Given China’s expanding influence and continued efforts to accrue greater regional and global power, the so-called Thucydides Trap remains a favorite sound-bite used by many academic, military, and political leaders to summarize the dilemma the United States currently faces in the Indo-Pacific region. This idea holds that a rising China is on an inevitable course for armed conflict with an increasingly threatened United States. The ensuing and fervent discussions regarding various dove or hawk approaches have only grown louder in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, increased Chinese military encounters in response to the U.S. Navy’s Freedom of Navigation Operations, the COVID-19 global pandemic, and the current administration’s expanding trade war tariffs.
