What they think they're doing and what they're actually doing are two different questions. What they're aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody's actually at the helm and it's an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.
Where we are actually headed, regardless of who's in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.
If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don't start WWIII, and you're lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you'll be expected to work through. There isn't going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You're just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of "boring dystopia" is almost certainly where we're headed.
The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren't able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.
