Even the gold & silver thing is a different argument: that's essentially saying a country should have a net trade surplus with the rest of the world in aggregat

Even the gold & silver thing is a different argument: that's essentially saying a country should have a net trade surplus with the rest of the world in aggregate. You can have that while still running deficits with some/many individual nations. The personal-finance analogy would be that it's fine for me to have a "trade deficit" with my grocery store, just as long as I'm not spending more dollars than I have coming in, overall.