I don't think any of these are salient. In the first place, politics is more often the driver of economics than the other way around. No way would American pol

I don't think any of these are salient. In the first place, politics is more often the driver of economics than the other way around. No way would American political leaders sacrifice the good of the nation for the good of individual corporations. To allow China to do this literally means they're sleeping at the wheel. Americans have always been fiercely America-first, up to and well beyond the point of being willing to go to war over it. This is, quite literally, the one job that a lot of people in government have, to come up with foreign policy strategies and assess the situation and recommend policy to political leadership. Those people are still there, doing their jobs, assessing and recommending. Yet we still have not started pursuing an effective strategy for containing China. Why? Your other theme, that Americans just somehow like China, doesn't really hold water either. Americans had a similar like for Russians, but that didn't stop us from fighting a decades-long proxy war with them. American leaders just seem legitimately confused over the direction the nation should be going, allowing China to fill a leadership void. It almost seems like we're just tired of global hegemony.