"Never" is certainly plausible, even with good outcomes in the next two elections, in the same kind of way that the British Empire never really recovered from WW1 because that was followed quickly by the Great Depression then WW2.
The same industrial realities that had allowed Germany to alternate from "and also" -> "existential threat" -> "reparations" -> "existential threat" -> "suppressed" -> "Wirtschaftswunder" on such short timescales also applied to all the freedom fighters in the nations of the Empire.
A similar process also means the world is much less dependent on the USA for high-tech production than it used to be; and mass production outside the USA has changed what can be done with high-tech production, with the current US military posture being meant for a small number of powerful weapons, rather than saturation attacks with drones replacing shells on both range and rate of fire and apparently not being hugely more expensive than shells.
