Present you argument instead if just liking posts then dude. What your doing now is just straight cowardice. Be a man son
It actually came up when I was doing research on my future-history setting actually. While nukes exist, the thing about them is that they're -geopolitically- giant paperweights that anyone
sane is far too scared to use. Everyone made them because they're the most powerful weapon created, but they simply were not used because everyone sane feared them.
Fear alone never worked, as a wise gangster once said, 'you are better off having nice words and a gun than either' (seriously paraphrasing here). The US enforcing trade ensured that the world was at one of its most peaceful eras (when only
one year in all of human history is war-free, having as few wars as possible is the only thing you can achieve).
By forcing the planet to 'buy-in' international trade (in a combination of conventional arms, subsidizing the shit out of it, and immense amounts of diplomatic and economic clout), the US made it all that much harder for multi-state wars to break out. While this isn't completely successful, it
did ensure that a WW3 (or in all seriousness, it would be WW4 or 5 depending on if you count the 7 Years War and/or the Napoleonic Wars as world wars as they too were also global) wouldn't happen outside of 'the insane controlling the asylum' and literally blundering into war scenarios.
International trade, surprisingly enough, is a fickle thing to set up, as it requires a set of conditions to exist. For one thing, trade routes have to be (relatively) bandit-free so the traders wouldn't get killed for their goods. Another is having resources to trade among the various nations/kingdoms/states. A third condition is the ability to trade, aka the establishment of trade routes. These conditions -and more- make it hard to keep international trade aloft.
An example of how trade could collapse is the Bronze Age and its collapse. While the reasons for the Bronze Age Collapse will be forever out of reach, the before and after is measurable. During the Bronze Age, nations needed copper and tin to create the namesake bronze. Copper and tin weren't distributed evenly due to geology, leading to a thriving trade for copper and tin. The Hittites had the largest deposit of copper via the mines in Cyprus and -thanks to recent archeological digs- probably the only source of tin in the Near East via mines in the Taurus Mountains (augmented by tin trade from Europe and the Assyrians); both deposits giving them no end of strife. The one thing that the Hittites lacked, however, is stable food production, which our next subject had in abundance.
Ancient Egypt, thanks to the Nile and its -for its time- though bureaucracy, had food in to spare. Ancient Egypt was reliant on the Nile for its food production. The Nile was one of the most predictable rivers in the world, so predictable that the Egyptians had modeled their calendar based upon this predictability. It was also one of the most fertile areas on the planet, allowing for incredible yields of crops, which, in turn, allowed for a complex society that isn't entirely dominated by farmers. This complex society also produced an intricate culture centered around the Nile. However, despite the abundance of food, certain finished goods were simply out of their reach, which leads to the third power of the period.
The Mycenaeans -the proto-Greeks and the civilization that all Greek city-states inspired to become- were masters of numerous finished products that required -for the time- a sophisticated industrial base to produce. The Mycenaeans used their sailing prowess to establish trade routes to gain these resources (and food, due to the (relatively) poor arable land that Greece has) then used these resources to produce finished products which, in turn, is traded for more of those resources. This cycle evolved to the point where trade is everything, and thus a requirement to civilization.
That was before the collapse, mind you.
When the Bronze Age Collapse happened, all the Great Powers of the era collapsed or contracted as well. Without these great powers supporting trade, trade collapsed, leading to a runaway compound problem that the states couldn't solve. Those that survived this collapse contracted by varying amounts, while those that couldn't survive vanished to the sands of time.
This is just me looking into history, mind you.
In addition, when you look through history, international trade as we knew it developed along colonial/imperial lines outside of a handful of resources that
everyone needed (nitrates being one of the bigger ones, as only
Chile had deposits big enough to supply then-modern civilization... and that went bust when Germany invented the various processes to effectively create
synthetic nitrates and said processes proliferated after WW1) before the US decided to put an end to it.
Exactly fear of death is what ensures peace not "I can get rich". Problem is people like fox assume people are rational. When they actually aren't at all.
Funny thing with this, "I'm going to get rich"
did ensure world peace in a way, as it relies on certain basic human instincts that are connected to greed...
