Here's the truth of the world:    People are just people until they have the power to induce their will on others. Then they are tyrants.     Every country is only biding its time until it's strong enough to impose itself on others.     That is exactly what china is and has been building toward for decades. With their rampant overpopulation, that's a lot of mouths to feed and satisfy. More people = less resources to go around. Eventually, it will come to the point where if china doesn't start land grabbing and killing people by the millions or even billions, they're going to be suffering from limited availability of necessary resources. It's an us or them scenario, always.         In order for china to thrive in the future, it has to literally obliterate the competition to free up resources. free trade just means higher prices, and even prices can eventually inflate to a point where war is inevitable.     The US is the most strategic and prime piece of land on the planet. keep in mind, that while the rest of the world was populated for thousands of years, they were also polluting and using resources of those lands. America by contrast, has only really had 300 years of civilization on it, in any meaningful sense since the indians didn't really take up much space. So by contrast, America is essentially untouched compared to other populated places in the planet. With the US having an ocean on both sides, and only being landlocked to the north and south, that's even more strategic.     China on the other hand, isn't all that strategic of a landmass. It's landlocked to various countries over a large portion of its border. even its ocean access borders are shared with other island countries. To top it off, china has high population density and really bad visibility from pollution, which is really bad for them if they were under attack.     It's not a question of if, but when. Even if we solved world hunger and had limitless cheap energy, china would still eventually need to expand its borders from over population, and in a big way.    places like India are the only places keeping them in check because they're close and also have rampant over population. A costly war with a place like the US, would allow india to swoop right in while china is weakened.