Cutting trade ties makes countries more likely to fight, new data finds

A new study quantifies how much international trade reduces military conflict between nations. It means governments now have stronger evidence that cutting trade ties could increase the risk of war.

The idea that trade fosters peace has been around for centuries, but it is often dismissed as theoretical or wishful thinking. This paper provides robust, modern empirical evidence for that link, using a clever method to isolate the causal effect. This means that policies like 'decoupling' or 'de-risking' — which aim to reduce economic interdependence for security reasons — now carry a more clearly quantified risk of increasing military conflict. It shifts the debate from abstract theory to measurable consequence.