… is from page 162 of Steven Pinker’s important 2018 book, Enlightenment Now (footnote deleted):
[M]any Enlightenment thinkers advanced the theory of gentle commerce, according to which international trade should make war less appealing. Sure enough, trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.
DBx: Whatever the merits of, and success at, restricting trade in products X, Y, and Z – products asserted to be ‘critical’ for national security – recognize that such restrictions, by reducing the mutual dependence that trading countries have on each other, push in some real ways toward making the home country less secure by diminishing the peace-inducing ties of trade.
