Really? You really envision this? What you’re saying will probably happen in the next few years is INSANE.
In answer to the first question, next Wednesday. To the second…well, just wait and see.
Arches fingers
European countries have been on a slow and steady march to liberal policies for decades, if not longer - we in the United States will do it in a huge rush and implode from trying to do it all at the same time, like when we always try to do anything.
The 1960s would like to have a word with you.
Great. Now you’ve gone and told them.
The German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires all sort of ended spectacularly.
I’m not sure why people think the US would ever “fall”. The US isn’t an empire in the sense of being a centralized capital controlling a bunch of foreign colonies or occupied nations. The USA is a stable nation consisting of 50 states that all self-identify as “American”. I don’t really see those borders changing short of some massive global catastrophe that restructures the world.
The US might lose global influence if we become less competitive and less innovative. But that would be a slow boil. We’d be chanting “USA!! USA!!” as a nation of fat dummies thinking they’re still #1 while other countries are enjoying the benefits of cold fusion and flying cars.
And American Samoa. And Puerto Rico. And the US Virgin Islands. And the various Native American nations. And Guam. And some other stuff. It doesn’t change your essential point, but it’s not like the US hasn’t expanded and colonized and, in some cases (Hawai’i, much of Mexico), incorporated conquered territories into part of the 50 States. Just as time and circumstance made the people of Honolulu and Santa Fe Americans, so can time and circumstances make them stop being Americans.
Personally, I agree “gradual fade from significance.” Governmental dysfunction and an increasing GINI coefficient will lead to increasing corruption, which will make the US look a lot more like Brazil, Mexico, and some of the other major democracies in the Americas. It will happen so gradually that it will seem normal, and the way things have always been.
Thank you, that was very informative.
One party is aiming to have it happen in 10 days.
I think the US is way overextended on the military side and that is one thing that has caused empires to fall.
TSDR
A few tropical islands does not an empire make. And I disagree (very strongly) that anyone could ever feel “not American.” We all share a common language and a common mainstream culture and a common lifestyle. There’s variation, to be sure. And states, cities, and even individual neighborhoods have their own vibe, but they’re all “American” in the end.
I think economic collapse will be the killing blow. ETA: I was agreeing with you, with a weird way of saying it. 
I think a civil war is likely, too, but I see it more as a divide between the rich 1% and the poor 99% (more along the lines of the French Revolution - off with the heads of the rich folk!) as the middle class is extinguished and the rich just get richer and richer off the backs of everyone else.
Not to increase my reputation for being a USA-hater, but it’s kind of looking that way from the outside already. Stem-cell research, anyone?
One thing that’s different now than any other time is that we have a global economy.
With the global economy the way it is, and the US dollar at the hub of it all, if the US falls, the world falls.
With the US dollar being so entangled into so much of the global economy, I don’t see how the fuck they would replace it with something else.
I’m unsure if the US dollar is as important as you claim it is. Sure, oil trades in it; but on world money markets, solid western currencies include the GBP, the Swiss Franc, the Euro, the Japanese Yen, the Canadian Dollar, and the Australian Dollar. The US dollar is among the above, of course, but all of the above currencies trade freely on world markets, are held in reserve by various governments, and all float against each other.
I’m no economist, but it seems to me that there are enough hard western currencies, as listed above, that the failure of the US dollar (which is unlikely to happen) won’t affect much. Other currencies (e.g. GBP, CAD, AUD, CHF, JPY, etc), will still keep the world’s economy going.
assimilation by Canada…resistance would be futile, we’d flood your airwaves with CBC propoganda til you caved, cried Uncle and begged us to turn it off 
I see. So conquering and governing foreign peoples doesn’t count unless there’s a lot of them? Unless they’re not tropical? I am genuinely curious: what is your definition of an empire? Hawai’i really was an independent country that was conquered and incorporated into the USA. And, of course, though the Indian nations may now be as American as apple pie, there’s no denying that hundreds of cultures were conquered and at least partly assimilated. You don’t have to object to being in it for it to count as empire—plenty of ancient peoples were quite happy to be in the Roman Empire for economic reasons.
You’re wrong here: not everyone speaks English, for one thing. Spanish, Navajo, Hawai’ian, Mandarin, Portuguese… we do not all share a common language.
I always, from day one, felt more Californian than American, barring two days in 2001 when I was in Europe (9/11 and 9/12). In school, we learned a lot about New England. It never felt like my history—what was my connection to New England? When I was older and visited, I really liked the places and the people and the history, but it felt approximately as foreign as Canada, which is a different country. The South even more so.
Now that I’m a permanent ex-pat, I feel less American all the time. It will never go to zero, so perhaps you’re right, but I certainly don’t feel very American, and I have never felt any particular pride in the sense of “wow, being American is cool” the way I feel about California or Canada. The breakup of the US would not bother me in the slightest if it could be done without causing undue suffering. I’m not saying I’m representative, but I think there’s a lot more variance in how Americans feel about their country than you are acknowledging.
It’s not really exciting, but none of the major powers today are going anywhere.
There’s no real threat of outside conquest as there once was. Major powers cannot profitably war with one another, because changing control of small pieces of land doesn’t give you enough long term wealth to really ever pay for the destruction the war brings.
Major powers will saber rattle, fight proxy wars, and other parts of the world will fight direct wars with one another, but the days of great power warfare is over. It’s got nothing to do with a more enlightened society or humanity, but rather the fact that there’s no profit in it. I’m not even saying that conquests and wars are driven solely by profit motives, not in the corporate sense. But they have always been driven by the thought that after a successful conquest the conquerors are going to be better off.
Major powers trying to knock one another off, it doesn’t matter who wins or if anyone wins, because the destruction would be so vast no possible gain could ever pay for it. That’s the nature of highly technological economies that can’t be easily rebuilt from scratch as well as the potential mass devastation of modern weapons (especially potential nuclear exchanges.)
I don’t have many predictions, other than population isn’t that important as people are making it out. China and India will gain power relative to the United States, but we still reproduce at a positive so it isn’t like our population is going down. China specifically feels that its population could or maybe has reached a point where it’s too big to be good for China.
The next few centuries power is going to be determined more by technological advance than raw population and production numbers–which was actually true of the 20th century as well.
I think at some point there will be enough of a baseline of smart educated people all over the world, that technological dissemination of new ideas reaches very rapid rates. This should eliminate significant technological advantages from one country over another. That might suggest that then larger population countries will inevitably be the most powerful, all things (like technology) being equal. But instead I think technology will make it so that population size probably will matter even less than it did in the 20th century, because even smaller countries will have enough destructive power it won’t make sense to try and mess with the militarily.
I don’t really know that we’ll ever move toward world government, and anything more than a few decades out is just day dreaming anyway–but in the immediate future no great power is going anywhere.
Some level of size is definitely at play. If anyone looking through history called Denmark an Empire when they controlled a collection of Arctic/North Sea islands people would laugh at the concept.
In general it is widely acknowledged the sort of States-first idea you’re espousing here went to an extreme minority after the Civil War and that has only accelerated in the past 40-50 years as more people move to different States throughout their lives.
As for the language thing, aside from Spanish very few Americans are monolingual speakers of any language other than English. And monolingual Spanish immigrants tend to beget bilingual children and grandchildren and there’s even been lots of recent reports (NPR has run a lot on it as it is Latino Heritage Month) that after a few generations some bilingual Hispanic parents have not kept up as much even keeping their kids proficient at speaking Spanish. Generally the people who can’t speak English in America would either like to but don’t because it’s a pain to learn a new language as an adult, or even if they don’t care to learn it would really like their kids to be able to speak both English and their native tongue.
Whenever/however the fall happens, I just hope that the superpower that replaces it (if any) is a good one. I won’t mind if the US is no longer “in charge” (to the extent it even is), but I will mind if China is calling the shots in the world, at least the way China is now.
In any event, I don’t see anything dramatic happening to disrupt the United States. Just a gradual redistribution of power as US strength wanes relative to every other country’s, as others have suggested.
I’m not espousing it, and in any case I think it would be region first rather than state first. I’m just saying that if people can feel more loyalty to something than they do to the nation-state, there is a chance for them to eventually prioritize one over the other. Realistically, I think the ghost of the Civil War means that a lot of this is a non-starter for many centuries.
Re: monolingual speakers: you’re right, but just because someone can communicate in English doesn’t mean their primary identity is with the English-speaking group.