You are wrong on every count. Business is motivated by the desire to be profitable, not national pride. Most people work to live, get rich and out perform that ass hole coworker who got a bullshit promotion. Raise your hand if you work to make America great instead of a salary.
>America and N. Korea could be business partners.
Nuclear weapons testing is the entire reason why they are banned as business partners. It needs to be contained because it's a trump card that a relatively backwards country can use to level the playing field of war.
Additionally, even before the trade sanctions were enabled (2006) the weak North Korean economy would make the country a pitiful and basically non-relevant business partner to the US. China, as N. Koreas' lone trade partner, has the GDP to lift N. Korea up to a relatively prosperous nation but that hasn't happened due to the internal issues with the N. Korean economy itself.
>Look I'm not even offering a moral argument here. I've been using 'should' in the "balls should roll downhill." We should be doing it, not we ought to be. What I'm saying is that this is how foreign policy is done. Has been done, for a thousand years. I'm not saying we ought to be starting an arms race with China. I'm saying that by all rights, by all historical analyses, China looks like a rival, not like a partner. But we're not treating her like one, and just allowing her to accede to the world stage completely unchallenged.
China is a rival politically. But globalization today has made that rivalry all but a front to the true nature of the US and China relationship. US and China are economic partners and rivals in the olympic games and comparing GDP numbers.
The most powerful entities in the united states are not politically elected leaders. The most powerful entities are for profit corporations. Essentially just massive conglomerates of individuals grouped together into a massive entity to work together in business. When you group people together in such a way, an interesting thing happens, the individual morals and desires and "National Pride" of a person get lost in the aggregation of people and what you get is an entity that acts like a psychopathic person on an insane quest to do anything for profit.
Big businesses or aka corporations are the driving forces and most powerful individuals in the world today. It is the desires of these corporations that largely drive economic policies and foreign affairs.
When you look at motive, when you examine the rationale behind why a country does one thing instead of another thing, you have to incorporate Big business into the psychology of your analysis. It looks like your analysis doesn't include this as a factor. If you did, it'd be obvious why the US isn't challenging china.