Agreed. It’s also easier to trade with people who don’t want to kill you. Maybe I am a globalist. ;-)
Well, we trade all the time with people who, in other circumstances, would rather kill us. We always have. Three hundred years ago, for example, New England's most important trading parter was l'Acadie, home of those vile, evil papists that New Englanders would one day "racially cleanse" from l'Acadie so that the New Englanders could re-settle it with good Protestant stock. Not that the Acadians ever threatened the New Englanders militarily, of course---they were, after all, the French neutrals. New Englanders simply coveted what they had, and used the excuse that they were French and Catholic to justify what they did.I think we modern Americans are wrong in thinking that democracy can be exported; that democratic institutions can be grafted upon any and all cultures. That which sustains a democratic form of government is organic; a culture has it, or it doesn't. These feudal, patriarchal cultures, which are far older than ours, are based on a certain alchemy that does not foster or even desire our democratic forms. These cultures know our ways---they just don't want them. They just want our money. Yet Americans are largely tone-deaf to this, because we want others to love us, and we don't understand it when they don't---when they don't understand we're just trying to do good.
As for me, I stand with Frost: "Good fences make good neighbors."