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That means the US and co need to put more of their resources into costlier and riskier forms of directly coercive violence. They'll ramp up their efforts at regime change operations, where they've had a few big wins recently, like Syria. But Syria took 15 years of horrifying civil war to bring down. And the US has had plenty of defeats to, totally failing to unseat Maduro and seemingly helpless to do anything about Morena in Mexico. Lula is back in power and the US's efforts to attack him are shoring up his weak public support. They've had no big wins in Africa recently. As countries get a twinge more economic stability and sovereignty, they become less vulnerable to these attacks. And that leaves the US with just the big one: direct military intervention.

Obviously, the US is always willing to go to war, but it's never the preferred path. It's incredibly expensive and unpopular and doesn't have anywhere near the success rate of financial manipulation. Iraq was a half-victory, Afghanistan an outright failure. Though the super-empire is capable of projecting power anywhere, it can't project power everywhere. And the same economic development that makes countries resistant to color revolutions and coups makes them resistant to military intervention.

So you have history's greatest killer, dripping with blood and actively wreaking havoc where it can, but in a gradually shrinking operational zone. The longer it waits to substantially escalate military conflict, the worse its economic situation gets and the harder military victory becomes. The empire is fully aware of all of these dynamics and now has to choose how to deploy its proportionally shrinking but still gargantuan resources to hold onto what it can and use it to build a new economic base to beat China before it's too late. If they act decisively, waging major wars during Trump's current term, they might be able to cow enough countries into submission to peel them off of China and, hopefully, block the PRC's growing alternative. The PRC will almost certainly not intervene militarily to protect anyone - maybe increase trade, provide some critical components for arms. Is that Chinese trade support enough for countries to repel the US? It was for Iran, but who's as strong as Iran? The other alternative is the US realizes that it's already too late to win a global war (which it is) and turns its focus squarely to where it has the most control: Europe and the Americas. Leave Africa and Asia to China (for now) and convert its vassals and colonies into a massive war machine to feed a very hungry and sickly capitalist class.

I predict an attack on Venezuela, which is the biggest counterhegemonic force in Latin America that the US could potentially crush. It can't really do anything militarily to Mexico or Brazil except kill a bunch of people, but it might be able to remove Maduro and put in a comprador that can revive the US economy through a massive infusion of cheap oil (by starving the renewable energy industry, Trump is trying to create conditions where this war is totally unavoidable). But I don't think that war would have much success. You'd get the first true repeat of a Vietnam-like war that wrecks the US economy and political system, but they won't have alternative countries to turn to except Europe. Somebody in Europe is going to say "fuck this" and we'll get war on the paranoid peninsula once again. That might spill over into Africa and West Asia, but I think Europeans have very little juice when it comes to global war these days. The continette will be plundered, the US will get a dead cat bounce, and then the whole creaky thing will lay down and die, its military resources exhausted and its financial tools made irrelevant.

If we can kick off a revolution or two in the imperial core, this whole thing could get disrupted.