no value to exploit may be left to wither. Cities who through access to resources or good planning might maintain a semblance of former normalcy, but in order to maintain that in the face of internal migration and hostile corporate aristocracy will mandate their own militarization.
The barbarians at the gates of the great cities, the last bastions of actual civilization, will not be flooding across national borders. The migrations of dispossessed people will come from within the empire. The very people who cheered the empire on to even greater military folly will find themselves in a migratory wave that will make the flight from the dust bowel seem like an extended vacation.
The America first brigade will be proven right. It will be the migrants who are the problem, but it will be they who are the migrant problem as they flee jobless wastelands and seek some safety within the shadow of protected enclaves. But the rules will have changed and they will not be welcome either by their erstwhile masters or by the few functioning city states.
Most consider this dislocation to take at least a generation of hardship before it stabilizes into the new normal, but that is based on comparisons to other 19th & 20th century empires in decline. A 21st century empire may dissolve by other rules. One new rule is the changing climate, that will create internal climate refugees and reduced crop yields. Another new rule is the dispensable nature of labor. The aristocracy gauges the worth of those below by how useful they are. In a world where labor is replaced with increasing speed by artificial means the value of human labor will be reduced below any meaningful value.
Of course, none of this precludes a soft landing for the current aristocracy of wealth. The only thing that can dent their plans for a comfortable post-imperial enclave of power and privilege is if the mass of people, currently enslaved by the robust corporate machinery of obligatory debt, revolt. Rise up and tear down the golden walls. Share out the final scraps of empire among the many to help ameliorate the coming decades of enforced austerity.