I'm a big fan of Girard, so I'll take a stab at the question at the end.

I think Girard would say that US and China are in mimetic warfare and that they're both imitating each other. And in many ways this is true. The Belt and Road initiative is really China's version of the IMF and World Bank, for example. Girard would probably say that Trump's attempting to bring manufacturing to the US is imitating China's manufacturing. Even immigration policy can be seen as going from imitating Europe to imitating China. So at least from an economic perspective, there's a lot of power and status games being played where they're mimetic rivals for supremacy.

In that context, the scapegoat here may very well be Russia, whose conflict with Ukraine really has very little to do with either country, but becomes the source of blame for the malignant economy we've seen the last few years. There's definitely some of that.

Prediction-wise, Girard would say that the mimetic rivalry will result in real violence, so that would mean a conflict with China is way more likely than Russia. But if they do broker peace, it'll be essentially scapegoating Russia and ganging up on it.