In the time leading up to a serious crisis, there are usually a set of voices emerging that are raising the alarm about the many interacting conditions that threaten to bring that crisis about, and then those voices are shouted down, the crisis mounts, the voices are proved fucking right, and then those in power are forced to make the proper adjustments anyway under far greater pressure and under sharply curtailed time constraints than was really necessary.
The US and its allies have been flailing in foreign and global economic policy for decades now, just about smashing every last piece in the china shop really, and now the first glimmers of a new multipolar world are taking shape in response to that recklessness. The powers pushing to make that world come into fruition - namely Russia and China and their allies and observers - are already of that world and will be first movers in understanding how to move and survive in that world, whereas the US and its allies are wading deeper and deeper into a wilderness they have no real understanding of.
Of course one can learn and change as one moves into an uncertain environment, but the learning has to be fast enough and a competence and confidence have to emerge before the stakes are really high. The Western powers are learning about a whole new state of affairs very quickly and in a crash course as they make their moves in the course of the Ukraine crisis and are provided with real feedback, but is it enough? The continuing flailing, and willfully impoverished understanding transmitted through the media as the ruling elite talks to itself and the ruled, and the continuing attempts to obfuscate through better PR as opposed to real and hard understanding of facts on the ground, does not inspire confidence.
Living things can move towards all sorts of equilibria in many different conditions...until they can't. And you may have a set of legs that allows you to run when you start to hear the rumbling of an avalanche, but if it is big enough and close enough, it won't matter: no amount of running will allow for an escape.
That's not to say that the Western world necessarily has to be buried in the coming cascade of crises, but that world has certainly skated by for some time on those long and irresistible fumes of global hegemony without having to adapt to surrounding conditions, and it now appears that the bill is coming due. Historically, sooner or later that state of affairs starts to bite.
