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True, but they just delayed the inevitable. The debasement was underway. Then hard men reintroduced hard money. The siliqua and the solidus. But that actually caused a shock. Rome was used to inflation via taxation. Now they had to raise real taxes. So the burden of empire became visible. And Rome still went to zero in 476 AD. Many parallels between late Rome and America. Rome was an enormous egalitarian capitalist empire. Starting from an organic tribe, it expanded to conquer huge swaths of territory and assimilate countless foreign tribes under its system of laws. Then it gradually lost the distinction between the core and the periphery, by expanding the definition of citizenship (eg Constitutio Antoniniana in 212) and thus diluting it. Mass immigration to the imperial capital meant the Romans become confused about what Rome even was. Christianity arose as a revolutionary ideology on the edge of empire and eventually the emperor himself (Constantine) converted to Christianity in 312. The last ditch attempts to reverse the imperial overstretch and currency debasement with “extreme” measures by hard men instituting hard money (Aurelian, Diocletian) only worked temporarily. Because fundamentally the empire was just too capital-inefficient and internally divided to survive the burden of real taxation. So it ultimately fell to German “barbarian” outsiders, with half of it continuing in the East. All of that maps to today’s America. The Internet is analogous to Christianity, as it arose on the edge of empire and has disrupted it from within. The Chinese are like the Germans, barbarians disrupting the empire from without. The debasement of the dollar and the sudden reinstitution of hard money will cause a similar sovereign debt crisis. The overseas Anglosphere, particularly India, is like Byzantium, in that it has millions who understand the empire’s systems deeply but aren’t dependent on the central empire itself. Also, just as Byzantium tolerated Christianity better than Rome, India has tolerated the disruption of the Internet better than America. Like Byzantium, it has more of a tradition of tolerating a zillion different ideologies within it, and India has also fused the Internet with the state (UPI, Aadhar) much as Byzantium fused Christianity with the state (eg caesaropapism). Anyway: in the fullness of time, something great did get rebuilt after Rome’s collapse: the Holy Roman Empire, in a German-dominated Europe with Christian influence. The main thing is that after the collapse of Rome, Christianity was reconfigured into a stabilizing religion and the Germans were at the center of Europe rather than a barbarian class. That’s similar to what is to come with the Internet and China. After the end of the American Empire, sad as that will be, the Internet gets reconfigured into a stabilizing system (rather than a purely disruptive one) even as China becomes the economic center of the world (rather than a barbarian outsider). But there was a Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, and there may be something similar after the fall of the American Empire. It might not last thousands of years, because everything happens faster today, but we should boot up the monasteries and start copying the scrolls just in case. I agree some people say that, in a kind of hopeful way, wishing that some guy will arise and restore order and bring greatness. But the beginning of the American Empire was FDR, 80-90 years ago. I mean, there’s no way you can look at this global footprint and say otherwise. This ain’t the posture of a people sitting humbly behind their own borders, but the greatest empire of all time. And now it’s withdrawing from the world.