This Is What "Always" Happens Before A Superpower Falls

throughout history Mighty empires have risen to unparalleled Heights only to crumble into the dust of Forgotten eras from the Grandeur of Rome to the economic might of the 20th century superpowers the story is always the same but what causes these collapses what are the warning signs that can transform Prosperity into precarity and what does the US need to watch out for today we are to Crossroads the economic landscape is Shifting under our feet and the patterns we see now M those that have preceded the downfall of the greatest empires in history this is what always

happens before an Empire collapses are you paying attention it's no secret that the United States is at of Crossroads as countries de dollarize and many countries choose to team up against what is the largest and greatest nation arguably in the world we're seeing more and more fear especially here at home will the dollar collapse is the economy about to collapse do we have a debt problem and just how bad is it and even more importantly just how long does the US have to continue to be the primary world superpower and in this video I'm going

to discuss the rise and the fall of many of the Great Empires what is consistent among all of those collapses and where exactly the US is right now especially relative to China and then at the end of this video I'm going to discuss what you can do to protect yourself from the inevitable because every great Empire in history has collapsed so that you don't have to worry about your finances when that happens but before I get into all the details my name is n Maas and if you want to thrive financially if you want more

this is the place for you so do me a favor if at the end of this video you found it useful or interesting hit the Subscribe button and hit the like button so more people like you can see this video so I'd like to begin by talking about the most recent changes to the New World Order and full credit where credit is due here many of the charts in this video come directly from Ray doio and specifically from his book The Changing World Order and whether you want to delve into the full book or not

you can simply search R Alo the changing World Order and Linkedin and Ray Delio has posted summaries of each chapter now that being said many of the charts in this video do come from Ray Delio's book however a lot of the research has been done outside of that book research that I've done on my own using scholarly journals encycl IAS and I have come to many of my own conclusions which in a lot of ways mirror ray Delio's opinions but in a lot of ways don't and there's one specific difference between ralo's thought process and

mine which I think is quite interesting now that being said Ray alio is incredibly more successful than I am he is one of the leading thinkers in the world right now especially when it comes to economic collapses but I do think that even with the best thinkers in the world there is always a need for context and simp simplification and that's what I intend to do in this video is try to simplify a very very complex topic over the last several hundred years we have seen the Netherlands be the number one superpower in the world

to be taken out essentially by the United Kingdom and then the United States taking over just after World War II as the primary world superpower and a lot of this has to do with several things including military power economic power GDP and most importantly the status as the world's Reserve currency and as you can see from Ray Delio's chart Here China is very much on the rise well the United States is facing at this moment right now a decline now in my research I was able to determine that there are essentially five reasons why superpowers

collapse now there's all kinds of Articles out there there's articles that say there's seven reasons or 12 reasons or 15 reasons but what I did is I took a look at the most recent superpower collapses and then I compared them to one of the most famous and the most horrific Empire collapses which was that of ancient Rome and when you go back in history you can see that there are things that continually happen time and time and what I found was that there was five commonalities between the recent collapses of world superpowers and that of

ancient Rome and they were primarily economic decline military overreach political instability and Corruption internal strife and rebellions and external pressures and primarily external pressures means pressures from other countries now Delio has this chart where he talks about the typical big cycle behind Empires Rises and declines and as you can see there's always a new world order and then there's peace prosperity and productive debt growth and then eventually a debt bubble and a big wealth Gap is this starting to sound familiar and then eventually there is a debt bust and an economic downturn this would be

the equivalent of what happened in 2008 and the financial crisis and after that IES tend to begin printing money and credit which leads to eventually revolutions and Wars as their power financially starts to decrease and after that you start to see debt and political restructuring and once we hit that point which is typically after a war by the way you start to see a new world order emerge now that doesn't mean that the previous superpower completely collapses because as you are well aware the United Kingdom still exists as does the Netherlands but what it does

mean is that a new power Rises to dominance and in this case it is starting to become apparent that China has a very good likelihood of once again being that superpower because in the past China has in fact been the primary world superpower and I'll show you a little bit more on that a little bit later but I want to provide some context here first by taking a look at ancient Rome the Roman Empire had these same five things that happened they had overexpansion expon and military spending that led to severe Financial strain within the

Empire that eventually led to heavy Taxation and that subsequently led to inflation and that weakened the entire economy and lastly the Reliance on slave labor which was very much upended by several major Wars which led to a lot of deaths within the Empire including that of many of the slaves stifled Innovation and hampered economic Mobility so in other words without the workers that were so necessary to keep the economy going the economy essentially imploded now in addition to that there was significant military Outreach and defeats there were continuous military campaigns that drained resources ancient Rome

was obviously an Empire that sought to expand its reach but that only could last so long and eventually as the Roman Empire started to show its weaknesses there were invasions by Barbarian tribes and essentially that led to a reduction of resources that pretty much stifled the Roman Empire to a place where it could no longer succeed now with those invasions came frequent changes in leadership and Civil Wars there was infighting and as more and more leaders tried to take the helm that led to corruption and that eroded the trust in the leadership is this starting

to sound familiar and this all eventually led to the splitting of the empire into eastern and western halves with the West falling in 476 ad so essentially you had a once great Empire that was split in two now this was very much physically but if if you look at what's happening in the United States right now where the country is very much being split from an ideological perspective it starts to become apparent that there are certain lessons we can learn from the Roman Empire but here's the major one social and economic inequality led to internal

conflicts the rich got richer the poor got poorer and that led essentially to civil unrest and it was the rebellions and the power struggles among the different factions that ultimately led to a place where the Empire just could no longer continue so as you can see there's some clear parallels between the current the United States and the Roman Empire and this is important you need to be paying attention to this because it is clear that if things get worse and by the way all of this stuff can absolutely turn itself around but if things get

worse well we could find ourselves in a situation where China really does become the new world superpower so returning to our reasons why superpowers collapse Rio has a great chart here that shows the relative standing of great Empires and this goes back to the early 1500s and essentially what you can see is that there's always as one superpower like the Netherlands the yellow line is declining there's always another one on the rise and as the United Kingdom started to decline the United States was on the rise and now it seems as the United States is

declining China is on the rise which makes it somewhat likely that they could be the next world superpower except there's one major thing which I'll get to a little bit later on which could potentially prevent them from taking the United States out completely as the primary world superpower but before we get to that I want to point out that there are certain things that happened early in an Empire's rise and certain things that happen early in an Empire's Decline and I'm going to point out right now that the black line which is the reserve status

is typically the last thing that starts to decline and it tends to happen very late in the cycle almost 20 years after the start of the decline of pretty much all of the other factors but if you look at the first two things that almost always start the Rise of an Empire it's almost always education and Innovation and Technology think about the US taking over from Great Britain as a world superpower it was very much the creation of the atomic bomb The Innovation and the technology associated with nuclear power that led them to become the

new world superpower now from an education and an innovation and Technology perspective it's quite clear that China is also on the rise but the question is is there a decline in the US's education and Innovation and technology and if you look at the world of what's happening with AI right now it's hard to argue that the US's impact on Innovation and Technology isn't still on the rise and on the same note if you take a look at things like the military trade economic output these things all seem to be also continually on the rise in

the United States it doesn't seem like we've hit that inflection point where where we are quite on the decline yet now is there some question about whether the status as a reserve currency is on the line yes there are many countries that would like to see the US dollar abandoned and is there an argument to be made that we are no longer the primary Financial Center well we're still the financial center of the world however there are countries that are trying to knock the US off of that perch but even though Ray Delo suggests that

we are beginning the decline and it's clear that we've probably hit a peak my guess is that we are somewhere near the peak of the US Empire and if we reference R Alia's assertion that the rise and fall of an Empire lasts about as long as a human life cycle well that would imply that we're about in the middle and there's potentially anywhere from 20 to 40 to 60 years until the US really has to worry about being knocked off that perch now that being said the US is definitely 80 years into being the world's

leading economic power the question is how much longer does the US have and the answer to that question is very much hard to figure out but if you watch YouTube videos and you read certain articles online you might be led to believe that the end is very much near and the reality is it probably isn't yes there's more competition but that competition still has a long way to go to supersede the us as the primary world superpower so let's take a look at the five things that lead to the collapse of a superpower and let's

start with economic Decline and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to explain each and then I'm going to reference those to the Netherlands and the UK and then after that at the end I'm going to show you exactly what's going on in the US the decline of the US and the rise of China and I'm going to show you that one thing that could potentially cause the US to maintain its superpower status economic declines in superpowers and Empire collapses almost always comes down to three things excessive debt and financial mismanagement loss of

competitive advantage and economic stagnation and Rising inequality and social unrest which is by the way about where we are right now there is in fact Rising inequality and social unrest in the United States and when you look at the United Kingdom as an example of this there were significant things that led to economic decline things like costly Wars such as the world wars that drained Financial Resources there was the loss of colonies that reduced the economic power and the influence of the United Kingdom and there was industrial decline in the mid 20th century as other

nations industrialized including the United States then if you take a look at the Netherlands prior to that there was the over Alliance on trade and Naval dominance the economic competition from emerging powers like England and France and the high cost of maintaining a vast trading empire so in other words when you have a whole bunch of countries that you're trying to control and trade with it becomes very very expensive to defend those relationships both through diplomacy and through military and that leads us to the second thing that typically causes Empire collapse and that's military overreach

prolong and costly Wars that drain resources and the overextension of military commitments starting to sound familiar I hope you're paying attention here so let's take a look at that from the perspective of the United Kingdom there was obviously the involvement in two world wars that weakened the military and the economic strength and as previously mentioned the withdrawal from colonies and loss of geopolitical influence and then in the Netherlands there was the wars with England and France particular the Anglo Dutch Wars and I cannot emphasize enough that there was an extended period of War prior to

the United Kingdom succeeding the Netherlands and it was primarily these wars and the loss of the naval Supremacy that led to the loss of key territories and that subsequently led to a shrink in trade and a shrink in the economies they were no longer the vast superpower from a military perspective and as a result that had a significant impact on their economy and for comparison if you look at what happened to Germany during World War II you can see that similar things have happened over time when you lose a war you tend to lose a

lot of your economic viability you tend to owe the winning parties a lot of money and as a result you tend to go through a significant period of time where you just don't have the economic power to compete anymore and often the loss of that economic power leads to political instability and Corruption there's almost always deep political divisions and ineffective of governance welcome to the United States in 2024 and there is almost always an erosion of trust in institutions and Leadership and if you look at what is happening in the United States right now there

is very much a 50-50 split between one party and the other and members of both parties simply do not trust one another this is where things start to get scary and if you look at the United Kingdom there was the post-war political instability and frequent changes in government as governments were unable to rebuild what they had lost during World War II and there was challenges in managing a large empire and addressing domestic issues if you have issues at home in the United Kingdom it becomes almost impossible to affect places like Canada and Australia and all

of these pieces of the Empire that are spread out throughout the world and similar sorts of things in the Netherlands the collapse of the economy led to internal political divisions and conflicts as the poor got poor and the rich got richer that led to a divisiveness and that led to challenges once again in maintaining control over a diverse and widespread Empire now for context here the United States has never really had an empire in the same way that the United Kingdom and the Netherlands had however if you look at it from an economic standpoint they

very much do have an Empire based on all the countries around the world that rely on them both for their military might and their economics so while the US Empire isn't so much an Empire that is built on the amount of land that they have control of it is very much an empire built on the amount of influence that they have and that influence is starting to WAN as we know from the Saudi Arabia abandoning of the Petro dollar which by the way was fake news but there's very much a desire of Saudi Arabia to

look at joining the brics Nations which means that the US is potentially losing a lot of that influence and of course once you have political instability you start to have internal strife and rebellions it could be argued that January 6th was indeed an internal rebellion and that's largely due to Social and economic inequality which leads to the internal conflicts and then there's of course the power struggles and the factionalism within the state this is the power struggle that the Democrats and the Republicans are facing right now so when we put that in the context of

the United Kingdom you have the decolonization movements and independent struggles and colonies with the social and economic challenges within the UK such as the minor strikes in the 1980s which led to significant economic pain and then in the Netherlands you had economic and social challenges that led to internal conflicts because Wars loss of superpower status all of that stuff and you had the resistance and the rebellions in the colonies because when you're a colony of a great Empire and you start to see that they are weak you start to see an opportunity to rid yourself

of their control which is pretty much what the US did with the United Kingdom in the 1700s and then all of this leads when the weakness is clear to external pressures and invasions you get competition from rising powers like the US is facing from China right now and you also potentially get external Invasion pressures now in today's day and age due to Mutual deterrence from nuclear weapons the external invasions and pressures potential isn't quite as high as it was in the past but it is still in fact something that we need to watch out for

because there are other types of external pressures think about it from the Russian perspective right now where the US cut off their ability to trade in US Dollars which was essentially economic Warfare as opposed to military Warfare and when we put this into the context of the United Kingdom the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers obviously led to significant external pressures now this rise of the Soviet Union was largely due to their vast military might not so much their economic might but it was a significant external pressure and in addition

to that there was also competition from emerging economies as countries like China started to industrialize and started to take a significant portion of the trade that once was originated in the United Kingdom and then with respect to the Netherlands there was obviously the competition from other European powers particularly the UK and France when the UK and the Netherlands got into their war France took the opportunity to kind of backo and pull up a lot of the Netherlands trading relationships and there was of course the loss of colonies to rival Powers because if the UK and

the Netherlands are at War if you're another country why wouldn't you go and try to steal a bunch of their colonies while the other two powers are fighting now this is where it becomes interesting because this is where we need to discuss the decline of the US and right now the US is definitely facing these five factors that lead to an empire collapse from an economic decline perspective the debt and the deficits are of particular concern now relative to other countries including China things aren't quite as bad as you might expect but they are significantly

worse than they have been for the United States in the past from a political instability perspective we are seeing polarization and erosion of trust in the government from a milit overreach perspective we're seeing costly Wars that continue and global Military commitments that are just so significant that they are one of the leading factors that is leading to the debt and the deficits that the US continues to run up and of course we have the social decline this is the rich getting richer the poor getting poorer and that is very much apparent after the pandemic and

as all of these things start to come into play there are external pressures Rising competitors the brics Nations technological disruption and a real serious threat to places like Taiwan that the US relies on to feed their technological innovation which if there were a conflict between China and the US with respect to Taiwan that could very much lead to a significant decline in the US's ability to be technologically competitive now on the other hand with respect to the rise of China we're seeing rapid industrialization infrastructure development Innovation and Technology from a political stability standpoint we're seeing

centralized Authority economic reforms the military is consistently expanding the social cohesion is getting better and better education is improving health is improving and there is global integration both with the brics Nations and with many of the other nations all over the world but that also includes the significant relationship between China and the US which includes the us being the biggest buyer of Chinese goods and China being the biggest supplier of us Goods now there's one theme that has been consistent when we've talked about the Roman Empire the Netherlands and the UK and that is that

the collapse of all of those Empires was largely due to a significant war and it's my opinion that the prospects of war is the one thing that could see the United States and China actually not interchange with respect to their superpower status but very much run in parallel for a significant period of time because there's a whole bunch of things that make war between the US and China less likely than a war between countries like the Netherlands and the UK there is the Diplomatic engagement and communication the instant communication between nations that never existed before

then there's also the economic interdependence the fact that China relies on the US as much as the US relies on China now clearly with the brics Nations they are trying to do everything they can to make it so the US can't dominate who a country can trade with but that doesn't mean that if in fact the brics nations are able to come up with an alternative Reserve currency that it will definitely take out the US dollar as the primary Reserve currency in fact there's a lot of good evidence to show that there could be multiple

Reserve currencies in the future I'll link to a video about that at the end but the big one and the most important one is the military deterrence and balance you have two superpowers both have nuclear weapons and unlike in the past where an invasion or a fight or a war could have been devastating but not catastrophic a war between two superpowers in today's day and age would in fact be catastrophic to not just one but both economies and we're not talking about a significant portion of a population being wiped out we're in fact talking about

the majority of a population being wiped out which is why the US and China are likely not going to go to war anytime soon which is important to understand because those five economic factors always included Wars and in this case it's highly unlikely that there will be a war that will cause a new world order in the way in which it has in the past so without that one thing that essentially leads to those Empires collapsing and puts the nail in the coffin my observation is that we might see two countries the US and China

run in parallel for a significant amount of time as dual world powers as opposed to their only being one and that would very much be in line with the global economic theories which is essentially that the world has become so interconnected that we're very much acting as one giant unit as opposed to many individual ones like we have in the past and particularly when I say one giant unit what I mean is one giant economic unit and the evidence of this the fact that this is highly likely to be true is the fact that during

the pandemic and during the financial crisis when we saw one economy struggle we essentially saw all of the economy struggle and that was largely due to the interconnectedness of all of the economies in the world now all that being said that doesn't mean we shouldn't be cognizant of what's Happening from a global perspective because there is in fact the possibility that the US could no longer be the world's leading superpower the question is what do we do to protect ourselves in the event that this comes to fruition and the reality is it all comes down

to your investing strategy it all comes down to the things you own where you own them and what you do if the worst comes to worse now it's my belief that somebody shouldn't be taking their money and investing it outside of the US and doing all of these things immediately but it is my belief that you need to watch what's going on with the global economy and as things start to show signs of weaknesses and there seems to be cracks in the armor of the United States it becomes very clear that you need to start

thinking about how you can protect yourself so the question is what can you do to protect yourself well the first is as things start to seem like they were becoming more and more dire for the United States you want to start diversifying Investments internationally and not only diversifying internationally but across asset classes which means you don't want to just own energy and you don't want to just own Automotive manufacturers you want to try to own the equivalent of the S&P 500 in another country now this is only if things get really really bad yes right

now it makes sense to put a small portion of your investments into other economies but as of right now the US is still very much the best place in the world to invest this is the wh if scenario for if the worst case starts to happen and you want to invest in international markets foreign stocks foreign bonds foreign mutual funds and consider International real estate and commodities and in order to do this you can use Global exchange traded funds to gain exposure to different markets and that is a very easy way to expose yourself to

those global markets without having to worry about foreign currency exchanges and setting up accounts in other stock markets that you may not have really accessible to you in addition to that if it starts to seem likely that there's going to be hyperinflation and keep in mind that 8% 10% 50% isn't hyperinflation hyperinflation is when currencies are decreasing in value by 50 to 100% in a day or a month but if it does seem like there's going to be hyperinflation you want to start have holding Assets in more stable currencies so the first thing you do

if there's going to be hyperinflation and it seems like that is what's happening is you start to convert as much cash as you can to more stable currencies so other currencies for example could be things like the Swiss frank the Japanese Yen or Bitcoin although there's an argument to be made for how stable Bitcoin actually is as you see the big swipes up and down on a daily basis as investors start to either feel really good or not so good about that cryptocurrency and you want to consider holding Assets in currencies of countries with strong

economic fundamentals so if the US seems like it's going to hell in a hand basket look to places like Great Britain look to places like Canada look to places like Japan look to other countries that seem to have those strong economic fundamentals and invest there in addition to that you can consider investing in Safe Haven Assets Now yes I'm the guy who made the video about why you shouldn't buy physical gold and silver and we are definitely not at the point where the US is so close to collapse that you need to start converting your

cash into physical gold and silver and deal with all the premiums associated with all of that you want to have a little bit at home to set aside just in case fine but don't start converting all your US Dollars into gold and silver because well you're going to get burned by the gold dealers who love to sell it to you at a higher price than what it's worth and buy it back for significantly less than what it's actually worth in fact I kid you not physical gold and silver dealers are very much the equivalent of

used car dealers but you can expose yourself and I do believe in exposing yourself and your portfolio to precious metals and things like ETFs to the tune of about 5 to 10% and you can also consider government bonds from other countries as well but one of the best the absolute best investments I think somebody can make is real estate in an economically stable regions that can also be a safe haven investment but the key here is that they need to be debt free so if in the event that you can't pay the debt you don't

lose the properties and this is in my mind the most important one you want to stay liquid you want to be able to respond quickly to changing economic conditions take advantage of new opportunities and you want to create a safety net during Financial emergencies so you want to keep a portion of your portfolio and cash or cash equivalents and ensure easy access to funds without significant penalties and the last thing I would be doing right now or at any time is giving my money to somebody and having it locked up for five or 10 or

15 years because in the last 15 years we've seen too too many crisises and to have your money inaccessible is just something that I don't think anybody should be doing so stocks bonds ET FS great Investments but locking your money up in things like land Investments where you don't have control of the land is just not something that I think is prudent and last but not least it is completely in 100% your responsibility to focus on financial education and skill development this is the one thing in life where you're responsible for both educating yourself you

never had a teacher there to do this and also being completely and 100% responsible for the amount of knowledge you have and subsequently the results that you get and and you want to stay informed about global economic Trends and financial markets and continually be educating yourself about investing economics and financial planning but most importantly you need to be going to reputable sources for this information don't just watch that guy on YouTube who's telling you to buy gold or telling you not to buy gold don't just go and listen to that Financial YouTuber because you know

you like that he's got a nice haircut and a Ferrari go and find real actual information from real experts and make sure you stay up to date and when you're staying up to date make sure the financial news sources and the analysis that you're getting is in fact from a reliable source because I'll tell you right now one of my favorite YouTubers one of my favorite Financial YouTubers about a month ago made a video about Saudi Arabia abandoning the Petro dollar and the irony is the pet Dollar in the way that he described it never

Act actually existed so it's important that not only do you know where you're getting your information from but that you personally fact check that information don't just take that guy on YouTube's word for it go look for the information find it for yourself find reliable sources that back up what was said and if you can't prove it as fact it's probably fiction oh and last but not least there's a lot of worry right now about the dollar collapsing and people wondering what would happen to their debt if the dollar didn't in fact collapse s and

if you want to see the video I made on that make sure you check that one out right here