This month, the world watched as US President Donald Trump wrangled up his bro-squad of capitalist billionaires and chartered them across the world to China. We watched in disbelief as the China-hating Trump administration paraded around Beijing gawking at beautiful ceilings and giant rose bushes. “China is beautiful,” Trump said.

All the while, the top US oligarchs met with Chinese officials, hoping to find openings they could us to slither into China’s large, booming markets and siphon off even more wealth that they most definitely don’t need. Fortunately, China just wasn’t that interested.

Even though nothing much came of the meetings, all the China hawks in Washington were on the edge of their seats, anxious that better relations with China would risk their favorite justification for raising the military budget to an unprecedented $1.5 trillion. But we need to prepare for war with China by 2025… no, 2027… wait, maybe 2030? Forever?

Mainstream media had a lot to say about the meeting. The Guardian was especially deceptive, with one article titled:

This is the kind of headline we’ve come to expect from outlets like the New York Post, whose credibility is on par with a spam email. In fact, they did have a similar article:

It’s not a huge surprise that Western media is trying to make it sound like war was China’s idea, when it’s the US that has been actively preparing for it for the last decade. It’s part of their strategy to use misleading headlines to stoke fear about China, so nobody pays attention to the war-antagonizing behavior of the United States.

When President Xi Jinping speaks about the “Thucydides Trap,” he is warning the US against treating war with China as inevitable and instead urging it to pursue diplomacy and cooperation. Many US policymakers, however, continue to frame China’s rise primarily as a military threat, expanding military posturing across the Asia-Pacific in an effort to preserve US dominance even at........

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