Recession is probably the best case scenario. If only we get through this with just a recession!
The world's economic inter-dependence is one of the things that have kept World War 3 at bay for decades. Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading. Russia shows what happens when you economically isolate a country with sanctions and force them to rely on themselves economically: It reduces one of the downsides of warfighting. Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?
>Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading.
World War 1 begs to differ, hell even the Russian invasion of Crimea back in 2014 begs to differ. Economic interdependence dosen't stop authoritarians, it only threatens democracies with a larger margin for dissent.
WWI started in countries (Balkans) with the least economic interdependence, then pulled in more Western European countries through defense alliances. While technically someone could have put the brakes on, it was an autopilot sort of thing. The lesson of WWI is that if you're going to enter into defense agreements that obligate you, be careful to whom you're wedding yourself. In particular, don't wed yourself to someone who has much less to lose than you do.
One of the lessons from the prelude to WWII is to be careful about trade imbalances, as they can breed instability and radicalism. During the 1920s the US enjoyed huge trade surpluses with Europe, which caused all manner of monetary and labor dislocation in Europe. Worse, the US wasn't content with this surplus, so similar to modern China they erected additional barriers to imports to try to have their cake and eat it, too. These effects were amplified by the gold standard, which accelerated deflation and unemployment in Europe, and accelerated (stock market) inflation in the US. And of course all these ill effects were amplified again for Germany.
Toward the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, the whole system was disassembled as every country, understandably, retreated to lick its wounds. Economic interdependence is critical to maintaining global security, but that interdependence itself isn't self-sustaining. It can fall apart if dislocations aren't managed well across the system. For example, the lessons from the 1990s and early 2000s is, "just go back to college or trade school" is an absolutely horrible approach to dealing with labor dislocation. Significant changes in labor structure need to happen inter-generationally, not intra-generationally.
From the Russian perspective, the US promised not to expand NATO eastwards in return for allowing German unification. While Russia was weak, NATO ignored the promise, but miscalculated after Russia strengthened.
Ultimately, you need to understand the Russia reasons, and they had been threatening war since 2008 when Bush announced Ukraine could become a NATO member.
If you rely on Western sources to interpreted Eastern motives, you end up with rubbish like "they hate us for our freedoms".
It is a willful distortion of the so-called 2+4 Treaty from 1990, in which the two German states and the four occupying powers negotiated the terms of reunification. Ultimately, they agreed that only West German military forces would enter East Germany until the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which was to be completed by the end of 1994 at the latest. This is stipulated in Article 4 and Article 5 of the treaty: https://web.archive.org/web/20050222182358/https://usa.usemb...
Great point. Also "because of our love of jesus christ" has been thrown at me a few times when I'm trying to provide more nuanced arguments for why people in other countries might not favor us.
It's also just not the general lesson from history either. Plus you have to recall that in many cases war is about resource acquisition as much as anything else, and sometimes wars are popularized as ideological crusades when they are masquerading as resource disputes in order to motivate a populace.
Something that has become apparent to me is that in our years of somewhat peaceful economic growth, we seem to have forgotten that there are haves and have-nots and that the economic system that was created to hopefully replace war with peaceful competition only works so much as the large powers decide that it works well enough. Those who are have-nots tend to not have the proportional military leverage to do something about their position.
Our rejection of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism in favor of a "rules based international order" has blinded us a bit through abstraction and legalese to the reality of how the world works and the limits of resource availability given the size of the planet and the population numbers.
> As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.
I used to think this as well, but I recently re-read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address [1] and it aided me in coming to the conclusion that such a moral crusade is neither wise, nor moral, and least of all practical.
There will always be some nations that have governments, authoritarian in our eyes or otherwise, that we disagree with from a political perspective. But we simply do not have the time, resources, or motivation to do something about all of them, and even as we try to do something about one or more of them we wind up with others popping up. Instead we should seek to treat fairly where possible, and treat not at all where necessary due to immoral behavior and stop trying to control the entire world. That doesn't mean we should never intervene or do anything, as in the case of Nazi Germany or perhaps other atrocities, but a national policy of extinguishing authoritarians seems to me to be one that isn't in our best interest.
I'm not pitching this as a moral crusade, but as a practical one. Authoritarianism is a cancer that invariably spreads and disrupts the global system.
It is simply in our best interest to starve cancer whenever we find it and excise it if possible.
If the goal of buying Russian hydrocarbons was to increase the economic stability of Russia and to foster capitalistic market systems in the country to prevent the rise of authoritarianism then the second they invaded Georgia should have resulted in the cutting of those economic ties.
If the goal of opening trade up to China was to prevent a Chinese-Soviet alliance and to weaken the USSR then the second the USSR fell we should have pivoted to defeating Chinese authoritarianism instead of strengthening economic ties to them which has ultimately provided fuel for an authoritarian economic machine that has grown to surpass the capacity of the US and made the US dependent on it.
We didn't do those things and now we're facing existential economic and military threats.
Are you ready to sign up and go fight in Ukraine or elsewhere and die to stop authoritarianism as a matter of practicality?
It's not a very fair question to ask, I know, but I think we really need to make sure we are honest about what we're asking people to do.
Cutting economic ties in these specific cases isn't enough to actually stop the bloodshed and bring about stability.
There are practical limits to our willpower and resources and we can't just stamp out every dictatorship in the world, remember Iraq and Afghanistan? I fully support our actions in Ukraine, by the way, and in terms of picking fights that's probably one of our better ones to help stop authoritarianism.
> Are you ready to sign up and go fight in Ukraine or elsewhere and die to stop authoritarianism as a matter of practicality?
Not necessarily, as I’m not directly threatened, but I’m more than happy to carve out a piece of my paycheck to give Ukrainians any and every piece of equipment they need to do it for me.
Ok but that's not enough to fight all of these authoritarian regimes that spring up. We don't have enough people, resources, or willpower to defeat all authoritarian regimes militarily forever. We have to be prudent, and sometimes we just have to live with such regimes.
This is circular reasoning. You are pretty much saying democracies should be aggressors first. If you swap `authoritarian` and `democracy` in your statement, it will also ring true.
However, the parent poster paints a different picture. If people in Moscow were economically threatened by reduced trade caused by an invasion, the elite appetite for such a move would be reduced.
"In the early 2000s, however, German politicians had developed a contrary, more liberal theory — that more economic interdependence between Russia and western Europe would create peace in the long run. As trade increased, democracy would inevitably prevail."
>Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?
China being cut off from ~15%? of their market does not mean China isolation, it means US rewriting Child labor laws to fill Walmart shelves.
There's a difference between preventing war and preventing a wider world war. Trade links persisting even when countries are opposed to each other contributes to a certain level of global order between the biggest powers.
We do not and cannot so trivially assign a reason for the lasting peace since WWII. There are many theories in international relations that propose a cause, and none are currently accepted as being solely correct
I think the more pointed question is: will USA aggression be unchecked if the economies disconnected?
China hasn't invaded anyone. USA is conducting an active genocide in Gaza and the Iraq War wasn't that long ago. I could name so many other incidents of unbridled aggression it boggles the mind.
Recession is probably the best case scenario. If only we get through this with just a recession!
The world's economic inter-dependence is one of the things that have kept World War 3 at bay for decades. Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading. Russia shows what happens when you economically isolate a country with sanctions and force them to rely on themselves economically: It reduces one of the downsides of warfighting. Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?