Yeah, I've been observing the collapse intensely and it truly seems that no matter what the US tries to do nowadays it always practically ends up in failure like the Gordian knot (anything in terms of building back their own internal capability or narrowing distance with China). Just like in many similar end-stage collapses of empires in history.
At this point, to me, the most logical outcome is that they decide simply to give it one final go that they have yet not tried, and provoke China directly into a hot war around Taiwan in this presidency (quite easy to do actually, not very unrealistic scenario).
The basis is that since they can't improve themselves, better try to bring your main competitor down with all that rusting old military hardware you still have a lot of thanks to past generations before even they become fully obsolete and rot away as well.
Ofc, they would have been beaten badly and fragmented in a few months by current China; but if they were smart enough to realize this now, they would have not been in this predicament in the first place. They would not have given China 20+ free years to develop while pointlessly bombing/fixating on some random Muslims everywhere.