U.S.-China Trade War Raises Risks of a Real One

In 1910, British writer Norman Angell published a book titled “The Great Illusion,” which was destined to go down as one of the most mocked volumes in history. The book’s thesis was that countries had grown so economically interdependent that they could no longer afford to engage in long, destructive wars. Angell’s timing was spectacularly bad, as World War I began just a few years after the book came out. Germany and the U.K., two of the chief belligerents, were among each other’s largest trading partners when the war began.

But Angell’s idea wasn't entirely risible; although the European powers didn’t take his advice, they were stupid not to. The two world wars were long and terrible, and most nations endured considerable hardship. In the aftermath of the conflagrations, economic weakness among European nations ultimately put an end to the continent’s global imperial hegemony. Meanwhile, in the decades after the end of WWII, great powers essentially stopped fighting each other -- perhaps because of the threat of nuclear destruction, but possibly also because of a growing realization that in a modern industrialized economy, war has high costs but confers very few material benefits. Even the U.S.’s invasion of oil-rich Iraq ended up being a huge economic loss.