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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

The more countries trade with each other and depend on each other, the better things are for peace and human advancement.

The zero-sum mindset that's de rigueur at the moment needs to die soon or the world that we'll inhabit is gonna suck.

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> The more countries trade with each other and depend on each other, the better things are for peace

I previously thought the same, with Europe and Russia doing lots of trade e.g. Germany buying lots of gas from Russia, and many western companies being present in Russia. It seems obviously true.

But Russia still started a war anyway, so I guess it's not actually true.

I think it's true but only in equitable societies.

Putin or Trump are totally isolated from economical and political consequences so they have no problem severing ties. If there are genuine co-dependencies, including for the leaders, they it's much harder to break peace.

I imagine the ideological aspect is the deeper motivation but it only matters with the right circumstances.

This don't make things better through.

Putin and Trump sits in the opposite side of the political spectrum, so as the country they lead, and yet they still managed to archive something similar.

It's not that hard to manage the country to a point where nothing in the country, even law, can hurt it's leader anymore. Sometime a bit of time and patient is all it takes.

I mean, we in europe did a a lot of trade with US too, and between other (then and still) EU countries, but the americans (and brits, and a few others) decided to attack Iraq for example ("Iraq has WMDs!"), and there were no sanctions and trade went on. And many other conflicts and bombings all around the world.

So it's not actually caring about the war and dead people (if we did, we'd do something about what israel is doing in gaza), but "us vs them", and russia is "them" while US was traditionally "us", until daddy Trump came along.

Someone probably told the EU politicians that russia will cave after a month or two of sanctions, there will be some kind of a "revolution" there, someone "pro EU" will be set there, and gas would be even cheaper.... A similar scenario was probably given to Trump for iran (just bomb the government, they'll cave, and you can set up a new pro-US leader there again).

You can never rule out irrational acts. Merkel was ignoring the writing on the wall for much too long, it was pretty obvious that russia was on the war path long before she was still happily inking contracts that financed russia's machinery. You can not get a country that is already waging irrational wars to change their way by trading with them. But I'm pretty sure that for instance Trump right now is restrained to some degree by the certain knowledge that the US economy is at the mercy of outsiders.

None of that stopped Trump raising the gas price to $10, or ending the petrodollar, either. It seems to have been empirically demonstrated that economics cannot restrain powerful idiots.

We can only live in one world, but I can easily imagine a much worse alternative where there had been no restrictions at all. The question here is a matter of degree, it isn't an on-off switch.

But it would seem there’s a certain balancing act. Because that kind of economic integration can also create pressure points for an autocrat to exploit in ways that are contrary to peace and human advancement.

This is why many Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just view monopolies as an economic problem; they viewed it as a direct threat to free and just society.

We've gathered decades of evidence in support of this, with commerce and trade supporting global peace.

Though, it's nice to see in this particular case that a near monopoly player gets unseated and creates room for innovation.

Yes, but we (in Europe) cannot afford all the digital infrastructure to be concentrated in one partner country. If you buy something from us and we buy something from you, that's trade. If we have to buy everything from you, that's a dependency, and we need to fix it asap

For this to work all participants need to play along, not throw a tantrum & actively trying to sabotage the system. In such cases, you need to cut out the faulty participant & continue without them.

But now you are not playing along either...

Yes, exactly. Playing along with anti-cooperative and anti-progressive behaviour is not on the agenda. The goal isn’t to get along with everyone.

You have to measure and compare the interdependence then aim for interdependence be balanced. Or you're back to where we are.

There's only one player with the zero sum mindset, maybe two if you count Russia.

Trump, Putin and Xi all seem to fit the bill and act like they can only gain at the cost of others. Some are more nuanced about it than others but none wants to cooperate with anyone else.

China seems inept at international relations, especially in building strategic alliances, but I wouldn't attribute that to a zero some mindset.

We're getting there. There are fewer irrational actors and small man syndrome affected people in places of power every passing day (on average, I hope these las few years are jusg a bump on the road)

This is exactly what people thought pre World War 1 and yet the war occurred anyway.

This was just another American cool-aid. The strategy was this: cultivate a hyper-consumerist, greedy and gluttonous population at home. Invite other countries to export and trade with the US. Build a dependency from which countries can't unwind themselves out of. Enslave the world and rule over them. Continue the aforementioned strategy while dispensing other cool-aids like "trade prevents war".

Yet, it seems like the enslaved nations still haven't gotten the memo.

The idea of "change through trade" mostly worked great (see most former socialist European countries), but sometimes not at all (see Russia and more recently the US), and China is kind of in the middle of both extremes and may swing to either side in the future.

The world we inhabit already sucks pal. You're just high up enough on the ladded that the suck hasn't hit your ankles yet. Don't worry -- it's coming! For us all!

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