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An opinion I have over the linguistic development of the future - even if the US lose some or even all of their power, English will stay the main international lingua franca for quite a long time.
There is precedent for this - Latin retained a very important place in the intellectual and international relations sphere centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire (it's still the language of the Catholic Church).
The cultural power of English in the modern world is probably deeper than that of Latin during the Roman Empire - it's the language of aviation, science, academia in general, lots and lots of incredibly popular pop culture products, and trade.
Competitor languages aren't as well attested - Mandarin Chinese has quite few L2 speakers outside the Sinosphere, and has the pragmatic disadvantage of using a ideographic system in a world where alphabetic systems are much, much easier to make machine-friendly.
