The military buildup is promulgated as a great step in not only building peace in the Indo-Pacific over the past decade, but latches onto the rhetoric on how “bombs are democratizing instruments that manifest “peace and democracy”” (Schwartz 2021, 6). I argue that “despite the rhetoric, such deployments do not necessarily attempt to deter enemy action, to ward off an undesirable future, but are as likely to prove provocative, to increase the likelihood of conflict, to precipitate that future”(Goodman 2010, xiv).