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Can international trade instigate the next great conflict?

September 6, 2022 Sorin Adam Matei

A potential favoring factor for the invasion of Ukraine and the threats made of China to occupy Taiwan could be that International trade clusters cut across political-military alliances. In a study I conducted with Nagisha Ishinabe and published in The National Interest we show that The US belong to the Asian-Pacific trade cluster, while the EU belongs to a trade cluster including Russia, Eastern Europe, and North Africa. This leads to a misalignment between political and economic tools of international deterence and influence. The study also found that if the US were to leave the Indo-Pacific cluster by decoupling from China, it would not carry the cluster with it. In fact, China will become the core nation of the cluster, while the US would remain isolated in the Americas.

The National Interest article “Does International Trade Actually Breed Conflict?” describes the method and the findings in more detail.

Trade Clusters: Blue – Euro-Russian; Red: Indo-Pacific; Yellow: Other nations

Sorin Adam Matei

Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).

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