This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.
What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.
Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.
You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).
> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology
No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?
China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.
> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.
> China is now communist.
This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.
> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.
This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.
For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_slavery_in_the_United_S...