The COVID-19 pandemic has served to upend many long-held policy assumptions, but none so clearly as the theory that international trade rests purely on economic incentives, and that those economic incentives will always override a country’s more base instincts to act in its own interest because of the cost to global profits.
Responses from countries around the world to COVID-19 have significantly fractured this argument. It can no longer be said with unshakable confidence that nations will sidestep their own economic objectives, interests, and policies for the sake of a more profitable international economic integration.
In other words, reports that “the Westphalian notion of the self-interested state is dead” are greatly exaggerated.
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International Relations 101 said a nation would never take an action unfavorable to its own national interests. That was right around Nixon’s first visit to China and before the European Union was complete. The books had not yet been rewritten, nor was there a New World Order. Economic opinion articles were nearing the concept of global dependency, but countries still retained enough nationalism to keep away the boogerbear. Kung Flu is showing people we need to look out for the US of A. We can stand on our own, as we deplorables have been saying for some time. Philosophical economics studies do not take into account the gut-level reality of experience by the people doing the work.
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