You phrase it as doing business. But to me, these people in these other places are coming to us. They are connected to us. The onus is not on the rest of the world to adapt ourselves to these pilgrims. That's not what interconnection implies. We cannot flatten ourselves to be a lowest common denominator to all.

The East India Company feels entirely inapplicable here & is a gross & toxic countersuggestion. That was a case of a nation expanding outward. This is the opposite. This is visitors from afar, visiting us across the internet, a system begat of a free & democratic people.

That all said I am interested in some kind of cooperation. But I have a hard time imagining what a usable basic framework would be. It has to start with realizing sovereignty across boundaries is weak, enormously weak, a supplicant. And working from that start.