Are you RCP?
The PRC is our real threat, but neither Republicans nor Democrats will call that elephant in the room out.
The PRC donates a lot to political campaigns and parties through their US based subsidiaries. The PRC has lobbying firms (some of the most influential like the Podesta Group). They have vast influence on the US media through direct engagement, some ownership, their own state run media being available in the US and advertising revenue. There is a huge expat population in the US. Very important, much of US manufacturing is based in the PRC (Cisco, HP, Apple, Dell, GM or >75% of what is sold on Amazon) and US based companies do not like anything which interferes with that, nor do they like to have access to one of the worlds largest markets interrupted.
Bottom line: when it comes to the PRC, the US policy makers and bureaucrats hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_wise_monkeys#/media/File%3AGandhiji‘s_Three_Monkeys.JPG
The PRC can drive tanks over pro democracy students on Tienamin Square, and that same year the US will give them most favored trade status under George H. They can have questionable organ harvesting policies, make dissidents disappear, oppress religion, have forced abortions, literal internment camps, and we won’t say much. The PRC is a single party communist regime, they execute more people than any other country on this planet, occupy Tibet and in a show of force recently conducted a naval blockade of Taiwan. What do we do? We tell our #1 trade partner not to worry and things will return back to normal soon.
Our foreign policy is guided by making money, and that’s it.
If you’re important enough to us, you can disembowel and dismember a US resident and journalist while he’s still alive, in a fellow NATO country, at the order of the prince, and we won’t do anything, i.e. Kashoggi. We’ll sell you $200 billion worth of arms the next year and roll the red carpet out. Where’s a warrant? What investigation was there, really? Who in the US government is pushing for those responsible to be “brought to justice?” Hahahaha
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45812399
We once were special. We once had a constitutional republic, a free press, our policies reflected certain societal values.
We expected our leaders to display certain values, and they were present in our literature, movies, plays, paintings, music, sculpture, even architecture. All that is history. That is not who we are today. Today you “literally” have a US President go on a tour and claiming the US is not a Christian nation, repeatedly.
You tell me, what do we really represent today? Your Norman Rockwell, apple pie and American flag world is gone. Today when you go on a US military installation, you’ll buy clothes made in Vietnam, where the owners of the sweatshops there are communist party members, some are the same folks we fought against. You can buy your peace, democracy, sovereignty and human rights Ukraine flag (Ukraine isn’t any of those) on Amazon made in China: https://a.co/d/cD3bR4L