An opinion piece by Australian writer John Birmingham published on December 17, 2013 within the Brisbane Times offers a hint of how the landing from the Chinese Chang'e 3/Jade rabbit is now being seen in countries away from China as well as the United States.
Birmingham is aware that Chinese moon landing as being a significant and largely positive development, albeit not for America's own space agency.
'Significant since it marks the arrival on the emerging Chinese superstate within the highest frontier; as it throws into sharp relief the retreat on the US from space; and given it presages a brand new realm of competition between Beijing's massive state supported space program along with the growing band of private, western firms seeking to extract value from cold rocks inside ny lottery expired games sky.'
In short the new space race will be between China along with a bevy of western brands like SpaceX, Planetary Resources, and Golden Spike, amongst others. This is actually, as opposed to Birmingham's assessment, a potentially bad situation.
The reason things could turn ugly is the fact that China contains the military muscle of the government to back its space ambitions. Without their unique nation state to back them up, a gaggle of commercial miners for the moon, say, could be out of luck if China made a decision to jump their claim.
Birmingham meets your needs that NASA is often a captive to crazy politics. But it needs liberating unless one desires that China becomes the dominate space power within the planet, thus taking possession from the future.
Ironically Birmingham is the most suitable known from the United States because the author of your trilogy of alternate history novels the location where the United States is destroyed by an established unknown entity.