Doug Irwin: evaluation

Transcript context

…The idea that free trade might be connected to peace seems quite plausible to me in an era of communism, where you have expansionary foreign governments, and for a long time, there was, as you know, no McDonald’s in Moscow. If you look today, it seems something has changed. China is our largest trading partner, but many observers of foreign affairs would argue that the relationship between US and China has some reasonable chance of leading to foreign conflict. So something has changed in the structure of the equilibrium where now nations that trade a fair amount might fairly readily go to war relative to what we used to suspect. Of course, there is a McDonald’s in Moscow. There’s probably quite a few. People in Moscow eat sushi. They consume all kinds of American popular culture, if only downloaded illegally on the internet. What do you think has changed in the structure of the problem to have made the free trade–peace connection possibly now so weak? I don’t know that it’s weaker. I think China’s a really difficult one to figure out in terms of whether all the openness we’ve seen over the past two decades or so is going to lead to political transformation or a change in their foreign policy. It doesn’t seem to have yet, so I’d say that the jury is still out. Still the costs . . . This goes back to Norman Angell’s point. Of course he’s widely misinterpreted from saying, “We won’t see wars in the future because of increased trade. ” He didn’t say that. He said it changed the cost-benefit calculation. I think it may have for China. Just recently, watching the Ken Burns Vietnam series on PBS, there were a lot of wars in Southeast Asia beyond the Vietnamese War. China invaded Vietnam. Vietnam invaded Cambodia. I’m not sure that that sort of local conflict . . . I don’t think it’s more likely, given the tremendous amount of commerce that’s going on and the perceived need of the governments to justify themselves by saying, “We’re providing an adequate standard of living for our people.” Some questions about trade in Asia. Should the United States allow China to buy US semiconductor companies?…

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