Some believe in the "Thucydides Trap": the idea that, since a rising power will challenge the dominance of an established one, a China-U.S. trade war will be inevitable. Being the largest and the second largest trading nations globally, the U.S. and China are in fact each other's most important...

This paper examines the persistent deterioration in the international external position of the U.S. over the past 60 years. I develop a model without Ponzi schemes and arbitrage opportunities that accounts for both the secular rise and the cyclical variations in the U.S. international debt...