hornberger speaks of where we are and where we say we are in 'our' maneuvering as the empire using china as a display tool in the process;

What could be scarier than the rise of a regional hegemon? Right? It conjures up an image of a giant Transformer, one who is going on the march and stomping through smaller nearby nations and imposing its will on them. Scary!

That’s the situation with China. While President Trump’s trade war that he has initiated with China gets most of the focus, the U.S. government’s aim with China goes much further than that. It goes to China’s rise as a regional hegemon, something that U.S. officials are always on the lookout for and that they will smash out of existence before the regional hegemon can become a global hegemon.

Of course, this is all empire-speak but that’s the way it is with empires. The big empire cannot afford a smaller nation get too powerful because then it would be able to compete against the big empire.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Empire, which viewed itself as the “indispensable regime” and the “world’s sole remaining superpower,” has engaged in actions designed to impose its will on foreign governments. These actions have consisted of invasions, occupations, coups, embargoes, sanctions, assassination, torture, secret surveillance, and alliances with dictatorial regimes.

Throughout that time, China was lifting much of its controls over economic activity within the nation, which resulted in tremendous economic prosperity among the citizenry. That prosperity naturally brought into the government large amounts of tax revenue, which enabled the Chinese government not only to build up its military but also to extend a hand of friendship around the world through loans or grants to foreign regimes and construction of large public-works projects in foreign countries.

U.S. officials felt they act to act. That was what the so-call pivot toward China was all about — to do whatever was necessary to bring China down a notch, weakening it economically and perhaps even militarily so that its role as a regional hegemon would be brought to a close. The goal is to turn China back into a poor Third World nation that knows its proper role in the world, one that would mean, once again, that China would be subservient and deferential to the U.S. worldwide empire........https://www.fff.org/2019/06/07/chinas-scary-rise-as-a-regional-hegemon/