People were definitely building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers in the aughts, although they were signifiers of adherence to a particular political outlook.

There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.