Could our own obligations to foreigners presage not just devaluation but also industrial and imperial decline?

But imperial decline and the subsequent demise of industrial Britain sent the area into decay.

A sure sign of imperial decline and incipient chaos, according to Hari Seldon.

But no one should labor under the illusion that Mr. Putin views himself as the orderly steward of Russia's imperial decline.

Yet somehow imperial decline never comes, and the social catastrophe never materializes.

The Round Tablers, then, hardly saw themselves as being in the business of imperial decline.

He writes of the estate's owner, his landlord: "My meditations in the manor were not of imperial decline.

If so, they can always comfort themselves with the thought that its establishment coincided with the beginnings of imperial decline.

"The rumors of America's imminent imperial decline are somewhat premature," he writes.

For the British, who had denigrated the Japanese as myopic, semi-primitives, it was a humiliation, a harbinger of imperial decline.