The argument that "it doesn't make sense, therefore it won't happen" doesn't inspire confidence. It assumes not only rational actors with perfect information, but it does not account for many differing motives, ideologies, and institutional structures involved.
China must be prepared for an irrational United States acting out its worst impulses under the influence of decision-makers whose visions of what is sensible, desirable, and achievable may be very different from our own. I have already spoken of the contingent that would be only too happy to see a crisis in America's ability to borrow as an excuse to dismantle the non-military aspects of the US federal government. And of course Trump personally, as with other American presidents, and indeed rulers everywhere, draws strength from confrontation with adversaries.
The bottom line is that America believes that it is the greatest nation on earth and that it has the right and the power to run the world. Any limitations on American power or flaws in American society are therefore signs of a treasonous fifth column in American society or "cheating" by other nations. The interlocking mythologies that sustain America's messianic vision of itself will not dissipate with Trump's departure. The growing tension between America's idea of itself and the realities of domestic political dysfunction, the ongoing decline of the white middle class, increasing global multipolarity and the looming Chinese Dragon will tend towards increasingly spectacular, even violent collisions, and there will be a powerful impulse to continued escalation in order to Make America Great Again, i.e. to validate America's messianic vision of itself.
