Nuclear missiles are so obviously different in scope. It's not even worth debating. And it's not like the US has been turning Taiwan into a medium/long range cruise missile battery. It's so obviously incredibly a defensive mission, and coloring it any other way is embarassing. China has nothing to fear from Taiwan, if China doesn't aggress: trying to say otherwise is laughable.

We are doing things in Gaza to try to help our ally defend itself while trying to get them to de-escallate; it's just not super visible or obvious & it's unclear what you'd have us do in spite of your ongoing super-critical view. We absolutely are super involved, and scared of this growing worse, and trying to improve it, and trying to prevent a broader conflagration from growing in the area. It's unclear why you think this means anything about the US maintaining power versus trying to keep world stability.

You amazingly fully give license China to push around & use military might against local countries for whatever cause suits them, while again using whataboutism to deflect onto the US rather than face the real issue at hand. The US has done bad things, but often it's less clear cut bad than many lay at it's feet (the 1953 Iranian coup was hardly US instrumented, in spite of that common portrayal, for example). Even though the US went into Iraq, we spent enormous money (ineffectively, alas) trying to create a stable democracy, rather than colonizing & imperializing, with for example a huge number of development contracts going to other nations. These slights on the US, these whataboutisms, are not as bad, and just a whataboutism against China acting incredibly poorly in it's neighborhood & not bothering to keep any friends in the region.

The US does pick and choose conflicts, indeed, and doesn't attend well enough to some. But it does get involved in a huge number of conflicts and is by far the worlds biggest peacekeeping operation, is responsible largely for worldwide shipping being as feasible as it has been (deterring piracy). And we are very keep to combat instability anywhere.

Russia is less of a threat than China because Russia is losing huge amounts of forces to a lone neighbor they have aggressed, and cannot rebuild that force quickly. China is by far the fastest militarizing nation on the planet, radically outproducing everyone else, and have shown time and time again willingness to ride rough over neighbors & claim internationally agreed waters and land as their own. Nothing about your "real" talk convinces me that we should more worried about Russia than China.

You phrase this again and again as some kind of all-out competition against China, about the US keeping their lead. That just seems so facile, and to come from such a horrificly singular view of the world as competitive, as being zero-sum. I don't think the US thinks of China like that at all. We would love to see a good prosperous healthy China, flourishing at home and around the world. But we keep seeing a nasty bitter nation that is driven by it's own sense of insecurity at not clearly being #1, that thinks it must use force & power & might to bully other people into submission. That's why China is the problem, that's why this conflict exists: because China has lost touch with the spirit of heaven, because it begets havoc on earth.