So I can definitely see a similar sort of “free trade agreement” occurring between China and Russia as there’s very little incentive for either to care to monitor all the busy businessmen, so long as the right palms get greased.

The easiest place for hazelnuts to go upon leaving Turkey is pretty much Italy, especially without paying for the Suez Canal

-My understanding is that China loves in shell hazelnuts, basically like a traditional thing over there, possibly being related to new year celebrations.

-We have multiple varieties of hazelnuts that each have their advantages and disadvantages. We have a lot that work well for direct eating. It’s more difficult to get exactly what you need from Turkey, since their focus seems mostly about fat content, rather than taste/color/size/texture/shelf-life.

-American reputation for safe and sanity food. Our farms are more sanity (as much as any farm can ever be), less contaminated with pollution and pesticide residues, and we have much more capable cleaning infrastructure where nuts are washed/sanitized(a “kill step”)/dried.

-We control the moths and bacterial blight which results in low amounts of infested nuts going out. If you’ve ever eaten in shell pistachios, you’ll know that occasionally you’ll get a dried worm or shriveled/moldy black nut. Can’t really eliminate it yet, but we keep it at an “acceptable” level.

-We are better at keeping the nuts climate controlled, so they don’t go rancid.

-Geographically we are well positioned, able to send them to the ports within state, and across the pacific.

-When prices are reasonable, the demand in China is big enough that they could completely absorb our output even if we doubled it and sent it all to China. Last I checked we produce about 4-5% of the world output. Turkey is like 75%.

Have you done business in China? They’re not idiots. Russia’s GDP is half of California’s.

I made no such inference. The opposite, in fact. My argument relies entirely on the organization of large scale concealment of trade. That involves smart, discrete people.

There are three major direct railway connections between China and Russia. Exactly zero of these sites have any Western observers with the authority necessary to ensure anything about what is in the box cars. And that's just the railways. There are also roads, boats and aircraft.

We don't know what's going on: we can't measure any of this credibly. Certainly not well enough to draw precision graphics and cite volume numbers with single digit precision.

Beyond that, even if the given numbers are dead nuts accurate, how can we claim this is down to China's better nature as a non-pariah state contributor to international prerogatives? It could also be that Russia just doesn't have enough liquid hard currency to pay. It could be that Russia's demand for industrial inputs has fallen off simply because they're running out of factory workers. There is public data and anecdotal evidence for both of these as well: all similarly unverifiable.

So for me the story fails on both fronts: unverifiable claims about the quantity of trade and unverifiable attribution of the reason for the former.

Ultimately my hang up here is the creation of illusions. We know far less than we pretend, and that is one factor in bad decision making. Acknowledging unknowns -- often a very difficult choice, especially when there is an ample supply of spreadsheet ninjas and graphics artists eager to paint whatever the preferred reality of the day might be -- improves decisions.

Re: troubles with payments: For all I, or you, know, the money is being concealed as well. Despite the triviality of concealing industrials inputs moving across the unmonitored borders of friendly nations, concealing money is even easier.

Yep, quite different from Egypt-Sector Gaza border))