Wars are strategic but motivated by emotional propaganda. In this case, American news is full of discussion about genocide in China. China will use it's incre

Wars are strategic but motivated by emotional propaganda. In this case, American news is full of discussion about genocide in China. China will use it's incredibly effective propaganda machine to promote theories about heinous American acts (about Covid, Taiwan, anything). (Just to clarify I am not saying there aren't heinous acts going on anywhere. But what I will say is that there are actually horrific circumstances in many parts of the world (such as for example, where wars were already "successfully" initiated). It just so happens that the press and the moral outrage coincidentally tend to be extremely ramped up when and where they are needed to motivate war.) It's not possible for military or economic planners to say "look, we need to go to war or else we will no longer be able to get computers" or "our money will disintegrate" or "we need to access this area to maintain strategic dominance" or whatever it is. So whatever type of moral story is necessary to justify mass killing is propagated. Not because those people are evil liars, but because without the stories there would be no war, and the strategic objectives would fail and have very real consequences. And it's not hard for a human to rationalize anything really. People are happy to have a moral reason to defend their ability to procure the next gadget or whatever threat there may be to their standard of living. Which often those are actually very real threats and not just about trivial things like gadgets.