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Comment by aristophenes | Hacker News Reader

Is your claim that good trade is not possible? I think in the 150 years since your examples there have been many positive examples of trade beneficial to both parties, and hardly any that are harmful, though there should be a handful.

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.

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> Is your claim that good trade is not possible? I think in the 150 years since your examples there have been many positive examples of trade beneficial to both parties, and hardly any that are harmful, though there should be a handful.

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.

Which wars would those be?

Not all of these were hot wars, but the point of overwhelming force is, best case scenario, you don't have to shoot anyone. Hawaii, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti...

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...

The Tsar would have probably been a better choice looking in hindsight. Most likely would have resulted in an eventual democracy.

I think not getting involved is usually the better choice. In hindsight, perhaps we could have prevented the USSR, but that would've required foresight that we didn't have. These days, we seem to make things way worse when we get involved, so we should just not get involved most of the time (beyond restricting trade, that is).

The US/Allies were fine with the March 1917 revolution--the Karenski government kept shooting American/Allied bullets with American/Allied guns against the Germans on the eastern front. The Allies weren't happy with the Bolsheviks making peace with the Germans and then taking those guns and bullets and fighting other Russians with them.

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.

US "interventions" in Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and probably some other countries I'm forgetting. Even the entry in WWI is largely a trade-or-death policy move, as it was predicated in large part on Germany's hostility to American shipping interests.

You're taking a lot of liberty with the term war here :) And in none of your examples was trade even remotely as great a consideration as were strategic regional rivalries between global powers, e.g., Germany in pre-WWII mexico and carribean, the Soviets for the rest of the century...

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.

To be fair, the US was smuggling guns and other aid to Germany's enemies, so it makes sense for them to put an end to that. The US was already involved in the war, they just didn't have the full military on the ground, which needed a declaration of war, which the attacks on the transport ships allowed.

But I definitely agree that it has pretty much nothing to do with the OP's point.

My claim wasn't about trade being good or bad, rather, if an entity working out of self-interest is a good or bad actor.

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.

And we often get ourselves into additional conflicts because of that intervention. We basically created Osama bin Laden by funding the Mujahideen (under bin Laden) against the USSR, where he gained a lot of notoriety and power. If we didn't get involved in a proxy war with the USSR by funding terrorist organizations, I think it's likely bin Laden wouldn't have gotten powerful enough to create al-Qaeda.

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.

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