For example, South Koreas economy, in a single persons lifetime, has grown 60x per person, inflation adjusted. An entire nation pulled out of poverty. https://tradingeconomics.com/south-korea/gdp-constant-prices
You can see that trade is a major part of their economy, currently around 80%: https://tradingeconomics.com/south-korea/trade-percent-of-gd...
You can look at their neighbor North Korea for a counter example, that has established hostile relations with most other countries and has a juche philosophy that frowns on trade.
More like 70 years. It was only around WWII that the US kicked the theme of trade-or-death running its foreign policy. The early 20th century has several wars you don't read about in history books where the US basically sends in the marines to topple a government that's antagonizing US commercial interests.
The United States' entry into WWI had nothing to do with forcing Germany to trade. Literally nothing. I'll let you refresh your own memory regarding events at that time, including Germany's unrestricted submarine attacks on American civilians.
But I definitely agree that it has pretty much nothing to do with the OP's point.
Did you know that USA and allies attempted to keep the Tsars in power against the Soviet Revolution of 1918? I didn't until now...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Edit: In fact, the American president was more than pleased that in his request for the US to declare war that, with the "democratic" Karenski government, the war had become Democracy vs Autocratic and it was ok to enter at that point on the side of Democracy.
I'm also not entirely sure the ends justify the means when it comes to threatening war. Having the power to write the constitutions of other countries costs the US economy a pretty penny.
There are a bunch of other cases where our involvement has made things decidedly worse, to the point where a policy of non-intervention would probably have had a better net result.
The entire 20th century was a war between globalization and the self-sufficient dream of communism (I don't know why they couldn't find a happy compromise myself, but alas) -- a fight to keep "trade" flowing -- this often manifests in the west extracting resources from less powerful countries (not saying Soviet Russia never extracted resources from poorer countries)
I don't have all the answers but USA is out for itself just the same as everyone else is.
That's an important function of every blue-water navy, but it's hardly their sole purpose.
> When countries close their ports we have an absolute conniption.
You're still on this? When has this happened? Please give us even one example that's less than 150 years in the past. Forget the conniption part; can you even point to an example of a country "closing their ports" to all trade?
The U.S. (along with every other powerful nation in history) has a long and storied history of military aggression in service of its own economic good, and American military policy has often been plainly captured by corporate interests.
But the assertion you're making here, based on something that happened two centuries ago, is complete nonsense, and makes light of the ills that actually do afflict American foreign policy.
When countries erect barriers to trade with the U.S., our government's reliable response is... wait for it! ...to erect reciprocal barriers in the form of quotas or tariffs, and then relentlessly work toward free trade agreements, preferably under the auspices of an international trade organization. Is that perhaps what you mean by having a conniption?
Every international trade has an associated international currency exchange. China’s manipulated its global position through exchanging more of its currency for USD than the market clearing rate for decades. This had the affect of setting their entire economy on “fire sale” prices, also for decades. They only acknowledge the existence of Chinese IP rights owned by Chinese companies. Etc,etc,...There are books on these topics.
During that timeframe the US government has worked unilaterally and internationally to combat the dotCom bust, the S&L crisis of the 80s, and the Great Recession, amongst other things. A good trade actor has many things, including a relatively stable currency and financial system. The US isn’t some paragon of perfection, but they have done some identifiably good international trade measures.