@smithy more or less. The west is not in decline, it's just that we were too used to be by far ahead of the whole world for half a century and now other countries start to catching up and compete economically. We are not in a unipolar world anymore, geopolitically speaking, so we are no longer uncontested when we interfere in foreign policy. You can call it decline, but it's really just a return to normalcy. For better or worse
@smithy I mean it's difficult to find a meaningful metric to define decline and even when you find one you can always present a counterargument of why it's a dubious quantifier of decline. For example, in a span of 50 years manufacturing shifted almost entirely from the west / Japan to Asia but at the same time manufacturing is no longer such a good indicator of countries' strenght.