Nearly sudden collapse
Patrick Buchanan says in "Churchill, Hitler and the 'Unnecessary War'" that Britain lost its empire in WWII, and the West lost the world. Mark Steyn noted in "Tattered Liberty" that the baton of global leadership was passed between Britain and the U.S. precisely in the middle of 1943. Like Niall Ferguson, Steyn expects the final shift away from U.S. dominance to come suddenly. Ferguson speaks of "sudden collapse" and says that a seemingly random piece of bad news could be the trigger that disrupts the apparent equilibrium. At one point, it looked like it might be Greece. The way governments mishandled the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the eruption in Iceland and the swine-flu outbreak also gave cause for concern about the vulnerability of the West to sudden collapse. Czech officials, as mere onlookers in most of this, can take pride that their incompetencies are rather inconsequential in comparison.
Glossary of difficult words
tattered - (figuratively) virtually destroyed, ruined; torn, (literally) old and in generally poor condition;to pass the baton - to hand over a duty or responsibility;
onlooker - a nonparticipating observer; a spectator;
incompetency - an instance of incompetence.