The threat of nukes is real. I wouldn’t expect any major wars between nuclear states right away, but there would be a lot of consolidation of smaller countries without nukes into larger countries with nukes. In this scenario if you’re Japan, you will have the option of getting nukes ASAP or deciding if you want to learn Russian or Chinese.

I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia

I’m not claiming that only xenophobia leads to military conflicts. It is often used to whip up support for conflicts that people in power want, though.

If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on

Soft power is preferable, yeah. The real measure is when someone has something you want and they say “no”.

our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

Definitely agree that they’re all fucked up. It remains to be seen how much it helps vs hurts though. Like the saying “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”, sometimes the fact that the metrics are all made up can be useful. I say that as someone that doesn’t like how little they resemble the real world.