ABSTRACT
Diplomacy is a means of communicating, establishing, and maintaining relationships with strangers. Trade describes the movement of goods, services, and capital. A fuller understanding of international trade from a diplomacy perspective will equip decision makers better to analyze and contribute to solving these crucial global problems. As the balance of global power shifts towards large emerging economies such as China, monetary policy clashes again pose increasing risks to trade relations, as they did between the two world wars. The emergence of markets for raising capital in the Netherlands to finance long-distance seagoing trade missions in the fifteenth century, and the securitization of those missions and the profits flowing therefrom, permitted trade to rise in economic importance alongside the rise of nation-states in Europe. Multilateral trade diplomacy ultimately proved difficult to conduct effectively ad hoc on an ongoing basis.
