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The US that, out of the blue, murders its plausible competitor is the US that cannot be «the leader of the free world». I think you're overly cynical with regards to the ideological homogeneity of the West in the 80s-90s. Other nations still possessed some living culture and autonomy. It'd have been a massive shock, and would have reinvigorated the project of the independent EU with nuclear, Russophilic Franco-German core.
That would've been a very hard situation to reverse. The actual course proves to be risk-minimizing: the Chinese are happy enough to beclown themselves and implode.
What about the thousands (Tens of Thousands!) of murdered students, bitterly yearning for liberty, cut down by the Red Tyrants? They could've played that card or at least not intensively exported capital and technology to the Red Peril.
The US was practically handed the perfect excuse to look like a righteous leader of the free world and they swept it under the carpet. They could've just not suppressed Taiwan's nuclear program, let them maintain nuclear ambiguity like Israel perhaps.
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