James Surowiecki has an interesting column this week on Venezuela's brand of business-friendly socialism, and the general willingness of ideologically opposed countries not to let mutual demonization and loathing get in the way of robust bilateral trade:
Chávez's demonization of the U.S. has had little or no impact on business between the two countries. The U.S. continues to be Venezuela's most important trading partner. Much of this business is oil: Venezuela is America's fourth-largest supplier, and the U.S. is Venezuela's largest customer. But the flow of trade goes both ways and across many sectors. The U.S. is the world's biggest exporter to Venezuela, responsible for a full third of its imports. The Caracas skyline is decorated with Hewlett-Packard and Citigroup signs, and Ford and G.M. are market leaders there. And, even as Chávez's rhetoric has become more extreme, the two countries have become more entwined: trade between the U.S. and Venezuela has risen thirty-six per cent in the past year.[...]
This may seem like a state of affairs that can't last, and Chávez's supporters and detractors alike assume that, soon enough, his deeds will begin to live up to his rhetoric: he'll cut off oil supplies to the U.S., or the like. But deep-seated ideological and political hostility between countries is often less of an obstacle to trade than you might think. Japan, for instance, is South Korea's second-largest trading partner, despite the fact that Korean resentment toward Japan runs very high, thanks to a long history of Japanese imperialism in the region. China, meanwhile, treats Taiwan as a rebel province, and has threatened military action if it attempts to declare independence, but foreign trade between the two countries totals nearly sixty-five billion dollars. Trade does not, as Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine believed, always bring peace in its wake, “operating to cordialize mankind.” (Think, after all, of the First World War.) But the benefits of trade often excuse even the most grievous of sins. Sometimes, it just makes sense to deal with the devil.
