@Remittancegirl I have a half-baked theory about this. But I'm just a rando, so feel free to disregard.
It makes sense of quite a lof of what is going on, which is both good (it has explanatory power) and bad (maybe it has too much explanatory power).
My theory in sum is that what we might call, for lack of a much more precise and lengthy characterisation, the US foreign policy elites, have an essential disagreement between two factions I'll called optimist and pesimist.
Optimists are the people who were in charge pre-Trump. They are liberals, in the technical sense of upholding free markets and so on, and believe their own propaganda. They're the sort of people who think Fukuyama was right and which believe capitalism is more efficient and soft power matters. Who think GDP measures power, financialisation has no negative sides, and industrial production is something that can be done elsewhere and paid for. Who regard China as abnormal, and on a permanent edge of crisis, and consider it will inevitably adopt more capitalist forms because it will otherwise run into a dead end. Optimists trust the US's ability to ultimately outcompete its rivals and regard persuasion and diplomacy as key tools.
The pessimists have similar terminal values (US hegemony, private property) but aren't convinced that there's anything more efficient or automatically victorious about them. They see China as an existential threat to the model, and aren't invested in upholding rules if that means they might lose. They also see the present moment of US power as historically unique, a peak, and so they see its current allies as resource bases to be extracted from, and its military as a tool to create facts on the ground that cannot later be reverted. Under this frame, US power is fragile and temporary, so it makes sense to use it now before it's lost.
This makes sense of very strange things, like the urgency to intervene in Venezuela, the concern with Panama, Canada, Iceland, Greenland, and the otherwise inexplicable support for the war in Iran. The way I see it, this is the pessimist faction gaining the upper hand and deciding having a big and scary military is no advantage if you never do anything with it, and since the hegemonic status is ultimately temporary, this is the time to act.
