I think there are two different philosophies at work here.
In one, international trading has built a web of mutual dependencies between countries. When your economic well-being depends on another country, you're less likely to go to war with them. The more inter-dependencies exist, the less likely armed conflict becomes.
Countries outside the trading bloc are then suspect: they have nothing to lose in attacking. Attempts to bring outsiders into the bloc via trade agreements, development, loans, etc, are all really part of a defensive security strategy.
This is nothing new: rulers have been marrying their children to those of their enemies for the same reasons since forever.
The other point of view, which seems dominant within the current US administration, looks at the inter-dependencies of international trade purely as a liability.
When the US relies on China to provide it with lots of manufactured goods, that is seen mostly (or solely) as a risk for the US, not as a stabilizing link in a web of mutual dependency.
Which is not to say that China (for example) won't try to leverage those dependencies to improve its position, nor to say that the US shouldn't encourage more widespread dependencies so that there's resilience in the system to bad acting on the part of any single player.
The point being that detaching from the web of mutual dependency makes you both weaker (in that you can only rely on yourself), and more threatening (since you no longer have anything to lose by attacking).
The US, by virtue of its size, can probably most afford to be isolated, but it's not clear to me that it's a good long-term strategy.
In one, international trading has built a web of mutual dependencies between countries. When your economic well-being depends on another country, you're less likely to go to war with them. The more inter-dependencies exist, the less likely armed conflict becomes.
Countries outside the trading bloc are then suspect: they have nothing to lose in attacking. Attempts to bring outsiders into the bloc via trade agreements, development, loans, etc, are all really part of a defensive security strategy.
This is nothing new: rulers have been marrying their children to those of their enemies for the same reasons since forever.
The other point of view, which seems dominant within the current US administration, looks at the inter-dependencies of international trade purely as a liability.
When the US relies on China to provide it with lots of manufactured goods, that is seen mostly (or solely) as a risk for the US, not as a stabilizing link in a web of mutual dependency.
Which is not to say that China (for example) won't try to leverage those dependencies to improve its position, nor to say that the US shouldn't encourage more widespread dependencies so that there's resilience in the system to bad acting on the part of any single player.
The point being that detaching from the web of mutual dependency makes you both weaker (in that you can only rely on yourself), and more threatening (since you no longer have anything to lose by attacking).
The US, by virtue of its size, can probably most afford to be isolated, but it's not clear to me that it's a good long-term strategy.