Another utopian project bites the dust. It turns out, economics isn’t everything. Global prosperity–based on free trade, interdependency, and globalism–does NOT, as expected, give us world peace.
From Robert Samuelson, Global prosperity is no panacea The post-euphoric world – The Washington Post:
What we are witnessing in the spreading turmoil around the world — in Iraq, in Ukraine, in Gaza — is the silent rejection of a central tenet of U.S. post-World War II foreign policy: that global prosperity would foster peace and stability. Countries would rather trade than fight. Promoting economic growth would suppress the divisive forces of nationalism, ideology, religion and culture. So we thought. . . .
There was also a lot of sloppy support for “the McDonald’s theory of international relations,” which held — as my perceptive colleague Anne Applebaum noted in a recent column — that two countries with McDonald’s would never fight, because both were integrated into the world economy and wouldn’t jeopardize the benefits. As Russia with more than 400 McDonald’s and Ukraine with more than 70 face off, writes Applebaum, “we can finally declare the McPeace theory officially null and void.”
The leaders of large expanses of humanity never bought into the idea that achieving prosperity was life’s central purpose or what fundamentally defined them. They had other competing beliefs, traditions and ambitions that qualified and limited the power of economic growth. This applies to Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the Middle East and — including the influence of nationalism — China and much of Asia.
[Keep reading. . .]
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