Sorry to pierce your holy pope box, but this stuff is really, really, really old. It's way bigger than peoples' economic interest. This deals with forces that people are willing to
die for. Think about that for a minute. What causes people to sign up for war? 9 times out of 10, it's for "the good of the country."
How do you define the good of the country? Only against the interests of other countries. What's in the best interests of the US is against the interests of China. That's what this stuff means. And it's a strong enough model to have prevailed for over a thousand years. Foreign policy experts are all over themselves right now wondering what the hell is going on and nobody really has a good answer.
The United States has historically been the global hegemony that dictates how much other nations can get away with. That's something that usually sinks into the minds of the entire population and infuses them with the willingness and desire to fight, not just to safeguard that status, but also to punish insults to that status, even if they're just perceived.
The EU is not an insult to American status. Neither is Russia, Africa, or South America. China is. They're creating global status for themselves that the US has historically held to be within it's purview. It's creating alternatives for countless small nations other than acceding to American dominance.
American politicians are more than capable of setting the economic agenda. They've done this in the past. Why are they not doing this now, in response to geopolitical imperative that's held for every single other nation in the same position has for as long as we can study dominant nations for? China should have expected the American inquisition. The inquisition never came. So they get bolder and bolder. This is far beyond business. This is pride.
America got to rise because the powers in Europe were too busy infighting to recognize the growing nation. Once the world wars concluded, they got their act together and are acting as a bloc to balance the US. The world learned to not ignore rising powers just because they're thousands of miles away.
Look, the US is willing to check North Korea, which serves no real threat to anything but perceived American interests. Yet we're willing to make national news every little thing Kim Jong-Un does, and seriously rattle our sabers against him. Why is North Korea on our radar, but not China?
It's got nothing to do with business. This is pure politics. The only entity capable of drumming up the resources to check China is us, and we're not doing it. By all analyses that have served us well for a thousand years, we're not doing it. Are we just waking up, just now getting ready to perceive the threat? Or is there something else going on? Does America just not care about the position in the world that previous generations spent their entire lives building?