Admittedly, I find myself wondering if these developments are a phenomenon in a world where Pax Americana is collapsing - but perhaps salvageable, or if it's the logical outcome of an already post-Pax Americana world.
Reminds me of another comment on a different story weeks ago which remarked: "I wonder if we will look back at this period and include it in the time period of WW3.". Perhaps it's already begun?
WW3 has definitely already begun. Looking back, we count all the years between 1937 and 1945 as years of WW2. Japan and China were the two belligerents who fought the longest, all eight years between 1937 and 1945.
So you could compare this current time to the China-Japan conflict during the 1937-1939 period or the 1939-1940 period of the 'phoney war' in Europe or even the period 1937-1941 before the Soviets and the US were both involved.
... but only if current events actually keep escalating to the scale of a world war. If Russia/Putin loses steam and the precedent takes the winds out of China's foreign policy sails, or if China's domestic economy implodes and neuters the economic support for Putin's war, the current events will likely just fizzle out. Ten years ago I generally thought the end of the US/USD empire was inevitable. Now that the chief competitors are playing their hands in some very foolish ways (and cryptocurrency has been basically harmlessly absorbed by the incumbent financial system), I'm not so sure.
Ray Dalio has weighed on exactly your question. This is a 45 minute video that directly answers exactly your question, that is very much worth a watch:
The extremely quick version is that wars happen when am empire is in decline, not when they have collapsed, so we are still salvageable, but only if we get a handle on income inequality.
He would say that Pax Americana has not collapsed yet, but that it is definitely in the process of collapsing.
He asserts that the main identifier of empire decline is income inequality which is fueled heavily by inflation which was enabled by the abandoning of the gold standard (Have you seen that WTF happened in 1971 meme? Abandoning the gold standard is what happened. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
When the rich get richer because they are the main winners of inflation, they start gutting institutions that can threaten their entrenched power (such as infrastructure, R&D, and most importantly education -- "we don't want people who can critically think, we want people who know how to perform a task" -- there's a move from liberal to technical education) which results in less innovation and therefore waning military strength and adaptability. As a militaries strength falters, the use of the American petrodollar for trade becomes less appealing, which would ultimately stop you from living beyond your means by powering yourself with debt/inflation. As soon as quality of life drops, civil war/revolution/civil unrest becomes much more likely, leading to inability to project power, leading to definite loss of reserve currency status, which definitely leads to "collapse."
Ultimately, if we do not tax billionaires to pay for social programs (namely public education) Pax Americana is guaranteed to collapse and WW3 will be that much more likely.
Billionaires having too much power in America is the political issue that matters. It's why Russia went in to decline (Ukraine is a result of Russia's decline), and it's why it's obvious to just about any working (as opposed to "owning") American that we are in decline.
Trump won't just end constitutional rule and rule of law, he will stoke civil unrest and directly work to undo NATO and therefore Pax Americana, which will ultimately end the US dollar as reserve currency, which will definitely lead to collapse. This will achieve Russia's main geopolitical goal. Secondary goals, such as balkanization (Texit, Civil War II, Cascadia) become more likely when America defaults because it can't inflate itself out of poor budget management.
