Another year has arrived but some things remain unresolved. The evergreen Free Trade/Fair Trade dispute returned to my inbox on January 1 — this time, in the form of arguments from the Fair Trade side, objecting to a recently approved free-trade accord between the U.S. and Peru.

Supporters of the new agreement say it will open new opportunities for exports to Peru, brining new revenue to U.S. businesses.

The scale of the argument over an agreement with a small, remote country like Peru was a bit surprising to me, probably because I spent almost no time following the development of this new accord. It’s part of an ongoing effort to build a broader free-trade zone in the Western Hemisphere, and Free Trade proponents naturally see it as progress. The Fair Trade side sees it as a further compromise to the economic security of Americans. Some of them even fear a steady erosion of U.S. sovereignty.

In fact, I spent more time in recent weeks thinking about a few of the issues I’d written about late in 2007: the emergence of stateless economic interests, indifferent to governmental or regional restraints; and, simultaneously, the prospects of new opportunities developing for domestic manufacturers to compete with global rivals, because the depressed U.S. currency makes their goods/services more attractive.

Each of these prospects is speculative; each one serves as a nightmare scenario for the opponents in this dispute. But, each notion has its own credible logic, and it’s reasonable to believe that each scenario could become reality.

And if so, then the Free Trade/Fair Trade dispute becomes completely obsolete. Neither side will claim to have won, but both will have been proven correct.