You’ve gotten yourself into a false dichotomy here, which started, by my reckoning, when you bought into this “Russia is China’s right arm” business. You really need to check with the left on this one, to see whether it knows what the right is doing. China and Russia have been civilizationally at odds for millennia. That’s not going to change overnight. Russia is busy shoring up Siberia against an onslaught of Chinese settlers. Russia goes toe-to-toe with China daily over influence in the former CIS countries, and elsewhere. Russia and China may strategically cooperate on some matters concerning the U.S., but it is a very tenuous cooperation, as the Russians have been burned and betrayed on this before, and are not keen to be seen as having been fooled twice.
Remember it was Nixon who stretched out a tricky appendage to China, both to shore up domestic sentiment and to burn Russia. And he didn’t do it by having the State Department and other relevant branches of government complete scholarly evaluations and weigh in on possible ramifications. He sent in Kissinger, then his head of National Security (not his Secretary of State, Rodgers, who was kept in the dark about this) to accomplish through skullduggery what should have been a broadly considered matter of public policy.
Henry Kissinger happily sold U.S. interests down the grand canal, and every other administration has followed suit (with some hemming and hawing). Clinton’s administration might have been the most egregious, with his allowing China to join the WTO without proper safeguards in place — essentially gutting the trade structure then in place — and certifying China as a place where working standards, environmental practices, and other aspects of human and labor rights were “essentially equivalent” to the U.S., under the ostensible premise that, as China’s market economy expanded, it would automatically become more democratic. That hasn’t happened, and China has grown more draconian with the surgical precision afforded by enhanced computerization and expanded technical sophistication.
Clinton welcomed partnership between Walmart and the guys on the other side of the Great Wall. China gained unheard of access to U.S. markets, on par with Japan, along with exchange rates fixed to be as favorable. The theory justifying this might have been that Global Corporatist Financiers would emerge mega-profitable, while the stuff just somehow got made and American coped with the results. Whatever the rationale, Clinton’s campaign was caught with their hand in the Lippo Corporation cookie jar — the same Chinese firm that increased Senate House Leader McConnell’s wealth from one to eight million in the last seven years. Contrary to your assertion that America has tried to suppress China’s rise, they’ve done very much to enable it. In addition to rescinding, curtailing, or never initiating the myriad of trade inducements, market access, and technology transfers proffered; the U.S. could have objected to China building military installations throughout the South China sea, but chose instead to look the other way. Now, as a fait accompli there’s little they can do about it other than outright war.
If the U.S. were genuinely concerned about curtailing China’s rabid territorial expansionism; restraining Beijing’s culturally genocidal policies toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians; protesting internet censorship; and a myriad of human rights, environmental, and other abuses, the U.S. would partner with Russia. On the contrary, the Russophobia campaign is, if anything, an indication that the Globalist Neoliberal elites who backed Mrs. Clinton see a strong role for China as partners in the exploitation and immiseration of the masses. They seem to believe they can reign in the CCP’s hancentrism and chauvinism.
No, the reasons for Russia being targeted for estrangement could be considered convoluted in a way different way from the one you suggest. Partly, it’s domestic reasons. Partly, it’s convenient. Americans have been conditioned for several generations to fear and loathe Russia. Power struggles within the government, between government factions, have been won by playing the Russia card.
Thinking that concern about Chinese totalitarianism is limited to a binary axis where U.S. planetary leadership is the only factor on the other side does a great disservice to the cultures, nations, and peoples in China’s path who are concerned that their fates will not mirror those of the Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongols who got caught within China’s ever-expanding boundaries. Keeping Russia and America at loggerheads advances the Chinese cause. Russia is not China’s right arm and would blanch at the suggestion.
There’s something deeply wrong with the way America is projecting foreign power throughout the world (albeit for a different set of reasons in disparate regions), and something deeply wrong about the U.S. citizens are being manipulated domestically. There’s something deeply wrong about China’s foreign power projection and domestic manipulations as well. This combination of Wrong + Wrong does not add up as you suggest.