> When nations cut themself off from the global economy, they often think that they've made themselves self-sufficient right up until a foreign power that's been trading the whole time shows up in your capital city with a fleet of gunboats to forcibly open your country to world markets.
Japan still did a lot better for itself than most other places that western gunboats showed up in the high colonial age. Is this not because it had a healthy political economy, and could meet foreign demands while still continuing "national" development?
Yeah Germany came very close twice to winning both world wars. The Soviets won the lion's share of the territorial spoils of WW2 despite emphatically not being a free trade power.
The Union won the Civil War despite almost alienating Great Britain and coming within a hair of war with the Brits multiple times. The Confederates were the free trade power supported by Europe throughout the entire war. As Ulysses Grant said during the final days before the Confederate surrender, "The British mark was on every battlefield of the war." Didn't work out for the free-trading Rebs the way that they hoped, but them's the breaks.
It's not actually the 'own' that people think it is. Free trade is not a cheat code for permanent global domination. It's effective but it has limitations and weaknesses. The type of arrogance that leads to the belief that it grants an aura of invincibility is just hubris.
The nations that use autarkic measures are not just stupid morons who are and were doomed to lose ahead of time: that's just believing our own Atlanticist war propaganda too much. Make no mistake, the modern sea powers have come very close to defeat and humiliation many times over the last couple centuries, and one of them was effectively annihilated (the British) in part due to the tidal wave of Asian nationalism.
Japan still did a lot better for itself than most other places that western gunboats showed up in the high colonial age. Is this not because it had a healthy political economy, and could meet foreign demands while still continuing "national" development?