Maybe, but following the argument in the parent comment about the speed of transfer of information and physical goods, the timeline now may progress significantly quicker.
I suspect that the root cause now will be a technological failure, or more accurately, the inability of even a large group of citizens to maintain or re-build the globe-spanning technological structures on which our lives depend. It's an effect I've called the "Anti-Singularity" - at some point, some key component of this technological structure will fail for whatever reason, and cause a cascading and quite rapid failure of the rest of the system. At this point, progress and knowledge growth will very rapidly halt.
It's getting ever-easier to observe this!
These internet fiefdoms will be owned most likely by giant monopolistic corporations, much like the old AOL network before it connected to the broader world wide web. Content ownership laws will go even further towards squashing the creativity and organic growth of our culture as these corps gain even greater control than they currently have.
The actual world-wide internet will become a niche relegated to the people willing to hack their way out of the walled gardens and a necessity for tech workers who live outside of the areas serviced by the limited networks.
Dang, now I really want to write a cyberpunk story.
It's entirely possible our technology progress has surpassed the government Great Filter and it is now almost impossible for empires to crumble from within e.g. CCP has experienced many "empire-ending" problems but still somehow survived to this day.
Winning a war isn't about force: it's about morale and mindset. If you can't stop people from fighting against you, you can't win a war. A drone has never walked into a community and gotten people to put down their guns.
Drones are weapons. They're one of the many tools of war. But war has always been about culture, food, politics, religion, demographics, and many other factors.
People win and lose wars. Weapons help.
Drones on the other hand are cheap and require fairly few people to operate. A few deaths squads in the control might be enough to suppress an entire country.
It's a little like surrounding an army on an open field: If you give the losing side in a pitched battle an escape route, many of them will run, but if you surround them, they will fight to the death because there's nothing else they can do.
While it’s not exactly that straightforward but democratic reforms is what basically killed it. Gorbachev allowed independent power centers to form which weren’t controlled by the party apparatus and these new centers had no reason to preserve the union/empire even though relatively few people (outside of the Baltic region and the Caucasus) actually wanted to abolish it. Internationalist empires like the USSR, Austria-Hungary, Ottomans, Tsarist Russia (outside of the core regions), Yugoslavia and even Rome to some degree tend to be very fragile. Any rapid attempt to reform the system tends to destabilize it to such a degree that it can no longer survive without extreme violence.
China and the US (still) are nation states and not real empires, therefore they are almost immune to some of the issues which brought down most historical empires (nation states are much better in enacting reforms and generally much more flexible). Of course that’s not permanent and might change in a generation or two, for instance if different US states continue drifting apart economically, culturally and socially.
Tell the Tibetans and the Uighurs that the PRC is a “nation state” not a “real empire”
The Ottoman sultan was calling himself Kayser-i Rum in the 20th century!
Well, there were some who wanted to continue it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire - of course, after a 300+ year gap, it's more a revival (or reusing a powerful trademark to boost your importance) than a continuation...
Michael Parenti does a good job of painting the crises of the first century BC (with some mentions of the Gracchi) as a class struggle in his People’s History of Ancient Rome.
This is an excellent example of wishful thinking. American influence is clearly shrinking. Just one example: when Biden went on a tour to oil-producing countries to ask them to increase oil production, every single country either ignored him or agreed to make homeopatic scale increase (which was presented as a huge win by US media).
Are you?
Americans like to repeat that and certainly believe it but is it still as true as it was?
It’s probably still true military but in term of influence the USA is less relevant by the day. You weren’t very successful at convincing developing countries to sanction Russia for exemple.
Arguably US was even weaker in that regard during the cold war. E.g. the response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia was much weaker in every regard. Granted there weren't many soviet billionaires to sanction but sending weapons there would have been inconceivable (especially on this scale)
The US is one of the largest producers of oil, a large exporter of food, and a large exporter of tech.
None of those sticks were used against developing countries to get them to sanction Russia because currently there's no need
Nations and empires can go through crisis after crisis, and Ancient Rome did so for practically 300 years, since the end of the rule of Marcus Aurelius, and the corresponding end of the Pax Romana. Crisis after crisis and civil war after civil war wore away at the empire. Each time, regional governors accrued more power, the central command structure got weaker and weaker, and finally provinces started to break away from the empire.
This is why the fall of Rome is at different times for different people: there wasn't really a clear end of the empire and a move toward fiefdoms and regional governance. The title "emperor of Rome" continued long past the end of the Roman Empire, well into the 2nd millennium AD.
EDIT: I believe that what we are looking at in the USA now is closer to Rome in 180 AD than it is to 470 AD. The Pax Americana and the era of globalization that it enabled (globalization is not a modern phenomenon - Ancient Rome under the Pax Romana had a form of globalization, as did the English empire with the Pax Britannica) is clearly coming to an end. There is still a long way to fall before everything unravels - and a lot more pain, tyranny, and bloodshed.
It is unclear to me that the big boogeymen of US foreign policy - China and Russia - are poised to take over from the US. Russia clearly does not have the economy to support this. The CCP is likely hoping that the US tears itself apart without a foreign war, since China would likely suffer heavy losses in one.