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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

A more interdependent world is a friendlier and more secure world. When countries are completely independent of each other they will be able to more easily shrug off economic consequences of their aggression.

Economic ties also foster greater cultural exchange and understanding, so the less of those there are the insular and navel-gazing the inhabitants of such countries will tend to be, which will also increase the likelihood of conflict as people tend to fear those who they aren't in close contact with and don't understand.

As bad as the world is today, it'll get much worse as countries isolate.

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I think that argument has been lost. Russia still invaded Ukraine and China still took Hong Kong backwards. America has invaded many countries. Taiwan is under threat. Interconnectedness doesn’t seem to matter a great deal when you have either a ruthless dictator in power or a country has a strong military advantage.

> A more interdependent world is a friendlier and more secure world.

No, it's not. Wars between major trading partners aren't historically uncommon at all.

> When countries are completely independent of each other they will be able to more easily shrug off economic consequences of their aggression.

When countries (particularly those toward opposite ends of the extraction -> intermediate goods -> finished goods -> finance & services spectrum) are integrated with trade, it produces durable inequalities through ricardian specialization and strong resentments that are either subjugating through imperial domination, mollified through political union and welfare policies, or expressed in war. Sometimes the latter even after the former through political union.

That has been the prevailing thought since before WWI, but multiple World Wars and Russia's invasion of Ukraine this year have proven otherwise.

Do you know who was the biggest trading partner of Nazi Germany on the eve of Operation Barbarossa? You guessed it, the Soviet Union. It was responsible for the vast majority of imports of critical resources like various metals, oil, grain, etc. It didn't stop Hitler.

Do you know who were the main buyers of Russian gas, and via which country that gas arrives to them? You guessed it, EU, and the main pipelines pass through Ukraine.

On paper, yes, you're absolutely right. But you're assuming rationality where it's far from certain. Same as in the 1930s, we have a bunch of empty populists everywhere who are anything but rational, intent on blaming everything bad on "bad guys of today", be it the EU, migrants, Soros, the Jews, Nazis, have your pick. With those types of people, you can't assume rationality of actions. Brexit wasn't a rational decision, to give but one example. Poland infringing on press and human freedoms against the will of the EU, while receiving billions of aid from the EU, isn't rational.

The difficult thing about even very good prevention is that the absence of events is difficult to prove.

Is interconnection perfect? obviously not. Does interconnection prevent more conflicts vs fully independent nations? Likely yes.

I think what we are seeing is societies and governments forgetting how bad wars are for stability, on a backdrop of slowing or reversing quality of life for many modern nations.

Your mistake is believing that financial interdependence is what prevents conflict instead of, say, shared values, political interdependence, cultural exchange, etc. Things that aren't money bind countries together far, far, far stronger than a stack of money ever could. That's the biggest reason why trying to bind Russia financially failed, and why it's been failing with China for the past 20 years. Ideology is such a powerful tool that I don't understand how people still think money is so important.

I don't think financial interdependence is exclusively what prevents conflict. Shared values and cultural exchanges develop when you spend more time interacting, and financial connections are one excuse to spend more time interacting.

I actually wish more nations provided for a youth international travel trip as part of a high school post grad type public benefit. I think it would do a lot for long term peace in the world. It would be better if money weren't the primary driver for so much.

> financial connections are one excuse to spend more time interacting.

And it's not sufficient. Most people will buy products imported from China without ever interacting with Chinese people (or their culture) and Chinese will export products to the rest of the world without ever interacting with foreign cultures and their ideas and viewpoints. Tell me how a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany helped build ties between the citizens of either country, aside from the politicians who got rich off of it and turned into apologists.

> The difficult thing about even very good prevention is that the absence of events is difficult to prove.

No, an inverse relation between propensity of dyads to go to war and their degree of trade integration wouldn't be hard to prove, if it were true.

That's true, but the other side of the coin is that richer/more developed countries take all the specialists and raw materials from poorer countries, set up low level factories for the remaining idiots, control the IP and sell them finished products.

Leaving them in a perpetual "developing" state, unless they smarten up, which is really hard without all the smart people that left, and even harder because the people in power are more than happy to keep things as they are because they get paid for it.

You can tell that to all the countries in Africa that are interdependently connected to Ukraine's grain.

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