I don't have anything to go by for this, but I do wonder if there were any people who predicted the downfall of the Roman empire 200, 100, 50, etc years before it actually collapsed. I suspect all of them would have somehow based this on its decadence and excesses, but I also suspect none would have had a firm grasp on how it would play out.
I am similarly interested with such questions wrt to the US today.
With so many near death experiences actually death was challenging to guess at.
This is just Germans dealing with end being unavoidable.
This is also what at least part of the Americans doesn't get. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc. weren't freeloaders, they were doing the bidding of the US in the UN, maintaining the system where the US can print money without limit, etc. All that soft power has been destroyed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless