A or B or Both?

"There's a limit to how long we can live off past wealth generated by our ancestors and foreign borrowing against our remaining assets."

That's a good way of putting it. Unfortunately, we're trapped. To escape the march of death we're on, we would have to begin paying off the principal of our debt. Not only can we not make any headway against the principal, we can't even keep up with the *interest payments* on the principal out of what we generate ourselves. We have to take on new debt just to keep up with the interest. This is like starting a new credit card to pay the interest payments on your other credit cards.

We're trapped. To break out of the prison described in your quote, we would have to smash through one ( or possibly both ) of the walls.

A- Stop handing over native assets to our creditors.
B- Stop finding new creditors to supply the funds we need to service our existing creditors.

If we don't default on our paper, the paper will bury us.No other way out of this boa constrictor of debt.