The Thucydides Trap Revisited: Can Complex Economic Interdependence Prevent Hegemonic War in a Fragmented World?

Executive Summary

The Thucydides Trap — Graham Allison’s thesis that structural war becomes likely when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one — has moved from academic seminar rooms into live summit diplomacy. In May 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping raised the concept directly with US President Donald Trump during their Beijing summit, asking whether the two powers could escape the pattern that, in Allison’s accounting of the past five centuries, produced war in twelve of sixteen comparable transitions. This assessment examines whether complex economic interdependence — the dense web of trade, finance, and technology now binding Washington and Beijing — can function as a structural brake on that historical pattern, or whether it is better understood as a new terrain of competition rather than a genuine substitute for it.

The evidence is mixed and time-sensitive. Bilateral trade has proven far more resilient than “decoupling” rhetoric implies, and both governments have begun institutionalizing crisis-management channels through a new Board of Trade and Board of Investment. At the same time, military spending, rare-earth and semiconductor leverage, and unresolved sovereignty disputes — above all Taiwan — sit largely outside the logic of interdependence altogether. As the two leaders prepare for a further summit at the White House on September 24, 2026, this report assesses the probability of managed competition, deepening fragmentation, and crisis escalation, and offers a strategic outlook for policymakers, businesses, and analysts tracking the relationship.

Key Judgments

High confidence: US-China economic interdependence has not meaningfully reversed despite five years of tariff escalation; trade volumes have proven resilient and supply chains have rerouted rather than genuinely severed.
High confidence: Both governments are simultaneously deepening institutional trade linkages (Board of Trade, Board of Investment) and military capability, indicating a strategy of managed rivalry rather than either full engagement or full decoupling.
Moderate confidence: Interdependence has been weaponized by both sides — Chinese rare-earth export controls and US semiconductor export licensing — as substitutes for military escalation, functioning as a form of costly signaling rather than a path to war.
Moderate confidence: Taiwan remains the flashpoint least constrained by economic interdependence; sovereignty and regime-security considerations in Beijing are unlikely to be neutralized by trade linkages alone.
Moderate confidence: The classical Thucydides Trap framework, drawn from pre-nuclear and pre-globalized historical cases, offers limited predictive precision for a nuclear-armed, economically fused dyad, though it retains value as a psychological and rhetorical frame that both leaderships now consciously invoke.
Low confidence: Current institutionalization efforts (the Board of Trade and Board of Investment) will mature into durable, war-preventing crisis-management architecture rather than remaining ad hoc, summit-dependent arrangements.

Introduction

For more than a decade, the phrase “Thucydides Trap” has functioned as shorthand for the danger inherent in power transitions: an ascending power’s growing capability triggers fear in an established power, and that fear — more than any single grievance — makes war more likely than either side intends. Harvard scholar Graham Allison popularized the term in a 2015 essay and elaborated it in his 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, in which he catalogued sixteen historical instances of a rising power challenging a ruling one since roughly 1500, finding that war resulted in twelve.

What distinguishes the current moment from the framework’s original popularization is that the language has migrated into direct use by heads of state. At their May 2026 summit in Beijing, Xi reportedly asked Trump whether the two countries could transcend the dynamic Allison described and construct a new model of major-power relations. Trump, for his part, has continued to frame the relationship through personal rapport and transactional deal-making. Both leaders are scheduled to meet again at the White House on September 24, 2026, in what analysts characterize as a lower-stakes summit oriented toward managing an existing stalemate rather than resolving it.

This assessment asks a narrower and more analytically tractable question than “will there be a war”: can the complex economic interdependence that binds the two economies — trade, investment, technology, and finance — meaningfully reduce the probability of the kind of structural conflict the Thucydides Trap describes, or does it instead simply relocate competition into economic and technological domains while leaving the underlying security dilemma, particularly over Taiwan, largely untouched? The analysis draws on classical realist and neoliberal institutionalist international relations theory, historical precedent, and current economic and military data through September 2026.

Historical Background

The term originates in Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, in which he attributed the conflict’s underlying cause to the growth of Athenian power and the fear this produced in Sparta. Allison’s contribution was to generalize this dynamic into a repeatable pattern and apply it to contemporary China-US relations, arguing that structural stress — not necessarily any specific leader’s intentions — pushes rising and ruling powers toward confrontation.

A distinct but related literature offers a more optimistic counter-thesis. In 1910, British writer Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, arguing that in an economically interconnected industrial world, war between great powers had become irrational because even a victor would suffer catastrophic financial and commercial losses. Angell’s argument is frequently — and inaccurately — summarized as a claim that war had become impossible; his actual thesis was narrower, holding that war was irrational rather than unwinnable, a distinction historians note is often lost in retrospective readings of his work. The outbreak of the First World War just four years later, between economically intertwined European powers including Britain and Germany, is commonly cited as an empirical rebuttal of naive interdependence theory. It is worth noting that the causes of 1914 were considerably more complex than a simple failure of trade linkages — alliance commitments, mobilization schedules, domestic nationalism, and misperception all played independent roles — but the episode nonetheless established a durable historical caution: deep commercial ties reduce neither the political psychology of fear nor the operation of alliance-driven escalation.

The Cold War offers something closer to a natural experiment in the opposite direction. The United States and the Soviet Union maintained minimal economic interdependence for most of their rivalry, yet avoided direct war for over four decades, a stability generally attributed to nuclear deterrence rather than commercial linkage. Together, these cases suggest that neither economic interdependence nor its absence is, by itself, determinative; both must be read alongside nuclear deterrence, alliance structure, and the specific sovereignty stakes involved in any given dispute — a caveat directly relevant to the US-China case, where nuclear deterrence, deep economic linkage, and an unresolved sovereignty dispute over Taiwan are all simultaneously present, a combination with no close historical precedent.

Strategic Context

The present phase of the relationship has moved through several distinct stages within roughly twelve months. An October 2025 meeting between Trump and Xi on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Busan, South Korea, produced a one-year tariff and trade-barrier truce, alongside a temporary suspension of rare-earth export controls that China had imposed in response to earlier US tariff increases. That truce set the stage for Trump’s state visit to Beijing on May 14-15, 2026 — his first visit to China since 2017 — which produced a further set of agreements: Chinese commitments to purchase US agricultural goods and Boeing aircraft, restored market access for American beef and poultry, and the establishment of a Board of Trade and a Board of Investment to manage non-sensitive trade and investment issues on an ongoing basis. During the same visit, Xi cautioned Trump that mishandling the Taiwan issue could produce serious conflict, underscoring that even the most cooperative economic diplomacy has not touched the relationship’s most dangerous fault line.

Both governments’ official statements on the Beijing summit’s outcomes diverged in emphasis, a pattern consistent with two-level games in which leaders simultaneously negotiate with a foreign counterpart and a domestic audience. By September 2026, several of the May summit’s headline commitments — notably the Boeing aircraft purchase and the full operationalization of the Board of Trade — remained incomplete, and the one-year tariff truce from Busan is set to expire in November 2026, with US and Chinese officials publicly offering different degrees of urgency about extending it. Trump and Xi are now scheduled to meet again at the White House on September 24, 2026, a summit analysts widely describe as carrying lower expectations, focused on managing the existing stalemate on trade, rare earths, and Taiwan rather than producing new breakthroughs, and taking place against the backdrop of intensifying US secondary-sanctions pressure related to Iran and a US midterm election cycle roughly six weeks away.

Underlying this diplomatic choreography is a harder structural reality: global military expenditure reached an estimated $2.89 trillion in 2025, its eleventh consecutive annual increase, with the United States, China, and Russia together accounting for 51 percent of the total. US military spending declined by 7.5 percent in 2025 to $954 billion — a dip analysts attribute to the absence of new Ukraine aid packages rather than any broader retrenchment — while China’s declared defense budget rose 7.4 percent to an estimated $336 billion, continuing more than three decades of sustained growth. US congressional appropriations for 2026 have already risen above $1 trillion and could approach $1.5 trillion in 2027 under current budget proposals, indicating that the near-term trajectory of the relationship is one of simultaneous economic re-engagement and continued military buildup on both sides — precisely the combination the Thucydides Trap framework identifies as most dangerous.

Detailed Analysis

Military Dimension

China’s military modernization continues on a trajectory largely decoupled from the state of bilateral trade diplomacy, though its tempo is calibrated in visible ways around key summits. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense recorded a first-half 2026 average of 7.5 Chinese military aircraft sorties per day near the island — but during the May 14-17 Beijing summit window itself, daily sorties fell to an average of three, with zero recorded on the two core summit days, before a joint combat-readiness patrol resumed within days of Trump’s departure. This pattern indicates that Beijing treats military pressure and diplomatic engagement as coordinated instruments of the same strategy rather than separate tracks, a finding with direct implications for how analysts should read any future reduction in military activity: as a diplomatic signal that is reversible rather than as evidence of strategic reassurance.

Independent trackers using data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program classify the Taiwan Strait as an elevated-tension standoff rather than an active conflict, recording zero organized-violence deaths in the twelve months to July 2026 — a useful corrective to more alarmist framings, though the absence of casualties says more about the current absence of kinetic action than about the underlying trend in coercive pressure, which independent trackers assess as continuing to build through incremental, calibrated increments designed to normalize an expanded Chinese military footprint around the island. For a fuller treatment of the maritime dimension of this competition, including People’s Liberation Army Navy modernization and the broader Indo-Pacific balance, see StratReview’s assessment of China’s maritime strategy from coastal defense to Indo-Pacific power.

Political Dimension

The Thucydides Trap has itself become a subject of live political and academic contestation rather than a settled diagnosis. Allison has continued to defend the framework’s core insight — that structural fear generated by a power transition can produce conflict neither side wants — describing it at a June 2026 forum in China as an accurate, if uncomfortable, diagnosis of the underlying dynamic. Critics have pushed back on both empirical and methodological grounds: commentary in the National Interest has argued the framework oversimplifies the far more contingent, multi-causal nature of historical great-power conflict, while other critics have contended that today’s nuclear deterrence balance, unlike most of Allison’s sixteen historical cases, makes a preventive great-power war far less rational for either side to initiate. A parallel academic critique, published in the Chinese Journal of International Politics, argues that Thucydides’s own text supports a reading in which balancing behavior, not inevitable war, was always the more historically common response to a rising challenger — suggesting the “trap” is better understood as one possible outcome among several, contingent on specific policy choices, rather than a structural inevitability.

At the leadership level, both governments have layered institutionalized, technocratic mechanisms (the Board of Trade and Board of Investment) atop a highly personalized diplomatic relationship built around direct leader-to-leader summitry, state visits, and public flattery. This hybrid model — part bureaucratic regime-building, part personalist diplomacy — reflects genuine uncertainty within both governments about which mode of engagement is more durable, and creates real fragility: personalized arrangements are difficult for successors or domestic bureaucracies to inherit, while the institutional mechanisms remain new, thinly staffed, and untested by a genuine crisis.

Economic Dimension

The empirical record on decoupling is more complicated than the political rhetoric surrounding it suggests. Chinese customs data show bilateral goods trade recovering to roughly $294 billion in the first half of 2026, a V-shaped path that followed an 18.7 percent year-on-year contraction in the first quarter alone — evidence that commercial actors continue to find ways to sustain exchange even through periods of acute tariff friction. The composition of the US trade deficit with China has shifted structurally: the goods deficit fell from $382 billion in 2022 to $202 billion in 2025 and to roughly $33 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with China now ranking behind Taiwan, Vietnam, and Mexico as a source of the overall US goods deficit — its lowest relative ranking since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.

However, research from the Peterson Institute for International Economics complicates any straightforward “decoupling” narrative: while China’s direct share of US bilateral imports fell by roughly seven percentage points between 2017 and 2024, its share of the value added embedded in US imports — including Chinese content routed through third countries — fell by only about two percentage points. Vietnam, Mexico, and Taiwan captured the largest gains in headline import share over the same period, suggesting that much of what is popularly described as “decoupling” is better characterized as supply-chain rerouting that preserves underlying economic interdependence while obscuring it from bilateral trade statistics. This finding is directly relevant to the complex-interdependence framework advanced by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in the 1970s, which distinguishes sensitivity (how quickly one party feels the effects of another’s actions) from vulnerability (the deeper, harder-to-reverse cost of adjustment): headline trade data suggest declining sensitivity, but the PIIE findings suggest underlying vulnerability has fallen much less than the political narrative implies.

Rare earths remain the paradigmatic case of what scholars of economic statecraft term “weaponized interdependence” — the use of a state’s structural position within a global network, rather than direct military force, as coercive leverage. China controls an estimated 70 percent of global rare-earth mining and roughly 90 percent of refining and processing capacity. Since 2023, Beijing has progressively expanded export licensing requirements to cover more than twenty rare-earth elements plus gallium, germanium, and antimony, and in 2025 extended its quota system to cover imported feedstock as well as domestic production — a move that, combined with April 2025 export restrictions imposed in response to US tariff increases, forced temporary shutdowns at automotive plants in the United States and Europe before the Busan truce paused the most acute restrictions. Beijing’s continued retention of this leverage even amid the broader trade détente indicates that rare-earth policy functions less as a bargaining chip to be traded away and more as a permanent structural instrument of Chinese industrial and foreign policy. The World Economic Forum estimates that geoeconomic fragmentation more broadly is now costing the global economy between $213 billion and $307 billion annually, with pressures increasingly affecting not only geopolitical rivals but also traditionally aligned economies such as the European Union, Canada, Japan, and South Korea — a second-order effect with implications extending well beyond the US-China dyad. For a detailed treatment of the parallel financial dimension of this fragmentation, including the erosion of the dollar’s reserve-currency share and the limits of BRICS-led alternatives, see StratReview’s assessment of de-dollarization and SWIFT alternatives.

Technological Dimension

Artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors constitute the domain in which economic interdependence and hard security competition are most tightly and dangerously fused. The Nvidia H200 saga illustrates the dynamic precisely: after protracted internal debate, the US Commerce Department approved the export of Nvidia’s second-most-advanced AI processor to roughly ten Chinese technology firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, each permitted to purchase up to 75,000 units under license, with the US government collecting a 25 percent fee on the transactions. Yet Beijing itself subsequently slowed approval of these same imports, reportedly limiting the eventual volume to well under half of what Chinese firms requested, citing a desire to protect the continued development of domestic chipmakers and excluding military, state-owned, and critical-infrastructure end users from eligibility altogether. The result is a genuinely novel configuration: rather than one-directional US restriction of Chinese access to advanced technology, both governments are now independently gatekeeping the same transaction from opposite ends, each managing the pace of interdependence to protect a distinct strategic objective — Washington preserving a generational capability gap by withholding its most advanced Blackwell-class processors while still capturing Chinese chip revenue, and Beijing protecting its nascent domestic semiconductor industry from being crowded out even by chips it urgently wants access to.

This mutual gatekeeping, layered onto China’s rare-earth leverage over the magnet and processing inputs the US defense and technology base still requires, produces a structure of reciprocal chokepoint dependency that resembles, in miniature, a form of mutual assured economic disruption: both sides possess the capacity to inflict serious short-term harm on the other’s technology base, which may raise the cost of rapid, unilateral escalation in ways loosely analogous to nuclear deterrence, even as it does nothing to resolve the underlying strategic competition. Consistent with this reading, analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies following the May 2026 summit concluded that trade issues dominated headlines while the deepest technological tensions — spanning AI, cyber operations, export controls, and digital sovereignty — saw comparatively little substantive progress, suggesting this is the domain where interdependence functions most as a competitive arena and least as a genuine constraint on rivalry.

Legal / Diplomatic Dimension

The establishment of the Board of Trade and Board of Investment in May 2026 represents a modest but genuine step toward the kind of durable, rules-based crisis-management architecture that neoliberal institutionalist theory identifies as necessary to sustain cooperation absent deep mutual trust. Whether these bodies mature into effective institutions or remain largely symbolic will depend heavily on whether they survive the expiration of the underlying Busan tariff truce in November 2026, a deadline on which the two governments have publicly signaled different degrees of urgency. More broadly, the increasing reliance on bilateral summit diplomacy and leader-level deal-making, rather than multilateral rule-making through the World Trade Organization or comparable bodies, marks a structural shift in how the two largest economies manage their disputes — one with second-order consequences for smaller and middle powers, whose bargaining leverage within a multilateral system is generally greater than within a bilateral one dominated by the two largest parties.

Taiwan’s legal and diplomatic status remains entirely untouched by any of this economic architecture and constitutes the clearest limiting case for the interdependence thesis as a whole. Keohane and Nye’s own original formulation of complex interdependence explicitly reserved a role for military force on the highest-stakes issues even among deeply interdependent societies; Taiwan is precisely such an issue for Beijing, for which sovereignty and regime legitimacy — not economic calculation — are the operative variables. No plausible expansion of the Board of Trade’s mandate addresses this dispute, and both governments continue to prepare for scenarios in which it is not resolved through negotiation. For related analysis of the alliance and burden-sharing dynamics that would shape any Indo-Pacific contingency, see StratReview’s assessments of autonomous weapons and the future battlefield and the logistics of modern war.

Scenario Analysis

Scenario 1 — Managed Strategic Competition (continuation of current trajectory). Summit diplomacy continues on a roughly biannual cadence; the Board of Trade and Board of Investment gradually accrete modest authority; the Busan tariff truce is renewed in some form near or shortly after its November 2026 expiration; rare-earth and semiconductor leverage continue to be used as calibrated bargaining tools rather than maximal weapons; Taiwan tensions remain elevated but below the threshold of open conflict.

Scenario 2 — Deepening Economic Fragmentation. The tariff truce lapses without meaningful renewal; both sides escalate export controls and tariffs beyond current levels; the Board of Trade and Board of Investment stall or are sidelined; broader geoeconomic fragmentation accelerates, drawing in third countries and raising global growth and inflation costs, without crossing into direct military confrontation.

Scenario 3 — Taiwan Contingency. A political trigger — a Taiwanese election outcome Beijing deems unacceptable, a major US arms transfer, or a miscalculated gray-zone incident — precipitates a blockade, quarantine, or limited use of force around Taiwan. Economic interdependence raises the costs of this path substantially but, consistent with realist expectations regarding indivisible sovereignty stakes, does not by itself prevent Beijing’s leadership from accepting those costs if core regime-security interests are judged to be at stake.

Scenario 4 — Institutionalized Coexistence. The Board of Trade and Board of Investment mature into durable, professionalized institutions; sectoral carve-outs and crisis hotlines are formalized for AI, cyber, and military-to-military contact; both governments accept a longer-term equilibrium of rivalry bounded by institutionalized guardrails, more closely resembling late Cold War superpower arms-control diplomacy than either full partnership or full confrontation.

Probability Assessment

Scenario	Likelihood (12–24 months)	Likelihood (5–10 year horizon)
Managed Strategic Competition	High	Moderate
Deepening Economic Fragmentation	Moderate	Moderate-High
Taiwan Contingency (limited force or blockade)	Low	Moderate
Institutionalized Coexistence	Low-Moderate	Moderate

These assessments reflect the judgment that near-term dynamics are dominated by the concrete diplomatic calendar — the November 2026 tariff-truce deadline and the September 24 summit — while the more consequential, and more uncertain, Taiwan-related risk accumulates gradually over a longer horizon as military modernization on both sides continues independent of the state of trade relations. Allison’s own historical base rate, in which twelve of sixteen comparable power transitions ended in war, should be treated with substantial caution when applied to this specific case: nearly all of Allison’s historical cases predate both nuclear weapons and the scale of contemporary economic interdependence, two structural features whose joint presence in the current US-China relationship has no close historical precedent and whose net effect on escalation risk is genuinely disputed among specialists.

Strategic Outlook

The available evidence supports a qualified rather than a categorical answer to this assessment’s central question. Complex economic interdependence has demonstrably raised the cost of confrontation, generated new institutional channels for de-escalation, and proven far more resilient to tariff and political shocks than “decoupling” rhetoric suggests — developments broadly consistent with Keohane and Nye’s original framework. At the same time, interdependence has not proven capable of resolving, or even substantially softening, the dispute most likely to trigger a genuine crisis: Taiwan’s status, which both sides treat as an issue of sovereignty and regime legitimacy immune to economic bargaining. Nor has interdependence prevented sustained military buildup on both sides, which continues on a trajectory largely independent of the state of trade talks.

A further, more novel finding of this assessment is that both governments are actively converting elements of their economic interdependence — rare earths, advanced semiconductors — into deliberate instruments of coercive leverage, a pattern the academic literature terms weaponized interdependence. This suggests policymakers in Washington and Beijing are not passively relying on interdependence to keep the peace in the manner Norman Angell envisioned; they are actively managing and instrumentalizing it as an extension of statecraft, alongside rather than instead of continued military competition. Whether this produces a stabilizing equilibrium of mutual restraint or a more volatile dynamic of escalating economic coercion will likely depend heavily on whether the Board of Trade and Board of Investment survive their first real test — most plausibly the November 2026 tariff-truce expiration — with their mandates intact.

Conclusion

The Thucydides Trap identifies a genuine and historically recurrent danger, but complex economic interdependence should be understood as a factor that meaningfully raises the cost of war and creates useful institutional off-ramps, not as a reliable substitute for a resolution of the underlying security dilemma. Norman Angell’s core insight — that great-power war is economically irrational — remains as true in 2026 as it was in 1910; the enduring lesson of 1914, and the enduring risk in the Taiwan Strait today, is that economic irrationality has never been a sufficient guarantee against political leaders accepting it when sovereignty, regime security, or national identity are perceived to be at stake. For policymakers, the prudent conclusion is neither complacency born of deep trade ties nor fatalism born of historical base rates, but a deliberate effort to reinforce economic interdependence with the kind of institutionalized crisis-management architecture — of which the new Board of Trade and Board of Investment are an early, still-unproven example — that history suggests interdependence alone has never reliably provided.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Thucydides Trap? It is a term popularized by Harvard scholar Graham Allison describing the heightened risk of war that arises when a rising power’s growing capabilities threaten to displace an established ruling power, drawn from Thucydides’s account of Athens and Sparta and applied by Allison to sixteen historical power transitions since roughly 1500, twelve of which ended in war.

Did Xi Jinping actually invoke the Thucydides Trap with Trump? Yes. During their May 2026 summit in Beijing, Xi reportedly raised the concept directly, asking whether China and the United States could transcend the historical pattern the theory describes and build a new model of major-power relations.

Is the US-China economy actually decoupling? Not in a straightforward sense. Bilateral trade volumes recovered substantially through 2026 despite tariff friction, though the composition of trade has shifted, with supply chains increasingly rerouted through third countries such as Vietnam, Mexico, and Taiwan rather than genuinely severed.

Could Taiwan trigger a war despite deep economic ties between the US and China? Analysts broadly agree this is the scenario least constrained by economic interdependence, since Beijing treats Taiwan’s status as a matter of sovereignty and regime legitimacy rather than an issue subject to economic bargaining.

What is “weaponized interdependence”? It refers to a state’s use of its structural position within global economic networks — such as China’s dominance of rare-earth processing or US control over advanced semiconductor technology — as a coercive tool, short of military force, to influence another state’s behavior.

Sources

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (2017); World Economic Forum remarks, June 2026
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (1910); World Peace Foundation retrospective analysis
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (1977 and subsequent editions)
Michael C. Desch, “Balancing Away from War: How the USA and China Can Side-step the Thucydides’ Trap,” Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2025
James Holmes, “Enough About the ‘Thucydides Trap’ Already,” The National Interest, May 2026
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2025, April 2026
China-Briefing, “The Xi-Trump Beijing Summit: What Was Agreed—and What Was Not,” May 2026
CNBC and Center for Strategic and International Studies, Trump-Xi 2026 Summits coverage and analysis
The Diplomat, “China Moves to Lock in a New Edge on Taiwan Before the Next Trump-Xi Summit,” July 2026
International Crisis Group, “The Three-body Problem in the Taiwan Strait,” March 2026
Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project / Uppsala Conflict Data Program, via Taiwan Strait Tensions Tracker, 2026
Peterson Institute for International Economics, “Made with China: Global Supply Chains and the Limits of US Decoupling,” 2026
World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman, “Deepening Divides: The Cost of a More Fragmented Financial System,” June 2026
International Monetary Fund, “Geoeconomic Fragmentation and the Future of Multilateralism,” Staff Discussion Note, January 2023; IMF COFER database, 2026
S&P Global, “FACTBOX: Trump-Xi summit to tackle China’s rare earth dominance,” May 2026
Reuters and TrendForce, reporting on Nvidia H200 export licensing to China, 2026

This assessment is part of StratReview.com’s ongoing coverage of great-power competition. Related reading: China’s maritime strategy from coastal defense to Indo-Pacific power; de-dollarization and SWIFT alternatives; autonomous weapons and the future battlefield; the logistics of modern war.