This isn’t the Russia of the early 90s. Also worth noting that US itself is far less politically stable than Russia at this point.

I have to strongly disagree. I’m not trying to overstate Russia as being unstable, just perhaps less so than the US given the age and time each has had to peacefully consolidate from a position of strength. One after all suffered a collapse and change of economic systems in the last 35 years which gave lots of openings, upset lots of people, while the other has been stably steeped in a national myth and revisionist reactionary civil religion for 70 years now stably since their emergence as an empire and global top power. Russia can’t just remove all the possible people who might be resentful hold-overs or people who got in deep with the US/CIA in the 90s and still owe them big time. With those who fully bought into the western narrative and myth they shopped around successfully (remember, only the US has this myth they spread and sell globally to great success among liberals, sure Russia is sewing a few minor counter-myths lately about being based and trad but these are only beginning to take root whereas the US mythos runs deep and is a strong, big plant).

The deep state is quite stable. Sure there is some quibbling over exact implementation details but there isn’t really any deviation. Trump says he’s going to be tough on China, he starts a trade war. Biden gets in, doesn’t do anything but double down on it despite not campaigning on it as Trump did. Same thing with border policy. New faces, some people get drone striked who wouldn’t otherwise, others who would be don’t get so, x gets a tariff instead of y. One side applies 70% power, the other only 50%, they’re still headed in the same direction on the same road. A war is started in Ukraine instead of Iran or the SCS. It’s just timing basically, who goes first, if a stage of the plot gets skipped over or not. Make no mistakes they’re all working out of the same playbook. The same career nat-sec ghouls are there, new faces each time whether Victoria Nuland, Blinken, or Pompeo, etc. Slight differences in implementation, public feuding and squabbling (and indeed I think within the realm of what they understand as possible they viciously hate and angrily, passionately disagree with each other’s choices in private as well but it doesn’t change the facts that they serve the same overall master with the same overall types of plans). The best we might get out of someone like Trump is delay on some fronts and facets such as a direct war which he may be wary of getting into, he’ll advance the plot everywhere else and when the US wants that direct war they’ll start it with his replacement or they’ll engineer a situation which so offends the “honor” of the US and Trump’s own tough guy image that he has no choice but to respond with force and gets locked in escalation.

I would also argue that US doesn’t have any actual plan to isolate China.

Don’t they? Sewing chaos and terrorism in the middle east to block belt and road, isolating Russia and cutting it off from Europe to block belt and road routes there. Building an island chain of steel bases around China which can throw up a maritime blockade of China and choke them. Their Ukraine thing I posit is seen by some of them and should be seen by us as a test run for the willingness of Euros to jump when told to jump, to cut off Russia and injure themselves, a test run for when the US instigates over Taiwan and tells Europe to stand up for “democracy” and they do so and slap on sanctions and trade cuts and slit their own wrists but importantly drive themselves away from China and hurt China on command. If they can instigate over Taiwan, get Europe to decouple voluntarily, throw up a maritime net in the seas then they can block trade with Africa and having stopped it with Europe basically isolate China. Their problem of course is Russia, it should have been defeated by now, humiliated, forced to their terms and its neck within a hairsbreadth of their sword for a killing stroke if they help China. That didn’t happen. But even as a bloc China and Russia alone, isolated from the rest of the world would be in trouble.

Further there are signs the US only wants a partial embargo on China, a tech embargo. They want to keep them 10 years behind them technologically at least, make Chinese products inferior or reliant on western tech, to deny them raw materials and the know-how as well as markets in Europe and the US. If you take out the NATO/Eyes/EU+Aus+NZ+Asian vassals (Japan, occupied Korea) and get India on-board (they very much want to be on board this with their made in India plans and would benefit greatly) they basically cut off China and Russia from most of the world’s consumers who have the income and desire to need things like AI, high tech silicone chips, advanced processes, advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, etc. At which point China’s economy starts hurting pretty badly. Yes they might still make precursors to those things and the west will be forced to allow them, but China will be stuck in a trap, if they refuse to sell the west even those then they hurt themselves even worse, they voluntarily slice themselves whereas the easier path which the US calculates they’ll take is to grit and protest but bear it, continue selling, continue innovating at home even though they can’t sell abroad and that’s not a problem for this plan in the near term. Sure in 10-15 years China could prepare to decouple with less pain though still some (US grows a lot of food and has control over South America in enough ways to prevent most of them selling to China if they really want to stop such trade) but the US figures they’ll have figured something out or be in a better place themselves then, that they can decouple faster.

They can turn inward at that point but they’ll be stuck behind a wall of the choose of the US, much like the cold war and the US will move to move as many people and developing countries into this tech blockade as possible while they still have things to threaten them with. China may well endure and advance to peer status with the US or overtaking it but the US would rather build a wall around its kingdom and holdings and make those as great as it can and then sit behind that wall trying to wait out China, to destroy Russia and to destroy China, to foment terrorism, to wait for the worst ravages of Climate Change to hit China in particular to hurt it, to try and corrupt and bribe people, to maneuver, to do all this stuff. And things will not be good in the west in this time at all but that’s one possible, probable plan I see from their statements and actions. Campism basically, a hard curtain between spheres and using force and propaganda to keep themselves king, ruler of their sphere while trying to keep that sphere as big as possible and to make China-Russia sphere as small and miserable as possible.