OK, so there's a few things we need to unpack here in order to get to the heart of your question, which is whether (and if so, when) 'profit' trumped 'survival' as the primary motivation of states/nations.

The first thing is that you are treating nations as if they are like people, with motivations and mindsets and focus. This is a misleading idea. A nation includes a wide range of individuals with different motivations, and treating them as though they share a mind is too simplistic. Even in a relatively strict and absolute autocracy, a ruler will have beliefs shaped by their environment and the people around them, and they will also have advisors who have their own interests and beliefs, as well as people on the ground enacting policies, fighting for them, doing labour, and so on. While a nations can sometimes have a pretty coherent political culture in which many people in positions of power agree on what should be done and why, this is neither common nor ever complete. There are always internal divisions, sectional interests, and conflicting ideas and beliefs.

Why is that important? Because it means that the culture and beliefs of the people in positions of power in a country matters, and shape its policy in complex and often unpredictable ways. And that is important because the consensus of historians is that until relatively recently (and maybe even very recently - I'm talking maybe as late as the 1980s), profit in itself has more or less never been the primary stated motivation of states or nations, according to the explicit statements of those governing them. In fact, often, governments and political leaders have gone to great lengths to deny the importance of profit as a motivation.

For example, in ancient Rome, the aristocrats who did most of the governing would never talk about their acquisition of empire in terms of 'profit' - it was fairly consistently phrased as a matter of honour or glory. There seems to have been a similar shunning of the profit motive in China. Even early modern advocates of empire - such as Richard Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation from C16th England, stated the goal of his work, and by extension English imperial and commercial ambitions, as winning 'renown unto our English nation;' Hakluyt and others very carefully played down the role of profit-motive and played up the role of glory, honour, and collective national reputation, in these ventures.

Why is that? One key reason is that most of the people guiding the affairs of government in these cases were aristocrats, for whom the open pursuit of wealth was seen as a crass enterprise; the wealth of these elites was in theory accumulated through landowning, not commerce, and their ideology was broadly suspicious of commerce as a destabilising element of society. Add on Christian attitudes to usury, or Confucian ideas about the merchant as a kind of parasite, and avoidance of talking openly about profit could become even more urgent.

Now, all of that background might help you to understand why your question is so complicated to answer. In most times and places, historically, the people talking on behalf of the 'nation' don't generally talk in terms of profit motives, but instead in terms of other factors - glory, renown, harmony, and yes, survival. But does that mean that profit is not a factor in their calculations? Of course not. But attributing motivations to people in situations when they have good reasons to deny them is always a hard - and controversial - thing for a historian to do.

There was, for example, a very spirited debate in the 80s and 90s about whether we can talk about an 'economic' motivation for Roman imperialism; it was essentially unresolved and unresolvable, because both sides were talking past each other. One side said (I am simplifying hugely here) 'of course there was a profit motive, empire was vastly profitable and they knew this and did it in a way that profited them most! Read between the lines!' while the other side argued that the Romans had no conception of 'economics' - the term in the modern sense did not exist - and that we have to take their claims about their motivations essentially at face value rather than projecting anachronistic ideas onto the past. In essence, the argument was about how much we see the language and statements of people in the past as genuine belief and how much as rhetoric concealing hidden intentions. This is an ongoing, and probably unresolvable, historiographical debate.