The 15 years USA spent running after imaginary boogeymen sowed the seeds of what we are dealing with today.
There are many aspects to this folly, but most bad were:
1. Okaying what Russia, and China were doing
2. Wasting trillions on completely pointless war
3. Squandered overnight the enormous goodwill USA carried from successful 199X
4. Stalled the wheel of democratisation around the world
The western globalist attitude involves giving power to our rivals in the hopes they will become our friends. Guess what...they're still our rivals.
The major crisis right after (Yugoslavia, the first post-WW2 war in Europe which we try so hard to forget every day) still had some UN legitimacy - NATO acted somewhat unilaterally but it was arguably as protection for a UN peacekeeping operation. The Russians had to follow suit - begrudgingly, but on shared terms.
Then 2001 happened and all that strenuous effort to keep powers together was just thrown out of the window, in pursue of simple and pure vengeance - the oldest and most tribalistic instinct for violence, the biblical an-eye-for-an-eye. Even then, there was still a chance to forgive it as a temporary aberration of a young country that had never been seriously attacked on its mainland before. Instead, the US literally decided to conquer Iraq on a whim in 2002/2003. At that point, anybody who had ever seriously considered cooperation had to change course, or lost massive amounts of political capital. Areas that were slowly moving towards softer stances (Iran, China, Russia, etc) predictably reacted by rushing back to the safety of oppositional competition. And now it's what it is.
Escalating competition further and further is not the answer, and will lead the world to darker and darker places.
We need to confront the problem of blind globalism.
> Escalating competition further and further is not the answer
Blind globalism is not the answer either, but that is what we've had for decades. It has resulted in a wide variety of terrible things for the countries advocating globalism. For example: a global pandemic, a decrease in biodiversity due to invasive species, slave-like conditions in countries like China, and IP theft on a staggering scale. I'm sure there are more consequences of blind globalism. My point is, we need to have a serious conversation about whether we should be traded with certain nations, whether we should be trading in certain essential items, etc.
Edit: just thought of a couple more problems with our current global trade setup: China can manufacture outside of the west's regulations designed to protect people's health and the environment, and the west has lost so many strategic skillsets and manufacturing capacity to China.
What X? Bombing Serbia in 1999?