Decline tends to occur as a consequence of territorial overreach and being too stretched, or internal decadence due to being an effective societal monopoly
America in the 90s basically had the later after communism rightly and inevitably collapsed, and the cultural rot's seeds began to ferment with no external enemy to focus on, eventually leading to the divisive and counter productive diversity-at-all-costs woke world
But ironically one of covid's inadvertent but most potent and long lasting impacts may well have been the school shutdowns for the simple fact that parents became more aware of what was going on with their children's schooling. In decades to come the Youngkin win largely driven by the school pushback may be seen as the small inflection point from which you can now see the anti-woke movement building amongst the all important "middle", and which showed that you didn't have to be silent on the matter anymore for fear of being labelled racist, sexist etc etc. To this you can add the de-fund movement and progessive prosecutorial leniency and how the subsequent crime increases impact the middle classes. This will take time but it has begun.
Also there now is a legitimate counter-force adversary in the form of China (and it's petrol station lackey Russia) to sharpen the focus and senses.
But the good thing is that China is screwed in a world domination sense
a) It is not a capitalist based model , and is even moving further away from this. Like it or not, capitalism is the model that works best at a macro level, and this has been proven time and time again empirically in the real world as it works with human nature and all its foibles (self interest for eg) rather than against it. It also allows for reinvention.
b) China is seriously seriously seriously buggered on the demographic front. Firstly from the disastrous one child policy (a great example of the flaws of central planning) but on top of that their natural birth rate is plummeting , the number of births has literally halved since 2016. In the coming decades this will put all sorts of irreversible brakes on China's supposed path to world glory and cannot be overstated: it will basically become a nation with a billion or so old people. Good luck with that
