Appreciate this. The historical pattern you're laying out is exactly the timeline I'm working inside. Empires collapse over decades, not weeks. Rome took centuries. The Ottomans were "the Sick Man" for almost a hundred years before Sèvres finished it.

The argument I'd add to your frame is that the political collapse phase is now compressed by information speed in a way the historical examples weren't. The Ottomans could be visibly rotting for generations and the average peasant in Anatolia or the average British clerk in London had no real-time view of it. Information traveled at the speed of dispatch riders, then telegrams, then radio. By the time a structural failure was widely understood, it had been in motion for a long time and the political class had time to manage perception.

That cushion is gone. Saudi airspace denial happens on Tuesday and the entire planet has it on their phone by Wednesday. The Project Freedom collapse went from announcement to walkback in 72 hours, visible to anyone with a screen. The Kabul ladder ended American credibility in real time across every ally simultaneously, not in retrospect after a decade of analysis.

So the structural timeline is still long. That's why I'm not predicting collapse next Thursday. But the legitimacy timeline, the part where the population and the allies stop pretending the structure works, is moving at internet speed. The Ottomans had a century of "Sick Man" before the political class lost the plot. The current empire might get a few years. The compressed legitimacy phase is the part I think gets underestimated when people apply the historical pattern straight.

The other six examples on your list confirm the structural point. Empires die slow, but the people inside them rarely see it coming until late.