Separation would arrive through diverging standards, not severed trade

The argument

The second case for the possibility of decoupling concerns what the two economies are actually joined by, and proponents argue that the usual framing looks in the wrong place. Attention goes to flows of goods, which are visible and measurable. What makes those flows cheap, however, is a layer of shared technical infrastructure: common standards for components and interfaces, mutually recognised certification and testing, compatible accounting and legal documentation, shared payment and settlement arrangements, and the assumption that data generated in one place can be processed in the other. This layer, proponents argue, is where separation is already underway, and it does not require anyone to block trade. Divergent technical standards mean a product must be engineered twice. Separate certification means testing twice. Incompatible data regimes mean a company must duplicate its systems and may not move information between its own divisions. Separate payment and clearing arrangements mean transactions route through different institutions under different rules. None of this is a prohibition, and each increment is modest. The cumulative effect is that interoperating becomes continuously more expensive until, for a growing range of activities, serving both markets from one base stops making sense and firms organise around one or the other. Proponents regard this as the decisive answer to the claim that decoupling is impossible. The objection usually imagines a rupture, which would indeed be enormously costly and is correspondingly unlikely. Divergence does not require a rupture, a decision or an announcement. It requires only that each side continue setting rules for its own market without regard to compatibility with the other, which is the ordinary behaviour of governments. On this account the two economies could separate not because anyone cut the links but because the links were allowed to stop fitting together.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that duplication is a cost firms absorb rather than a barrier that excludes them, and that multinationals already maintain divergent compliance regimes across many jurisdictions without abandoning any of them. The argument may describe friction rather than separation. They add that standards divergence has limits set by the firms themselves, since the companies with most to lose are also the ones that write and lobby over technical standards, and they have strong reasons to preserve interoperability. A process requiring no decision is also a process nobody is steering toward completion.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Duplicated compliance is a cost firms absorb rather than a barrier that excludes them, and multinationals already maintain divergent regimes across many jurisdictions without abandoning any market. [Rejecting P4] Divergence is not simply the ordinary behaviour of governments, since the firms with most to lose are also the ones that write and lobby over technical standards and have strong reasons to preserve interoperability. [Rejecting C] A process requiring no decision is also a process nobody is steering toward completion, so accumulated friction may describe a more expensive relationship rather than a separated one.