Suppose, hypothetically, that all trade between nations just stopped. There are invisible walls that follow the borders of countries. Nobody gets in or out. How long could nations last on their own resources? And what would happen?
Some small countries (e.g., Singapore, the Gulf states) grow hardly any food, and don’t have much land that could be used for growing food, so they would suffer massive starvation before long.
You need to define what lasting means. Is it continuing on at a modern technological level? Is it subsistence level survival? Something in between like the early Industrial Revolution?
No matter how you define it, you’d have absolutely enormous socio-cultural turmoil to change over from today’s economy to a self-sufficient level of farming and manufacturing. No country as we now understand them would survive that.
Hmmm, good point. I should clairify: How many countires would suffer the least amount of turmoil as a result of the cutoff of international trade? Is that better?
The big, rich ones with both substantial agriculture and an industrial and service base. The United States, Canada, China, Australia for sure. Russia and the Ukraine, probably. Maybe Brazil. India would likely do okay.
I think the U.S. would do about the best although it would still suck. We have some or a lot of just about everything and we could ramp up production really fast if we had to. Food shouldn’t be much of a problem in the short-term. Oil might be a big problem but we have much of our own and we would have to ramp up domestic production very fast. I have no idea how long that would take or how long domestic oil could support us on its own.
Where we would really hurt is in manufactured things like clothes. We just don’t make that much domestically anymore. That wouldn’t cause anything to come to a screeching halt but sneaker prices would shoot right up.
Australia? I wasn’t aware much stuff grew there. The coasts are rocky, and is the soil any good? I’ve been there a couple fo times and I didn’t notice much in the way of traditional farms except skimpy looking beef cows and oranges.
New Zealand could probally do okay. Although they would probally slip into a 19th centuary lifestyle as far a technology is concerned. Private citizens would loose acess to petrol.
Canada’d be okay, once the economic upheavals settled. Massive agricultural base, mineral and energy supply with a small, educated not-especially-prone-to-violence population.
The United States is a long way from being self-sufficient in energy. It imports 60% of its oil and 20% of its natural gas. That would have to be resolved in a hurry, and even if you deem all existing domestic reserves to be economical, it takes a long time to build the infrastructure and get production ramped up.
You also have to consider the impact of the loss of foreign markets on the economy. The US exports roughly $930 billion a year in goods, and imports almost twice that (~$1.7 trillion); in other words, trade is worth about 20% of the US GDP. That is now removed from the economy, and has to be replaced by domestic resource and manufacturing capacity. The cost of basic goods is now tied to minimum wage of American workers.
Countries like Australia, Canada, Argentina and Russia are probably in good shape, with vast natural resources and [reasonably] modern infrastructures. You still have to reform the economies to cope with the loss of cheap foreign manufacturing.
Australia both imports and exports food, and would cope reasonably well without international trade in food. Yes, a lot of Australia is arid, and a lot of the soils are deficient, but there are enough areas where food is grown.
If you’ve been to Australia, you must have been to the duty-free shops at the airports, where you can buy a wide range of food, some being specifically targetted to the high-end Japanese market, including frozen beef, frozen seafood, and rice! Yes, Japanese tourists to Australia buy bags of rice to take back home with them (because the Japanese rice-farmers are highly protected, and rice is pretty expensive in Japan).
Another example is that Australia sells a lot of lamb and wheat to Middle Eastern countries. (And it would sell more lamb in the US, except that again the lamb market in the US is highly protected.)
Having lived in Oz for ten years, I can assure you quite a bit grows there in terms of food production. Check out the Australian Food Statistics - 2005 (PDF warning) for details. Exporting $AUS 24 billion in food products in 2005 is nothing to sneeze at. The CIA World FactBook reports Australia only has 6.15 percent of arable land (compared to the US with 18.01 percent), yet Aussies are damned good at food production. And I can tell you firsthand, the quality is on par, if not better than, American food products.
I’m sure our Aussie Dopers will be along shortly and offer you more than a few shrimp on the Barbie juicy bits.
While there are some juicy bits, if you’ve lived in Australia you should know that Australians don’t put “shrimp on the barbie”.
They call them “prawns”, not “shrimp”, and they are much more likely to cook sausages, lamb chops and beef steak on the barbecue.
You are correct. However, since Americans by and large only know Austrailia via the old Paul Hogan commercials, it’s easier to use language they would best understand.
I do miss those Sunday lamb roasts when Tom and Nicole used to stop by. 
You’re honestly arguing that Canada would be in better shape than the US? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada, I see:
GDP: $1.023 trillion(2004)
Exports $315.6 billion (2004)
Imports $256.1 billion (2004)
That makes Canada much more dependent on trade than the US. Of course, the amount Canada trades with the US and the US trades with Canada are exactly equal, but the US economy is much larger than Canada’s (although we’re in the same ballpark per capita), so Canadian trade with the US is a much larger fraction of Canadian GDP than US trade with Canada is of US GDP.
Ninety percent of the population of Canada is within 100 miles of the US border.
Canada does have lots of natural resources (it has as much land area as the whole US), but most of those are (you guessed it) exported. Natural resources don’t mean much unless you can use them, look at Russia or Africa which are stuffed with natural resources compared to, say, Japan or the Netherlands which have nothing. Canada doesn’t have many factories either, from the article Canada’s lagor force by sector: ariculture (3%), manufacturing (15%), construction (5%), services (74%), other (3%)(2000)
Anyway, Canada would likely do better than most countries, but probably it would do worse than the US.
However, NorthAmerica could do quite well as a solitary nation. We’d have Mexico for Oil, clothing & cheap labor, and Canada for raw materials & such- including oil. The USA could manage with imported oil just from NA.
Does Australia have any oil? Argentina? The USSR used to have lots but isn’t most of it now in the " 'stan" nations?
Yes, Australia has oil, but mostly lighter stuff, so it imports heavy crude. It exports a lot of natural gas, and a lot of coal, so lack of oil would only be a short-term problem. (Cars can be converted to run on natural gas).
I think a great deal of short-term economic chaos is expected, but there’s very little you can produce that we can’t. We buy from you because it’s cheaper, but given the oddball hypothetical of the OP, we could and would ramp up industrial production to replace items we currently import.
So? You’ll get to watch most of us using our plentiful oil instead of selling it to you.
Yes, but Cerowyn was arguing that the US would be screwed because we export and import so much, while Canada would be fine because you all have lots of natural resources. Why wouldn’t Canada be screwed because you all export and import so much, while the US would be fine because we have lots of natural resources?
Yes, the US isn’t self-sufficient in oil, but oil is only one commodity. No country would have an easy time adjusting, but lack of oil is the problem then France, Germany, Japan, Great Britain (unless they take the North Sea with them), Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and on and on are going to be in even worse shape than the US.
I don’t think plentiful oil reserves are the only thing worth considering, if that were true that Saudi Arabia would be best off. But I think we can all agree that unless they can export that oil it will be pretty much worthless, and Saudi Arabia would be reduced to bedouin tribes wandering the desert within a generation.
Yes, Canada has bigger oil reserves than the US. It’s also, well, colder. What is Canada going to do without avocados? Ever think about that? Anyway, my point wasn’t so much that Canada would be worse off than the US, but rather that the US and Canada would both be in the top tier of “best off” nations, and if outsourcing manufacturing overseas would punish the US it’s going to hurt Canada at least as much.
While the U.S. has more arable land than we do, they also have ten times as many people. Both countries, I expect, would do okay, but the long-term prospect for Canada is probably a little safer because our cities wouldn’t collapse quite as fast.
And they weren’t the only thing I considered. I mentioned several other factors.
We could grow ‘em in greenhouses if we had to. What are you gonna do without, um… William Shatner! Yeah, that’s right, we’re takin’ him back!