Now that the unipolar moment has come to an end, the expanding empire found it's outer most bounds where it encounters real pressure from adversarial power cores. Since it has expansion built into its DNA and because modern nation state systems allow to abstract away and redirect resource scarcity signals with money printing and other tools the ever growing buerocracy and elite continue extracting wealth from their constituents without halt.
Some of those tools include "trade deals" and "protectionist legislation". These give the empires core and their representatives in the provinces a legalistic veil to delegate the bulk of resource extraction further away from the center thus mitigating potential for civil unrest in the core.
I other words: #eurocucks will continue to get sucked dry for the next decade or so.