Free Markets Don’t Buy Peace
This article doesn&#x27;t address the most salient argument in the free trade -&gt; peace syllogism, which is that free trade between two countries reduces the chance of war between them only to the extent in which cutting that trade off (which is what would happen in a war) would cause domestic pain. So it&#x27;s an incentive, not an absolute.<p>Take the China example - China as of this September holds $3.055 trillion in foreign currency reserves. This makes the US and China mutually interdependent - if China stopped selling products to the US then it would cause a massive recession in China. If the US couldn&#x27;t find buyers to finance its spending, it would default on its debt. If the US defaults, the entire international economy would likely go up in flames.<p>So it&#x27;s like mutually assured destruction, but instead of stockpiling nukes (though we do that, too), we&#x27;re actually producing useful goods and services. And it doesn&#x27;t make war impossible, but it does mean that war won&#x27;t happen on a whim - it will be an utter last resort, with millions of wage earners and business owners wanting to try to make any other solution work, lest they lose their livelihood.<p>It&#x27;s hard to take the article seriously without this sort of analysis.