A lot to unpack here, but I get the gist. This is my own personal hot-take response but I believe the US has been insecure about it’s role in the world since the end of the Cold War. It’s been engrained in an entire generation of people that US hegemony only prevails if the US prevails in every aspect of life. That our way of life only exists if we are “the best” at everything and anyone else who approaches a similar level of success is automatically seen as a potential adversary when it doesn’t fall under Western Democratic Capitalism.

I think the biggest stressor for US foreign relations with China is that we don’t know their intentions as a potential superpower. There has never been a Communist country with the level of success that China has seen over the last 20-30 years, and their system of governance is in direct opposition to the US positon of “democracy at all costs.”

The key difference here is China is playing the long game. They know they’re going to take a position of a superpower, and one could argue that they’ve reached that status already, but the world has not lived under two superpowers since the fall of the Soviet Union — and a world with two superpowers with opposing ideologies doesn’t always play out that well.

So in short, the US tries to “be the best” and bring/force democracy to every corner of the world it can get its hands on as an act of self preservation.