Re: ban Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
Is anyone else seriously worried about the prospect of all this sabre-rattling nationalism leading to WWIII? Or is it just me?
Militarily, there won't be a fight any time soon between China and western countries. That'd only happen if one or the other sides could actually conceivably win something by doing so. Neither side can take land from the other, and Chinese trade would cease to exist the moment shooting started whereas western trade would be quite safe (from sheer distance from China and quantity of military forces defending it relative to the force China could possibly project to the other side of the planet)
What we have is the same situation as in the cold war, where the Soviet Union and the West are unable to win a shooting war and quietly attempted to make each other collapse.
The Soviet Union employed huge numbers of terrorists, and the West just quietly prospered through the capitalist system while taxing off 5% to pay for a military while building using our superior tech base to field things things that are ever more expensive to defend against. The Soviet Union topped 40% of their GDP going to the military and then economically and politically collapsed. The Soviet Union strategy of spending on terrorism to turn us into a hostile, mistrusting, divided bickering dystopian society did not succeed to any notable extent.
I would suggest that the strategy today on the part of hostile nations would be to interfere with our political systems by funding disinformation and hiring people to deliberately try and disrupt any form of normal human interaction between people who actually have little actual disagreement beyond the best way of achieving an aim that everybody agrees on.
By turning these things into huge partisan arguments with only two sides and then attempting to drive wedges between the two sides the intention is to ramp up tensions to the point that things boil over.
I suspect that the hope on the part of the funders is that people are going to start killing each other and we'll end up collapsing into a civil war.
So no, personally i'm not worried about somebody starting WW3 and the world ending in a nuclear holocaust: Our society being pushed to the point it collapses is a much more realistic and serious concern.