The US is desperate to rattle sabres with China.

I suspect there’s a lot of nostalgia for the Cold War in the US gerontocracy. They were the centre of the “free world”, who had to accept American foreign policy on a “you’re with us or against us” basis, and they had a permanent excuse to splash cash on defense bric-a-brac, all without the political snafu of actually going to war.

It feels like the PRC avoided being a 1:1 replacement for the USSR; they never represented a “They’ll nuke Dubuque” threat, so you couldn’t rally support the same way. And the West is too wedded to cheap imports and entranced by new markets to accept a hard trade cutoff right now, so they pick little fights (semiconductors, EVs, TikTok) hoping to make bold gestures. Behind the gestures, it’s not about a direct military or national security angle (if people are using social media on military bases, that’s a discipline breach whether it’s TikTok or Facebook) so much as trying to push back the day that the US is not the unquestioned dominant economic and military power.

So in n years when the courts finally sort it out, TikTok will fire-sale to someone who doesn’t know what to do with it and let it rot, 90% of the users will have long ago moved on to the next social platform with a 5-year lifespan, and a bunch of foreign investors will have a bitter taste that if you make a product Americans willingly choose, their free-market-loving government will screw up your commercial investment to punish you for being Communist.