Who’s going to come out as the new Empire? I think that the answer will not be a country but rather a culture.
Thinking outside the box, the reason the ole USofA has been so powerful is not that we’re a country so much as an engine (or culture) of change. We’ve exhausted our energies with abstracts lately and are now sputtering. Do you think that a mere country is going to move into the vacuum that we’ve created? Not likely! Too many countries hitched their wagons to our star and are now as bad off (if not worse) than we, the USofA are.
The survivor in this collapse will be the people who recognize that their labor, not pieces of paper nor bits in an clearinghouse computer, comprise their worth. We’re now discovering that we’ve conned billions of people out of their lives’ breath for promises never to be kept. Money is trust and the trust has been breached by the continual dilution of said trust.