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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Mutual trade absolutely prevents outright war, as evidenced by the fact that the US rapidly trying to become less reliant on china in case of such a war. It doesn't do anything other than that - it has nothing to do with whether china has a democratic government or not, it has nothing to do with whether or not the countries we trade with make policies favorable to our ideology, it just keeps everyone involved from launching missiles because the rational actors on both sides realize that it would be economic suicide, even if they would win the military engagement.

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> Mutual trade absolutely prevents outright war

This was literally the theory that guided European (and particularly German) relations with Russia for the past couple decades. It was disastrously wrong.

Russia knew that the consequence of launching a war would be the evaporation of trade with Europe, and they still did it. They won't attack NATO because it's NATO, with overwhelming nuclear and conventional military forces, it has nothing to do with trade.

That theory also guided the development of the EU, which has arguably been a significant source of peace and stability for the past 70 years, leading to great prosperity. This is only the second war we are seeing on the European continent in all that time. Compared with the previous 70 years it's quite an achievement.

It's a fallacy to focus on the one failure of the policy and ignore the other cases when it was working.

As for NATO its expansion all the way to the borders of Russia didn't prevent the war either, and it remains to be seen whether we won't end up with a war between Russia and NATO.

In times of war it's tempting but dangerous to feel like militarisation of the world is the solution. History doesn't show that to be the case in general.

It's not fallacy to note that the theory has worked between democratic countries remarkably well, but failed between democratic and not so democratic countries. Thus my call to re-evaluate trade relationships with not so democratic countries.

Ok, maybe 'absolutely prevents' should be 'mostly prevents' - the key part is the rational actor bit. If the guy at the steering wheel cares less about the prosperity of his country and his personal wellbeing than he does about fulfilling a czarist power fantasy before he croaks the system is less effective. But I suppose there are very few disincentives to war that would help in that situation.

Well, it did stop Europe from retaliating against Russia with full power, and slowed then down until the actions became extreme.

The mistake is on believing that the effect was symmetric. Russia benefited very little from the trade (yes, for internal reasons), so they made no effort to preserve it.

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