There's a Lenin quote that says that there are decades when nothing happens and then there are weeks when decades happen. These things aren't linear. The contradictions can build for a long time, and it can look like the system is stable and even inevitable, then the collapse comes seemingly all at once. The US is very much in the stages of the empire where things are starting to unravel now, and I think we are absolutely entering the weeks when decades happen stages.

There's actually surprisingly decent analysis from capitalist perspective on this by Ray Dalio in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. He identifies a lot of the trends that the US empire in its current state shares with past empires when they started entering a period of collapse.