Dr. Katherine Barbieri was invited to appear on WIS-TV Sunday, March, 12, by David Stanton to comment on the Dubai port operation deal. The discussion was not part of a book tour, but her recently published study of international trade was cited often by the interviewer and quoted authoritatively by the interviewee. Her book, The Liberal Illusion - Does trade promote peace? was published last year in paperback by the University of Michigan Press.

To ask the question, "Does trade promote peace?" is to invite the stock answer, "Of course trade promotes peace. And it originates and distributes wealth. What can be wrong with that?" Barbieri doesn't see a whole lot wrong with that at all, but she does see collateral damage most never consider.

The stock answer has been around since before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, an opportune time for any American. With his degree from Oxford, Smith began as a moral philosophy professor at the University of Glasgow in 1752. He was appointed as a traveling tutor to the third Duke of Buccleuch, and spent three years in France. Upon returning to Britain in 1766, Smith spent another ten years producing Wealth of Nations.

The most notable feature of Wealth of Nations is the promotion of natural liberty. Smith pushed the concept that "man's self-interest is God's providence." Before Smith was John Locke, secretary to Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) who wrote Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina , generating some of the ideas of individual liberty under the protection of law Smith espoused. Smith argued if government could abstain from interfering with free commerce, maximum efficiency could be achieved, as could resolution of most problems among nations.

Barbieri says true, up to a point.

In her field of political science, there is something of a division in the academy between the scientific scholars, such as herself, and the qualitative thinkers. Her scientific pursuit of a theory in contemporary international relations includes exhaustive research of the world order since 1870, the time of the Franco-Prussian War. Barbieri's conclusions point to the strife as a direct result of close collaborations in foreign trade. Before 1870, for a earlier local example, SC was invaded by its former trading partners in the North.

John Temple (Lord Palmerston), as the British prime minister, sympathized with his American cousins and his country's raw cotton and cured leaf tobacco trading partners, but trade was not enough of an influence to help defend the South and its slave economy.

Trade, then, according to Barbieri, is not bad in full consideration, but it's not the purveyor of peace and loyalty most tend to believe.

Barbieri took her first degree in international development, cum laude, from Clark University in Worcester, MA. Her second, a master's in international development, is also from Clark. Her Ph.D. in political science is from Binghamton University, 1996. After positions as assistant professor at both University of North Texas and Vanderbilt University, she came to the USC as an associate professor in the fall of 2004. Among extensive non-degree training appointments and assignments, she attended the first summer workshop last July on "Teaching about Terrorism" at the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA.

Barbieri teaches in four fields of specialization: international relations, international political economy, conflict processes, and methodology.

Barbieri studies and teaches nations at trade and nations at war. Invariably, war follows trade. But, on the other hand, trade follows war. Simply put, trade does not prevent war.

Dr. Katherine Barbieri