Editor's note: Josef Gregory Mahoney is a professor of politics at East China Normal University. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Unsurprisingly, media is full of apocalyptic narratives these days, and many of them are questionable and overwrought, perhaps little more than clickbait clamor. The Economist has heralded the "end of globalization," for example, despite likely the precise opposite being true – that COVID-19 not only illustrates globalization has reached a new plateau, the pandemic is simply more proof that even more globalization is necessary to solve a multitude of intersecting global problems.

A similar inversion of reason can be found in Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the typical "Western expert" with no discernible training related to China or experience in the country, who recently argued that the West shouldn't worry, broadly, China has also peaked and in decline. 

In fact, while China is also struggling to find a new post-pandemic normal, it's widely regarded along with other East Asian countries for having righted its ship relatively quickly, and thereby reinforced the growing perception that power is gradually shifting from the West to the East.

This is why Evans-Pritchard's argument, which might delight the White House, won't stem Washington's panic over its inability to stop its own decline or effectively constrain China's rise, nor will it dissuade the unfortunate and inaccurate conclusion that the latter caused the former.

National collapses don't occur overnight. Historically, they have happened over decades, sometimes even centuries, and despite collapsing, in some cases states have persisted and sometimes regained some measure of former glory. This happened most notably with the collapse of the Roman Empire as detailed by Peter Heather's authoritative The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006), and a similar pattern emerges with the collapse of the British Empire according to countless historians who have treated the subject.

The key difference between long ago and more recent times, however, is what David Harvey famously describes as "space-time compression." This concept is based on Karl Marx's observation in the Grundrisse that capitalism increasingly "annihilates time and space" due to its intrinsic privileging of speed over space, leading it to invest in the development and dissemination of technologies that undermine and reconfigure existing spatial-temporal relationships.

Harvey's work centered on how these developments have advanced exponentially since the 1970s, and other leading theorists have followed suit. Doreen Massey and Paul Virilio, for example, have argued that time-space compression has become increasingly universalized, merging cultures and communities within compressed historical and political eras that are difficult to recognize in real time because these developments are happening faster than we have previously experienced and been conditioned to perceive.

In short, collapses likely happen much faster now and in the case of the U.S., maybe it has already happened. In fact, some argue it happened in 2008, during the U.S.-instigated global financial crisis, which overlapped with America's failed "War on Terror," which undermined global security and even America's own civil liberties.

Nevertheless, such analysis presents an interesting contradiction on its flip side. In the precise moment of fracturing international relations, closed borders, and even border conflict, what countries have in common has actually continued to increase. Indeed, cultural and technological similarities still appear to be accelerating especially under COVID-19 and are especially observable in younger generations.

Additionally, time-space compression can be linked to another concept – deconstruction – developed and popularized by Jacques Derrida, who even famously remarked in 1988 that "America is deconstruction." Derrida understood the U.S. then as being in the vanguard of global developments that were shredding competing but outdated narratives of being, including those narratives designed deliberately to resist American-led globalization. 

Today, however, despite still being a global leader in many respects, the interesting twist is that America has increasingly become hostile to the very forces and practices it did more than any other country to unleash. Thus, while Trump brays of "making America great again," pursues "America first" policies, and picks fights with others, the problem he fails to acknowledge is that as the world became more American because of America, the U.S. became less so, or at least, the gap between the two became uncomfortably small.

This in turn has helped deconstruct American claims for exceptionalism and its "end of history" universalism, including hegemonic unilateralism –- once these ideas became too universal or demonstrated their inability to do so. In this sense, the American project in some respects has collapsed at home but continues abroad, despite Trump spinning the story the other way around.

In other words, the U.S. has become stuck in outdated and always questionable narratives about itself while becoming increasingly unstuck as a matter of actual being. This problem is not limited to Trump or his supporters. 

While the COVID-19 experience, the backlash over police brutality, the push to rethink history, and the inability of national and in many cases local governments to deal with mounting crises have "awakened" the so-called "woke people" to the fast-moving changes unfolding around them, very few have yet plumbed how deep the problems go or how to adequately address them.

In the meantime and for the foreseeable future, regrettably, these events and their likely outcomes will continue to be breathtaking in the worst possible ways. As more COVID-19 hospitalizations produce more ventilated patients, as protesters for racial justice chant George Floyd's last words, "I can't breathe," all should contemplate the same before they also fall and the collapse becomes complete.

Part 1: Witnessing America's breathtaking collapse

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