Yeah, China are being "generic assholes" right now, but not crossing the lines into "serious villain shit" yet, at least for people who aren't in China.
I mean there are chinese spies in europe, which suppress, bully and sometimes even kill chinese journalists who have fleed (?) to europe. And thats not even a conspiracy theory, there were investigative journalists who have uncovered this in several countries.
So I'd say that china is reeealy close to that villain line
over oil against Iraq. And that's a shame. Even back then "the whole west" wasn't united behind that lie.
China isn't Iraq.
Iran neither. Iraq was an artificial state. Iran is there in some form for more than 2 millennia. 3?
Russia is in Ukraine. Israel is, with the help of U.S. trying to start a war in "middle east". Let's say that China "try for Taiwan", do you really think that the U.S. can "mobilize" effectively on all these fronts. And would Europe follow U.S.?
Another question would be, let's say that Trump is the next president: What would that change about your world war 3 fantasies?
Because the president only controls the country if they aren't a complete fucking moron, otherwise it's like his first term where literally everyone told him to go fuck himself. :)
It helps not being lead by inbred fucktards, as the history of Russia has eminently proven.
I mean, it probably would've been ideal then but as usual, America was recovering from/embroiled in the last Conservative disasters (financial crisis, Afghanistan/Iraq.) And Obama had just burned a lot of political capital giving people healthcare.
W annihilated our foreign policy, destroyed it completely.
And yeah, Obama burned everything on the aca and recovering the economy while fox News had mustard gate and tan suit gate and saluting a guy with a coffee cup gate.
His foreign policy was a mess, but at least he started the pivot away from the middle east back to meaningful places, but we really needed to deal with Russia then.