Watch what they do.

• If they were really gearing up for a war, they wouldn't have sent all their military equipment to Ukraine.
• They'd institute real arms production, not the money showers on the military industrial complex that yields horrendously expensive, useless systems where 3/4 of the cost sinks in corruption and good old profiteering.
• they wouldn't keep picking fights with second-, third- and fourth grade adversaries (that, with their corruption tech, they still can't beat - Hi Yemen), further depleting their stockpiles.

That narrative - we get it in the media, I doubt the regimes believe it - is acting like it's 1996 and they're the only one making any real military equipment, still funcional after all the corruption, and they can intimidate anyone.
If the last few months have shown anything, it's how delusional that assessment is.

They have nothing. Europe literally has no equipment to speak of, and the US has outdated sitting duck shit and a lot of overly expensive planes that only serve to attack someone who can be beaten into submission because it has no air defense, and can then be pressured to give up before an alibi ground operation can sweep up the rest.

The US is a wet paper tiger and it knows it. It's trying to ride out the last breaths of its high-tech trash to increase chaos to ride out the bezzle a bit more.