JF

Well there are two big reasons afaict: 1) China and Russia make far more plausible adversaries to justify unlimited military spending than ragtag militias 2) China's economic growth actually does threaten US hegemonic status and they won't consent to be junior partners

The TPP and "pivot to Asia" were the liberal aesthetic answers to the same question really

There's already a wing of the GOP that is ready to call it Chinesium Sneezium or whatever the fuck, as both evidence and reason to put boots on the ground in Asia. They want a shooting war because we blinked first on the trade war and it's made them extremely grumpy

Nobody wants war with China. China has a billion people and a formidable military. It would be more suicidal than invading Iran by an order of magnitude.

neocons and their ideological progeny infect every american institution and all of them have spent essentially every waking moment since the end of the cold war trying to find a way to justify keeping the cold war going and maintain a dynamic that favors their political milieu

"Neocon ideology" got routed in Iraq and New Orleans. Americans hate China for taking their factories and undercutting their wages, not for being the yellow peril.

The current policy of decoupling and "Great Power Conflict" is not driven by the average American's burning desire for proxy war with China

There is no current policy of decoupling. Nobody is proposing it and nobody is acting on it. Americans want to decouple, Trump wants fame, the MIC wants contracts (the 'proxy war') and all other businesses want cheap labor.