Taking the long term view, our system's failure will be seen as distinctly parallel to the failure of the Soviet system[1] - dual headstones of the European Era. I suspect that the common collapse will be seen not a result of any inferior ideological or economic systems, but a common lifecycle stage for all nuclear powers.

There's a mechanism deep inside the fundamentals of strategic nuclear weapons that has permanent and profound effects on the society and nation holding them[2]. One obvious thing that is easy to perceive even from our own vantage point: nuclear powers suffer from an always-expanding executive branch. Nuclear weapons make the Westphalian state system structurally obsolete . . but we have no replacement, so we're left with zombies. The nuclear states inevitably evolve into these sort of executive-branch security zombies, able to fixate on nothing but destruction.

I'm not going to pretend I have the answers here, but, well, we need to stick around for the future histories, don't we?

[1] The Soviet system having the disadvantage of being beaten the hell up by the great wars of the 20th century. You don't lose 2/3rd of your working age men and just go back to the mines like normal.

[2] Vaclav Smil has written extensively on energy transitions, and the quantitative point is incontrovertible: the jump from chemical to nuclear energy release is on the order of a million-fold, comparable in magnitude to the jump from metabolic to combustion energy. When genus Homo tamed fire, it forced speciation. We would be fools to expect less from the power of the atom.