My apologies if I caused offense. In terms of focus I advocate for the power of "and" although I disagree with your characterization of the problems raised as "smaller inward-focused." The wars and droning are not small nor inward-focused. The ramming was referred to in gallows humor as I don't think the Navy is so incompetent that they would think ramming cargo vessels would be effective, just incompetent enough to be accident-prone.

The g-parent comment asserts that "China must be stopped" and I started thinking about what aspect(s) of China do they want to stop. Certainly they don't want to end the country and its inhabitants. Maybe they want to stop some behaviors that cause harm in the world? What behaviors would those be? The comment uses the past tense "stopped" instead of "stop" so the implication is that some not-China entity performs the stopping.

So what behavior to stop and what entity to do the stopping? Are the actions necessary to stop the behavior proportionate and are they likely effective? To predict this, I look to the track record of previous attempts to "stop" nations and it isn't pretty. My comment came from thinking about what has happened in the US over the course of this century as it has embarked on ever newer crusades to stop this or that.