The ideal, obviously, is not running a trade deficit — but a very large trade surplus isn’t automatically some perfect situation either. Countries like Germany, China, and Saudi Arabia are often held up as models here, but they’re arguably not the ones actually worth emulating.
Let’s start with a harder case. What does Germany do? It manufactures cars and sells them to the world. Why not just sell to Germans? Aren’t foreign citizens just as much “citizens of the world” as German ones?
My own answer to that: German citizens are already wealthy — pretty much everyone who wants a car already has one — so of course producers look elsewhere. Countries produce more than their own citizens need, and export the surplus.
But is it actually sensible to put your workforce to work producing things your own people don’t need more of? Wouldn’t it make more sense to train your population and direct production toward what your own citizens actually need?
My own counter-answer: once a factory is built, scaling that particular business is far easier than starting from scratch elsewhere. Building a million different tiny specialized factories would be enormously costly and impractical. It’s far more efficient to build one very large car factory, specialize deeply, sell cars, and import whatever else you don’t produce yourself. That’s essentially the entire logic behind globalization.
That’s a fairly convincing case on its own — I nearly bought it myself. Here’s where it actually breaks down: what happens if other countries suddenly stop wanting to buy what you export? Germany already runs a production surplus — that’s not really the core problem. The real risk is what happens if the rest of the world suddenly stops wanting to buy what you’re exporting. The right approach, in principle, is to prioritize producing for your own population first, then export only the genuine surplus above that. This works reasonably well for large countries with populations in the 80–90 million range, since that scale alone creates a domestic market big enough to matter. Smaller, more clear-cut cases illustrate the risk better.
Take oil-exporting Arab nations — nearly all their oil gets exported. It sounds almost wasteful when you put it that way: you have this incredible resource, why not use more of it yourselves and export only what’s left? Well, because that resource doesn’t run out just from using more of it internally, practically speaking. The real risk: what happens the day the world suddenly discovers cheaper, better energy, or solar power becomes dominant overnight? That entire export-dependent model collapses fast.
Then there’s the “China model” — keep labor cheap, keep workers from actually being able to afford what they produce, and export everything instead. This model mainly enriches factory owners. And if the West suddenly decided to stop buying from a particular sector, that entire manufacturing capacity would sit idle overnight. I specifically called it the “China model,” but Germany is arguably walking a similar path in its own way — despite genuinely strong labor unions, real wage growth for German workers has been fairly stagnant for a long stretch.
To be clear, I’m not arguing for a closed, self-isolated economy — that’s not the point at all. But moderation matters here. “Let our own people go without so we can export everything” isn’t a sound national policy either.
If you build heavy dependency — through what you import or export — on specific countries, that becomes a genuine vulnerability during war, disease outbreaks, or any major crisis. Turkey doesn’t currently run a large trade surplus (if anything, we could stand to get less poor before this becomes our biggest problem), but I wanted to write down, in advance, what to actually watch out for if that day ever comes — so that if it does, this is worth revisiting critically rather than celebrated uncritically.
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