This is my final entry under the banner of The Re-Education of Trade. See below for what comes next.
For the last few months, I’ve been writing under this banner, trying, in my own small way, to explain what happened between the United States and China, and what we’ve lost along the way. I’ve written about tariffs and deficits, about steel towns and microchips, about how two great nations built the most productive commercial relationship in human history… and how quickly that relationship has fallen apart.
Some readers have accused me—gently or not-so-gently—of having a personal stake in all this lament.
“Of course you’re upset about the breakdown,” they say. “Your livelihood was built on trade. You’re just mad the music stopped.”
But that’s not even close.
Yes, trade has been my profession. But far more importantly—and I say this without sentimentality—it is how I learned to be a human being. Trade taught me how to talk to people who see the world differently. How to listen without suspicion. How to stay in the room long enough for the costume of “foreigner” or “enemy” to fall away and reveal an actual human being underneath.
Trade is how I paid the bills. It’s also how I learned to connect.
And so when my government slams the door on trade exchange, on aid, on international citizenship, and tells me, and people like me, that we must now treat former partners as threats, it feels like they are asking me to close my heart: To strangle the very muscle that allowed me to make sense of the world. To tell friends in Ningbo and Suzhou, Hong Kong and Singapore, Jakarta and Mumbai that the bridges we built must now be burned for the sake of this stupid political moment.
The collapsing of trade feels like a forced goodbye.
That’s the wound beneath all my writing. I don’t care about revenue. Internationalists can pivot on a dime. I care about the forced loss of relationship, personal ones and institutional ones.
Trade has always been, for me, personal: A bunch of very real hands: calloused, warm, extended across borders, shaking mine in factories, ports, stamping lines, conference rooms, and late-night teahouses. Hands that helped build my life. Hands that taught me how to trust. Hands that taught me how much of the world becomes possible when two people decide to work together despite everything pushing them apart.
And that is why the disintegration of the U.S.–China relationship has felt so personal.
It has ripped up the very thing that made me an adult in the world.
Losing it has felt like losing a piece of myself.
The Invisible Hand is our Hands
The invisible hand of trade is nothing more than millions of human hands reaching out for a better life.
And that reach rarely starts as a search for friendship. More often than not it moves forward in hesitation—sometimes in distrust, sometimes even in quiet disdain. We reach out to trade not because we admire the person across the table, or share their politics or creed, but because our business requires it. Trade has never been sentimental. It only demands that you acknowledge the other person exists, and that they have something you want.
I have done business with people I would never otherwise have engaged. Communists. Muslims. Party members loyal to systems that reject nearly everything I believe about politics and freedom. We did not meet to reconcile worldviews. We met to trade. We signed contracts. We shipped goods. We paid invoices. And somewhere along the way, without even trying to, we discovered one another’s humanity. Very often, we ended up as friends despite having so little in common on the surface.
My brother—an evangelical Christian—has a business life tied inextricably to a Jewish family in New Jersey. Their personal theology diverges, I’m sure, on many essential points. But their trade flourishes. Meanwhile my longest, most loyal trading partner is a sworn member of the Chinese Communist Party, a former soldier of the People’s Liberation Army. Sometimes we debate politics. But most of the time, we just transact.
And that turns out to be enough.
This is not kumbaya. Trade does not ask for agreement, conversion, or affection. It demands cooperation that is narrow, disciplined, and voluntary. But that discipline carries a radical assumption: that the person across from you is rational, purposeful, and trustworthy enough to keep their word. Once you grant that, the grand labels begin to shrink. Communist. Capitalist. Christian. Muslim. Jew. What remains is something older and sturdier: two people seeking mutual gain without mutual harm.
Adam Smith understood this intuitively. Exchange, he argued, enlarges sympathy through repeated contact. Hayek expanded it: Trade is cooperation without consensus. Order without command.
This is why trade matters.
And why its collapse is so dangerous.
When exchange ends, the reaching hand of trade is forced to retract. When the hand retracts, the practice of learned sympathy dies. Nations—and their peoples—harden into abstractions. Politics rushes in to finish the job.
The invisible hand of trade was never a promise of harmony. It was the forced discipline of continuing to make contact no matter what: forcing people who would otherwise remain strangers, or enemies, to deal with one another honestly, again and again.
The result is the slow manufacture of genuine human sympathy. And it is the greatest force for peace the world has ever known. It reminds us, practically, that we are human before we are anything else.
In a world desperate to divide, that reluctant hand reaching out to trade may be the last working instrument keeping us from an apocalyptic oblivion; the last thing reminding us that no one nation—and no one individual—can live alone in a silo. Abundance, both emotional and economic, only happens when two people face each other, dig deep for sympathy, and exchange.
Or trade.
It’s too late for our governments to resume normal trade—at least for awhile. But in the meantime, YOU can decide to trade.
YOU can keep your hand extended.
YOU can reach across lines others insist are impassable.
If I have earned any of your trust, I can tell you it’s worth it.
I have lived my entire life this way. In between.
Haphazardly bouncing into strangers.
Surprised to end up with a world of friends.
I refuse to live any other way.
A note to readers: a new beginning
This essay closes my series under The Re-Education of Trade. Over the past six months, you’ve allowed me to test ideas, sharpen arguments, and say aloud the things that too often get lost in the noise of U.S.–China discourse.
In the New Year, I’ll be launching something larger: The Global In-Betweenist—a platform dedicated not just to trade, but to the dignity of international engagement itself. A home for people who still believe that connection beats isolation, that curiosity beats fear, and that the world is richer when we enter it fully rather than retreat from it angrily.
I hope you’ll join me when the door reopens.