This and related thoughts lead me to wonder whether China may soon face a Greece like meltdown. They’ve established themselves as bad trade actors.

Given that the UK & USA has a habit of showing up with a Navy when someone refuses to trade (thinking of the perry expedition, the opium wars) I'm left wondering what a good trade actor looks like.

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.

> 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?

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

A habit... really? Based on examples from two centuries past?

The purpose of the US Navy is to keep trade routes open. When countries close their ports we have an absolute conniption.

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.

> The purpose of the US Navy is to keep trade routes open.

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?

I think you’re conflating topics, concepts, and history. I was talking about international trade and macroeconomics - primarily the last 30-50 years. The Churchill quote seems relevant as well but still off topic: “democracy is the worst government except for all the other governments tried through time.” (Paraphrased.)

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.