Pounding your best friend into submission is going to a lot to your reputation for trustworthiness, compassion and fair trading isn't it. Betraying what are in essence the most basic values we all hold dear would do more to destroy your democracy, social fabric and eventually the civilized political entity that is the USA than  anything else others might do or try to do to the US. Such a self-inflicted injury would destroy your soft power credibility and turn virtually every other country in  the world into an adversary for a very long time. And you suggest that could be a good thing for the US or for the experiment we call human civilization? We developed large brains for a number of reasons- seeing likely consequences to rash actions is one of them.