What peaceful country had NATO invaded? Ukraine was not going to invade Russia and neither would NATO. Russia is a nuclear power nobody is going to invade them.
China on the other openly threatens to invade Taiwan, has been battling India over their border for decades, continues to build man made islands to gain territory, has a dispute with the Philippines over islands etc. China is not a peaceful nation and once again has zero need for a base on the Solomon islands.
By the way all though I am no expert I spent several years working the Chinese mission as an Intel analyst so I do know a little about the China threat.
Yugoslavia, Libya to start with.
And if you think Ukraine is not a threat to Russia then you weren’t an intelligence analyst at all.
NATO bombed Libya, offensively, when Obomber got us into that mess over unproven allegations that Gaddafi was going to kill 10k of his own people.