"the American Empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying" -- Chris Hedges.
the sustainability of the global imperial venture is in serious decline. see Latin America in the 2000s and the last few years in the Middle East. it is not in the American character to shift to cooperation in the face of waning ability to dominate, so fully expect an escalation of US-perpetrated violence likely culminating in a global holocaust in one form of another.
it is likely the 'post-civilizational' 'historians', if we can imagine such a thing, will look back at our present time as already part of an era that rendered the civilization-experiment as we know it, doomed.
Intense psychological problems result in ideologies that prophesize "the end of the world as we know it" to minimize the cognitive dissonance between said problems and the relatively tranquil/happy/prosperous society we live in.