It’s wild how completely divorced from reality basically everyone here is. The average grade schooler in China has a better understanding of how the world works than the average US grad student.

The US will continue to circle the drain for as long as its population is kept like this. You can't make rational and correct decisions without having a good grasp of the reality that exists in the world.

Counterpoint: US won the first cold war with a deeply deceived, paranoid population that believed everything was the Russians from civil rights and uppity POC to more mundane things. In fact the US at the height of its power last century in the 50s was full of raving, rabid anti-communism, witch-hunts, etc but it went onto form the US of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and finally 90s that destroyed the USSR and became global hegemon.

The level of deception of the population and its detachment from reality therefore seems to have little basis on long-term trajectory for a country's power. In fact having external antagonists is helpful to the bourgeoisie as a relief vale for blame turning towards them. Every liberal raving about Russia is one who is less focused on American billionaires and corporations and whose worldview is shaped to view internal problems as mere tendrils of foreign antagonists who are the real issue to be hunted down. You need merely plausibly say the proletarian issue at hand is actually caused by Russian agents to deflect. Meanwhile this encourages a feverish appeal to jingoist nationalism with liberals and mainstream reactionaries both belting out and proclaiming how they're the better patriots who love America better because the other side of the aisle sides with a foreign power. Both encouraged and desperate to signal their patriotism by cracking down hard and shunning "foreign" ideologies like Marxism in order to retain their patriotism credentials and continue to enjoy the self-righteous feeling it brings.

The US will continue to be a deeply reactionary place as a result of this behavior that we can say. This behavior obstructs true class analysis that we can say. But its impact on American power? Not so easy to say and I feel probably negligible compared to other factors like the rise of China, de-industrialization, late capitalist greed and calcification obstructing the war machine, etc.