it seems that the empire is corroding and will soon be compost if things don't change;

 Miss Havisham is a character in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. A wealthy woman, she was jilted and swindled on her wedding day. From that day on she has allowed nothing to change. The wedding feast sits there, liquids evaporated, silverware corroded, cakes and food rotted; overrun with vermin and spider webs. She wears still her wedding dress, filthy and torn. The Day preserved, decayed and monstrous. Time and events move on around her but her past is her present and her pitiless future.

Will this be the West in fifty years? Surrounded by decay and filth but still clinging its past? Shouting about its ever-so-valuable values, ranting on about the Rules-Based International Order, boasting it’s the best at this and the most at that, issuing judgments on the bad behavior of the others, sanctioning non-believers, bathed in its media feedback loop. Still the highest GDP in USD! (Now Big Mac Cricketburgers are $1000 a pop, there are lots of dollars in every pocket!)

But nobody in the rest of the world cares. They’ve moved on. No tourist visits the moldering house and its unhinged inhabitants. They prefer cruising the high speed railroad from Cape Town to Beijing with a side trip to Baikal. Who wants to be robbed in the shoot-up galleries of Amsterdam, the tent cities of New York, the machete gangs of London? If it’s Tuesday and riots, it must be Paris. Young Harvard graduates pass out in their slums and dream of becoming a toilet cleaner in Omsk Airport – full benefits, you know. Plus dental. And you can afford a small apartment on your pay.

Is this where the West is heading? It gave away its manufacturing, its economies are financial prestidigitation and rent-seeking. It scores at the bottom of the Edelman Trust Index. (How can an electoral democracy function when people doubt the integrity of elections and believe that their politicians and judges are bought? Without trust, what is left?) Will the West decay into a future that’s all past and no future? A putrefying wedding cake?

After the failed wars, the rest don’t fear the West, they don’t respect it – if they ever did – and they don’t trust it. Who knew that Niger would lead the way and call the bluff? There are other more attractive and – most importantly – more successful examples to follow. Who cares about Miss Havisham and her mausoleum of the past?.........more..........