You know, we can look back at various empires, and pinpoint moments big and small that led to the downfall of those empires, whether they be Romans, Persians, Ottomans, British, Spanish, etc., etc. It's just so obvious in hindsight, some real "damn, they really fucked up at this particular moment in time" kinds of moments.
Most of the time, the people who were living at that time within those empires would not have realized the seriousness of those moments, because they would have grown up in a situation where the empire is all they had ever known. They couldn't conceive of something wrecking their world and they would have seen the occasional speed bump but assumed that things would course-correct and everything would work out fine, because that's how it had always been in their lives.
And in those cases where we can assign an exact date to the end of an empire, even then for the majority of people who were living at that time, it might have been just another day. One day a farmer and his family go to sleep under one ruler or one country, and they wake up the next day under another ruler or country. He still has chickens to tend to, fields to plow, etc. He's going to hear about it after the fact. He may not even be able to see the big picture, because he lives in a tiny village in the boonies. Maybe whoever comes by to collect taxes has a different accent in the future.
But here in America in 2025, we all have access to information (even if we don't partake of it) where we are aware of these things, and we can in fact see, in real-time where we are pissing away our influence on the world scene. We will feel the effects over time on our economy (it will be measured in years, so we will see and feel it).
Killing USAID and Voice of America and various other things we use to project soft power, we are literally giving the Chinese a power vacuum to fill, and when they fill it, we can't just put a different party in power in 2026 and 2028 and bring back everything and tell the Chinese "yeah, you guys need to leave, we got this, we'll send them some food and medicine and they'll let our oil or mining companies back in, no harm, no foul!"
When countries pivot away from one empire to another, well, lest we forget we have a very relevant example from earlier in the year: when we got in the tariff fight with Canada, they literally said they need to pivot to Europe and replace us with Europe. When that happens, we won't be able to claw our way back into those markets easily, because that's a helluva lot of supply chains/infrastructure that does not pivot all that quickly.
When conference realignment happens globally, just like with college sports, there's usually no going back to the old conference. And this isn't the Cold War where we just keep a steady bearing and stick to our values and we can beat the Russian bear and eventually get all of those Eastern European countries on our side. China is playing a much longer game than we and the Soviets were.