The interest clashing with someone is never beneficial. Russia and China may be the exception, instead of the "other big guns".
The problem is, by having difficulties with Russia and China, the US may make the "other big guns" also have difficulties with them, somewhat willing and somewhat forced. And the US actually has much more flexible rules to deal with Russia and China than any followers could possibly have, if the US saw something is actually harming itself. For example, it may keep something as an overly long warning, and it may make a lot of exemptions.
The US may benefit from Russia and China clashing with the "other big guns", that is, the other parts of the world clashing with each other. Whether this is intentional or a side effect, the US would feel less damage resulted from clashing with Russia and China, so the will to change is low.
On the other hand, by clashing with European countries, Russia and China will not follow, and the two would actually benefit instead of the US.
The simplest way of not creating too much troubles is simply to do nothing, or just deal with the problems themselves instead of escalating.
To escalate, one would attempt to define categories, try to infer the other side is already "planning" something in the category (or they did something little but really for the bigger plan in the whole category) from some analysis, and make first moves in this category themselves for uncertainty and distrust. The implementation stage beside the event order get lost on general people's perceiving of media.
But it's 2021 and government bodies should already have departments researching everything that important. They don't reasonably ignore something, notice something and suddenly feel the imminent need of overreaction. If they notice something, and it's not a missile launching or an attempted murder of a person (or maybe the pollution of shared environment), they are supposed to have the ability to calmly finish their research, instead of making loose categories satisfying their own usual way of thinking, and it won't be too late because this thing most likely already happened a while ago anyway.
In any case, if someone is really able to escalate something instead of just saying, escalating really needs more steps than not today, and is at least supposed to be slow if not deliberate.