If the US ever did anything to really p!ss the Chinese off the easiest thing the Chinese could do is start selling US bonds.
The Chinese have bought US debt in the form of US bonds for some time now and it doesn't take a genius to work out that they want leverage on the US for something.
The idea that the US has any chance of isolating China like it has North Korea is silly. It is not the US government that has a say, it is western big business that are flooding into China looking for places to set up their filthy non safe standard factories to use the plentiful labour that does not require health benefits or any rights at all. Cheap production allows larger profit margins.
The US might put sanctions on China but Europe wont, and that will give their products a huge competitive edge... it will be much cheaper than the American goods made in some other sh!thole where they don't even have a word for unions or workers rights.
Boom. How you going to fly to target Chinese cargo ships when all your
fuel is gone? US submarines could be fooled by reflagging cargo ships as
Taiwanese.
You are missing one important factor.
WTF are either of them going to start a real war with each other for?
Libya makes sense for the US because there is lots of untapped oil resources in the country, and whether the new regime loves the US or hates it... if it wants to rebuild it will need to access those untapped oil resources... which will lower the price of oil on the international market... which is exactly what the US wants. It wouldn't even matter if it was Chinese or even Russian companies that get the contracts... as long as that oil flows the US is happy.
A war with the US would lead to immediate damage and blockade of China... hard to enjoy economic growth in such a condition. For the US it might not be so bad as cutting off the cheap workforce of China might make some US industries start looking at using american workers instead.
The huge irony for the American people is that it was their tax money that bailed out the rich people in America. What did these rich bankers do? Spend money in the US economy to stimulate growth for all Americans?
Nah!!!! P!ss off. They put their bail out money into China because the returns to them are better in the short term and they can make more money that way.
What the American people should have demanded was that the bailout money should have paid back all the bad loans. It wasn't that long ago that there were laws that said if a bank lent money to someone they weren't sure could pay the money back then that person was not liable if they couldn't pay it back.
It was a law that made loan sharking illegal as an example.
It was also the main reason why getting a loan with most banks used to be harder than getting into Harvard. You basically got it if you were rich. In other words you got a loan if you could prove you had so much assets and income that you didn't really need a loan.
They changed those rules and banks would give anyone a loan to buy a house as long as the house was collateral because if you found you couldn't pay the loan they just took the house and with house prices going up all the time they didn't lose anything. When the house market collapsed however and house prices plummeted all of a sudden you had millions of loans worth billions of dollars where the borrower can't afford to pay off the loan and the loan is now worth more than the house the loan was used to buy. The borrower could sell their house but were unlikely to get enough money from the sale assuming they could even sell the house, to pay back the loan so they would still owe money to the bank and have no house to live it.
Another option would be to nuke a couple of US cities... that would destroy a lot of houses and push the price of the remaining houses up so they could be sold and the money paid to the banks in full.