While it now seems the United States is not satisfied with provoking Russia and is now also focusing on pressing China’s nerves, you might ask: Why is this?
A tool to explain this phenomenon without excusing the bellicist military industrial complex, is citing the Thucydides Trap.
Thucydides believed there is a trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results from a power emerging to displace a ruling one. Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”, when talking about the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece.
Based on Thucydides’s thesis, unless China could become willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington could accept becoming number two in the Pacific(none of these are likely), a trade conflict, cyberattack, a false flag incident or an “accident” at sea could soon escalate into an all-out war.