It certainly looks like US is preparing for war and is able to spread the cost of that war among an alliance. Again the theme here is America is the aggressor bringing war to Asia.They want to provoke China without actually going to war because the costs and consequences of actually starting to shoot is quite unknown and could be extremely devastasting to them.
How can China escalate even further when it’s trying to act with restraint, and it’s economic reality limits how far it can escalate.So there's actually 2 parts of the question: you can refuse to do what they want by either deescalation/restraint or by escalating even further and making it clear that they cannot control the pace of the conflict.
China is not Yugoslavia or Iraq. So your list of casus belli does not apply.And it really doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, as Rwanda also had a casus belli that they ignored, nobody actually cared about Yugoslavia and the facts are always malleable - see Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
