Angry Planet - UNLOCKED: The Failure of McDonald's Peace Theory

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

There’s a maxim that says “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” This so-called Golden Arches theory enjoyed a brief moment of prominence in the 1990s, got shaky after 9/11, and has been out-right assaulted by pundits and political theorists in the past ten years. It died it’s final death in October when McDonald’s Azerbaijan took public sides in the fight between Armenia and Azerbaijan.Here to walk us through the Golden Arches Theory and what the hell was wrong with all of us in the 1990s is Paul Musgrave. Musgrave is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His recent article in Foreign Policy about this topic is titled “The Beautiful, Dumb Dream of McDonald’s Peace Theory.”Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello there, Anger Planet listeners. This is Matthew Galt. We are taking a little bit of a break for the Memorial Day weekend here at Angry Planet. So to that end, we have unlocked one of our premium episodes that you would normally get on Substack. If you go to angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com, you can sign up and hear these and other episodes for just $9 a month. Again, that's at angryplanet.substack.com. This one is about the stupid failure of McDonald's peace theory. A lot of things happen on the way to Mikhail Gorvachov doing a Pizza Hut commercial, but the biggest thing is that he picks a fight with Boris Yelton, which was dumb. He runs for president in 1996, gets one, two percent of the vote. Gorbachev is cut off. Yeltsin says,

no more pension for you. And so Gorbatov has to find a way to fund himself. And at the same time, a really smart team of advertisers are working with Pizza Hut at a time when Pizza Hut is just like hegemonic in the fast food space. One day, all of the facts

in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost within community, And when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Gult. And I'm Jason Fields. There's a maxim that says, no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other.

This so-called Golddarch's theory enjoyed a brief moment of prominent. in the 1990s got shaky after 9-11 and has been outright assaulted by pundits and political theorists in the past 10 years. It died its final death in October when McDonald's Azerbaijan took public sides in the fight between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Here to walk us through this Gold Darchist theory and what the hell was wrong with all of us in the 1990s is Paul Musgrave. Musgrave is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His recent article in foreign policy about this topic is titled The Beautiful dumb dream of McDonald's peace theory. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me

on the show. All right. So to understand this theory, I think, and like where it comes from in the milieu in which it was created, I think we have to first understand Thomas Friedman. So can you explain to us what is Thomas Friedman? Yeah, this is a really great way to start this off. So Tom Friedman is someone I think of actually as existing in two parallel worlds. And I'm going to give Tom Friedman full credit because, you know, on Earth One, we have Tom Friedman who was a well-respected Middle East correspondent for the New York Times. He did a lot of great journalism. He was on the ground in the 1980s. He continues to have really deep connections in the region with the Saudi royal family and others. He spends a lot of

time getting the facts straight, he really cares about the issue. His understanding might be a little bit not quite as subtle as you might want, might be a little bit superficial. But, you know, Tom Friedman I is just a good journalist who found his beat and his beat was Middle Eastern elite politics, elite diplomacy, elite foreign policy. Then there's Tom Friedman 2. And Tom Friedman of Earth 2 has made a lot more money. Tom Friedman of Earth 2 is a pundit on everything. He is a guy who is a great sloganeer. He comes up with ideas like the world is flat or the Golden Arch's Theory of Peace. And he goes off and he tries to take these very simple sizzling hot takes

and just turn them into columns and books and especially into incredibly lucrative lectures on the lecture circuit. So when we're talking about Tom Friedman today, we are not talking about. talking about Tom Friedman 1. We're talking about Tom Friedman 2, who is the guy who has sold millions of copies of books and made millions of dollars, just serving up these really pop international relations accounts of the world. Do you think it would be fair to say that the Golden Archie's theory is the moment that Thomas Friedman 1 became Thomas Friedman 2? You know, it might actually be. The intellectual biography of Tom Friedman is something that I'm just a little bit Hazion, because all this was coming out technically, I think, when I was still in middle school.

So, you know, I was just beginning to be aware of the fact that there was such a thing as a New York Times or that Tom Friedman was a calmness for the New York Times. But yet, somewhere around the mid-1990s, somewhere around the time that people were really into gateway computers and the idea of going online using your AOL-CD-ROM, this was the moment that Tom Friedman really broke through. and he became kind of the court chronicler of the Clinton era and explaining globalization, explaining all these massive shifts in the optimistic phase, which only lasted about five or six years of the post-Cold War era,

that was Tom Friedman's heyday. And certainly if the Golden Arch's column, which was in 1996, I think, wasn't the exact moment that Tom Friedman II broke through, it was right during that period that phase shift happened. and Tom Friedman, one, kind of shuffled off and, you know, filed columns every once in a while. And instead, we got these hot takes from, you know, this really a sizzling hot New York Times columnist. All right. Can we drill down on the Golden Arch's theory then? Like, what exactly is it? What else was he saying in that article?

You know, what was going on right then, geopolitically, that made him come to this conclusion? So let's start with the context just a little bit. So I mentioned that this is the optimistic phase of the post-Cold War era. The first phase of the post-Cold War era was really shockingly pessimistic. And after the Soviet Union crumbled, and even when the Berlin Wall came down a couple of years before that, Americans were really anxious about what the post-Cold War was going to look like. And this is when Sam Huntington wrote and published The Clash of Civilizations, and you had people thinking that maybe Japan or Germany or a team,

up between Japan and Germany was going to take over the world, that period actually lasted about five years. If you go back and you look at the bestsellers, Americans, especially elite class Americans, were scared out of their wits about what they were going to do in this new post-Cold War period. Tom Friedman comes into this right at an inflection point where the American economy has recovered, when Bill Clinton has finally figured out how to do this presidenting stuff, when China is really going all in on its turn toward what looks like capitalism. Boris Yeltsin is winning re-election. This is a period where it looks like capitalism is triumphant,

and Japan, Germany, everybody else is going to go along with American leadership. And so the big question right then is, how do we make the international system work for this mix of liberal democracy and capitalism? And Friedman's argument is basically all good things go together. And he's trying to explain why it is that this world has turned out so much more positively than anybody expected it would. And his answer is economic integration. And economic integration has brought together all the leading powers in the world. They can't afford to go to war with each other anymore. And so therefore, we don't have to worry about all that stuff that we were worried about just a couple of years ago. And so the Golden Arch's theory is Friedman's way of distilling this for a broad audience. And his specific argument is, as you said, no two countries that have a McDonald's have ever gone to war with each other since they got a McDonald's.

And he makes this argument in that 96 column. And then he makes it again in the 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, where it gets a whole chapter. And it is a big part of his exploration of how globalization, is changing the world. And there's just one problem with this. Even on its own terms, it is not true. It is just not an accurate description of the world,

much less a theory to explain what the world would end up becoming. Speaking as the old person here, about to turn 50, there was a time when McDonald's did mean something. I mean, Gorbachev tore down this wall and allowed a McDonald's into Moscow for the first time and people lined up to get those hamburgers, those terrible hamburgers. They lined up for hours and hours and miles and miles. And I do think that people saw that as an optimistic sign. Yeah, I want to stress for our younger listeners, how surreal some of the 90s now seems in retrospect. You can see pictures of what Jason's

talking about. There's these beautiful photographs of the first McDonald's opening in Russia just swamped, just looks like it in and out burger opening. And also to your point, Paul, and this is something you talked about in your article that I thought was really interesting. There's also this period in the early 90s where, early to mid 90s where pop culture is looking for the new villain that America is going to stand in opposition to. So you get a lot of lot of really weird. It happens in sitcoms. It happens in movies.

It happens in Tom Clancy books. It's usually either Japan or an economic powerhouse of Japan or like Nazis taking Germany back over, right? Is that some of all fears is the Tom Clancy book where the Nazis nuke portions of America? So no. Actually, there it's a weird, international terrorist group of like everybody. Palestinians, Argentines, Nazis, they really slimmed it down

for the movie. But some of all fears, like it's East Germans and they were in the intelligence services, but their ideology, like it's just kind of revenge. Literally they want to go for revenge. But as people were trying to make sense of this, right, it all gets slimmed down. And of course, a little bit later on, Tom Clancy

has another book, Debt of Honor, where the Japanese go to war with the United States. a sneak attack, and then at the end, a 747 is flown into the Capitol building. You've got this moment exactly right between the most of you. And I think actually one thing that really struck me as I was looking at this era, now 25 years later, is exactly that McDonald's used to mean something a lot bigger in this discourse. French farmers, when they were protesting the Americanization of French culture, would go and burn down McDonald's.

It wasn't just that McDonald's was controversial. in the Soviet Union or in the former Soviet Union, McDonald's was controversial everywhere. And this was, you know, like phase two of McDonald's international expansion because it had been in Britain, it had been in Western Europe, but now it was breaking into really new markets. And this really seemed to herald a brand new era. And I don't want to say that this was not a new era. The error for me is that people assumed that this was just going to go on and on and on forever. and the phrase, the end of history, gets really mistreated a lot.

It's not quite what everybody thinks it meant. But definitely there was a sense that people thought we had gotten to the end of history. There's no more debates. There's no more progress to be made because, you know, now you can go to Red Square and get a McDonald's. And that was just supposed to be something tremendously significant. And it turned out to be significant, but not in that enduring way that Tom Freeman and other folks thought at the time. This is just a tangent, but I want to go down this road because you mentioned it, and I think it's important. People love to shit on Francis Fukuyama and the end of history, right?

But like, as you said, that's often kind of maligned and taken out of context. Can you kind of drill down into that real quick for us? Yeah, real fast. So, you know, Francis Fukuyama is a tremendously sophisticated political thinker and political theorist. And, you know, much like any great band of the 70s or 80s, he's actually. still out there doing new stuff, which is ardent fans like a lot better than the old hits, but he's never going to have a hit like his 1989 article, which became a book, on the end of history. And everybody read the title. And maybe 1% of people who read the title actually read the

argument, because the argument is so complicated, I don't see how you get your head around it. honestly, without checking, I can't tell you if it's all about Kantian or Hegelian philosophy. I think it's Hegel, and it's all about a dialectical process by which different forms of government emerge and contest with each other. And the end of history is the idea that you get to a point where liberal democracy has simply shown that it is the most enduring form of government that you can have. and people hung all sorts of implications on this. And Fukuyama himself was a little bit depressed at this prospect because for him the idea of thinking about different ways of organizing politics,

he's a political theorist. This is what he does when he wakes up in the morning. And he was actually kind of glum about this prospect, but it did seem to capture this era. And it's such a major shift in how people were thinking because just two or three years before Fukuyama wrote that, the big bestseller in the United States was Paul Kennedy's decline and followed the great powers. And everybody thought, oh, well, history is going to end, but it's going to end with, you know,

the U.S. just slowly sinking beneath the waves. If you're taking like one big subtext from the article, which, you know, I'm glad to surface here, it's people are super faddish about the things that they think drive world politics. And maybe we need to step back a little bit and like stop identifying ourselves with these really, you know, if Tom Friedman is basically an elite influencer, right, we need to stop identifying with these intellectual fats. Yeah, I think that's the, one of the reasons that the Golden Arch's theory fascinates me is that it kind of fits into this like superstructure of my own thinking, where people love to have very simple solutions and maxims that allow them to stop thinking about

complex problems, right? And I think that that's part of what Thomas Friedman does. Can you tell me like how quickly the Golden Archers theory fell apart? When was the, when did countries with McDonald's start to attack each other? Yeah, I'm going to be as precise as I can be, drawing on my recollection. My recollection is that Golden Arch's theory, so the column is 96, the Lexus and the Olive Tree is published in something like March 1999. And in April 1999, the U.S. and NATO are at war with Serbia, the form. former Yugoslavia. And this is significant because Belgrade had had a McDonald's since 1988. They actually, I think they got theirs before Red Square, but they definitely got

theirs while Yugoslavia was still a communist country. And there's actually a small subset of international relations nerds and other folks like me who have been to Belgrade. And I won't say that the only reason I went was to go to the McDonald's, but I definitely made sure that we went to that McDonald's. And I've tried to find the photograph, but this was pre-Iphone, pre-everything else. And so this was disproven so quickly. And Friedman has a second edition of the book, and I go through this in the article, he says, like, this wasn't really a war, this wasn't this, this wasn't that. And, you know, at this point in 2020, we are now four or five wars into things that kind of disprove this. And, you know, the basic idea is that Friedman sometimes wants to

have this both ways. One is that like, well, for this very small reason, this wasn't really a disproval of my theory, or he wants to say that this is actually something that stands in for a broader argument. At this point, either way, it's been disproven. But the initial, like the real shock to this thesis, the first real test was maybe six weeks after that book was published. And people just fell on that. That was raw meat. Even in pre-internet, pre-social media times, people just fell all over that. Yeah, I mean, I feel a little bad because we're, Actually, I don't. He's fine. But people, as much as people enjoy reading Thomas Friedman, people also enjoy attacking Thomas Friedman. He's a very popular public intellectual to go after, I think. But I think it's, I think he brings it on himself to a certain extent, right? Because he is this Earth 2 version of Thomas Friedman. But I think the ultimate, like, death to this Golden Arch's theory came in October, right? Can you tell us about what happened, on McDonald's Azerbaijani's Instagram?

Yeah. So obviously I cannot read Azeri, but news reports say that the local franchisee for the McDonald's in Azerbaijan started putting out really inflammatory, really nationalist messages, kind of slamming Armenia and basically saying, you know, Azerbaijan will never die. Nagorno-Karabakh is ours. We will retake this. And this was all in the, you know, during the course of.

I don't know that we have a name for it yet, the second Nagorno-Karabakh War, whatever version of the Caucasus War that we're on now, between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which just wrapped up a couple of days ago, and we'll see if this is actually just a truce or if it's really done. And this got slapped down very quickly by McDonald's Global because McDonald's does not want to be involved in wars, right? Like their entire business model is staying out of this.

And so their local franchisees are not supposed to be doing this stuff. But all of a sudden, McDonald's turned into this great symbol of, you know, Azeri nationalism, which is not what it's supposed to be. And, you know, at this point, you know, the Golden Arch's theory is dead, both of severe trauma and also a death by a thousand cuts. And I also felt a little bit bad about going after Friedman this hard. But then I thought about like, well, you know, he sold millions of copies. of books, I am pretty sure that he can comfort himself with the royalties. And I try to be very

fair to him and laying out his side of the argument. But, you know, I think that the tragedy of Tom Friedman is that if he were 10% more cautious, if you were 10% less slick, he would be 100% better as a public intellectual because he wouldn't dumb things down to the level that it's like he's self-strawmanning almost. And that's just really unfortunate. Is it possible that he's actually the victim of the fact that each McDonald's is independently owned and operated? I mean, this is one franchise that's taken aside in a war. You know, maybe Tom is still right. But so we got around that by looking at where both of these countries, Armenian and Azerbaijan, fit into globalization more generally, because Friedman's point

has always been that globalization itself is just manifested in this goal. and Arches theory, and what's really doing the work is economic integration. And the two countries, Armenian-Azerbaijan, are both really plugged into the rest of the world. And, you know, one thing that international relations scholars really think about is what causes war. And I think that there is broad agreement, actually, that greater economic integration, all else being equal, means that there's a lower probability of war, although the specific arguments for why that's the case, very, very detailed and nuanced.

But the thing is that not all things are equal. And so the idea that, you know, well, maybe it's because McDonald's has different franchises or maybe the company doesn't have as tight control, that shouldn't matter for Friedman's theory because it should be the idea that by going to war in the first place, you're jeopardizing your economic relationship, you're jeopardizing your membership in an economic system that's bringing you all the benefits,

including McDonald's, of being integrated with the rest of the world. And it turns out that actually repeatedly, that is just not enough to keep countries anchored into that system. And really, the thing that is more concerning for Friedman's general account is, of course, Russia, which was supposed to be the poster child for the turn toward liberal democracy and capitalism in the 1990s, and over the last 25 years has gradually and then quickly gone back to a very different style of politics. And so, you know, the great power politics underlying this are really what's driving the larger setting of the frame for this argument.

Basically, there was a theory, and it wasn't just Tom Friedman's, that you couldn't have an economic capitalist system. without having freedom, that you had to have political freedom along with it, that the two were just somehow interlinked. And now I have no idea why we ever thought that. Can you sort of explain what the idea was? Yeah, this is part of the all-good things go-together optimism of that late 1990s, and you've captured it exactly right.

And this was most prominent in the way that people talked about China. And this has its roots in something called modernization theory, which was a set of theories that were cooked up in the West in the 1950s and 1960s as kind of an answer to the Soviet or communist diagnosis of where history was going. And it was supposed to say that basically, yeah, you modernize, you industrialize, you get your people richer, a middle class develops. They're now rich enough that they demand greater political participation, and the only way to get them greater political participation is through democracy. And this is kind of a 30-second summary of libraries of disputes, but I think that this is kind of the nickel version that people had in their head. And so folks like Milton Friedman would really make this argument in terms of places like China. And there was even a specific number that would be cited, which is that once you hit, I think it was $10,000 per capita GDP, your country is going to go Democratic because every country that's ever hit that level, they go Democratic.

It's just a matter of time. And I'm pretty sure that China is past this now, and all the indications are, of course, that it's going the other way. But this reasoning made a lot of sense in 1997, 1998, when we were having those annual debates over whether the U.S. would have most favored nation or normal trading relation with China. And the argument was always, yeah, they're terrible on human rights.

They were bad in Tiananmen Square. They're bad in Tibet. But this is the long game. And if we trade with them, that that will mean that they'll get rich, we'll get a Chinese middle class, and that means we'll get Chinese democracy. And as it turns out, of course, we got the Guns and Roses album way before we actually got the real Chinese democracy. So why did we think that?

It was because it was a political doctrine that appealed to decision makers throughout the rich world. They didn't have to make any sacrifices. They could have their cake and say that there would be cake tomorrow for everybody to eat, too. and folks like Friedman played a really influential role in selling this message to everybody else. And back when the Dow was trending toward like, I don't know, 20,000, whatever the level was in the late 90s, this was a really attractive message. And it seemed to track with a lot of what people saw on the ground in places like Moscow and Beijing. It's lazy material analysis for capitalists.

So the move in Russia, I think, towards opening up in capitalism, I think, is best. personified in the personage of Gorbachev, right? And I think specifically of the Pizza Hut moment. Can you explain this to the audience? Yes, so Mikhail Gorbachev and his Pizza Hut commercial. So Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, who was a young, energetic reformer. It says something that he is actually not all that much older now than, say, Diane Feinstein. So in the 1980s, he was a really young guy, really vigorous.

And his whole project was to modernize and rehabilitate Soviet communism, get the economy working again, root out corruption in the party, make sure that there was greater space for dissidents to express their opinions. And it totally failed, completely failed, because in the end, reactionary elements, and there's no other way to describe them in the military and the KGB, try to coup. to push out Gorbachev, that failed, and reformers like Boris Yeltsin use that as an opportunity to dismantle the USSR from within. So Gorbachev becomes a symbol in the West of everything that is good about Soviet communism, of this wave of reform, and he becomes a hero in the West. Ted Turner loves this guy and takes him to the United States. He even gets a plane ride. He does a lecture tour of the United States. And Steve Forbes takes him on his plane, which is named something like the capitalist tool. It is some like, or made the capitalist pig. And Forbes takes Mikhail

Gorbachev around the U.S. and like everybody in the U.S. loves Gorbachev, which is hilarious because everybody in Russia hates Gorbachev, hates him, loaths him. The Soviet, the Russian economy contracts by like 30, 40 percent in 1992, 1993. People are hungry. Some of them are star, nothing works, nobody's getting paid. And so Gorbachev in the West acquires this reputation. And a lot of things happen on the way to Mikhail Gorbachev doing a Pizza Hut commercial. But the biggest thing is that he picks a fight with Boris Yeltsin, which was dumb. He runs for president in 1996, gets one, two percent of the vote. Gorbachev is cut off. Yeltsin says, no more pension for you. And so Gorbatov has to find a way to fund himself. And at the same time,

time a really smart team of advertisers are working with Pizza Hut at a time when Pizza Hut is just like hegemonic in the fast food space, they are hiring Donald Trump, they're working with really A-less celebrities, and they go off and they find Gorbachev and they talk to his people and they say, will you do an ad for us? And reading between the lines, this was supposed to be a Super Bowl ad, they film it in secret, they shut down Red Square for a day or two, like all the Red Square. They shut it down just to film this commercial. And then as they're on the plane coming back, Gorbachev rings up the New York Times and said, hey, I just did this commercial.

Takes control of the story and forces Pizza Hut to burn the commercial on the rose parade instead of the Super Bowl. But the commercial lives in infamy forever. It is on YouTube. It has millions of views. It's always funny when you look this up because there's only two reactions. One is people who are new to all this just saying, like, I can't believe Gorbachev did this. And then you get a lot of people with Hammer and Sickle and their username saying,

I can't believe Gorbachev did this. He is a traitor. He should be extinguished. But that is Mikhail Gorbachev. And that Pizza Hut commercial, I believe, is actually cited in a Tom Friedman book. I'm not sure if it is Lexus in the Olive Tree or if the world is flat as an example of American capitalism eventually taking over everything. A real landmark in post-Cold War politics. Cota to that story, he would go on to do a Louis Vuitton print ad run, too.

That is correct. Yes. I think it's an Annie Leibowitz, too. It's a very nice photograph. Okay, so globalization did change conflict, though, right? We kind of had a failure of imagination, I think, about how it would change conflict, but it did change war. You know, how do you see that it did? Yeah, no, I think this is absolutely right. It's a huge question, right? I think the first thing, and I will actually give credit to Friedman here because he did call this one, was the rise of terrorism and what he called super empowered individuals. And my recollection is that he specifically names Osama bin Laden before 9-11. As an example of somebody who was empowered by these major shifts in globalization and all of the opportunities it afforded people to become political entrepreneurs.

And so one big shift was globalization. If you just think about how it is how normal to us to think about groups like ISIS doing their recruitment online, about having recruitment networks that stretch deep into the West into Australia, you know, people who are running things in San Bernardino, that just seems second nature. That would have been almost unbelievable during the 1980s, in the 1970s. You just couldn't have an organization operating on that scale.

So one way globalization changed things was it actually changed conflict by changing who could participate. Another way that I think that it has shaped how conflict worked, not necessarily armed combat yet, is the range of ways in which interdependence turned out to have much more complicated implications than anybody thought in the 1990s. Henry Farrell and Abe Newman, you know, Henry is at Johns Hopkins. Abe is at Georgetown University, came up with this great phrase a year or two ago called weaponized interdependence. And the idea of weaponized interdependence is, if you look at relations between the U.S. and China, over the last 10 years, China has really figured out a way to use the fact that its economy is so integrated with the United States to its advantage. And when you think about

the debates that we've had over TikTok, the fact that Scythius, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States required a Chinese firm to give up its acquisition of Grindr, the gay dating app, because of concerns over what that could mean for U.S. intelligence personnel. And then you think about Huawei and 5G and everything that goes on. It's actually not clear that the United States is the country that is advantaged by interdependence with China because so much of our economy is entangled with theirs. And the Chinese Communist Party has so far evolved a better strategy about how to exploit those dependencies in a way to advance their agenda, advance their interests. There's a dumb version of this critique, which I think that the Trump

administration has kind of stumbled on, but I think that there's also a very sophisticated way, which is to say that globalization has made things much more complicated. And the old idea that all of these interdependencies would make war and conflict impossible really turns out to not quite understand that it just made great power competition way more, way more, imprecated with much more complex questions. And then I will say the other thing is, depending on the version of the capitalist piece that you take seriously, you could also make an argument that it is not actual trade between countries, but expectations of trade in the future that are most important. And so as we're going through a period,

where the United States and China are decoupling, where they're trying to break their economies apart, it could be that even if globalization didn't do all that much to reduce the possibility of conflict, that sundering globalization, that taking it apart is going to do a lot to actually make conflict more likely by making these countries, these societies, less able to find areas of cooperation. You know, we'll see what happens. I'm actually being agnostic on this right now because I haven't had to really think through all of this. But certainly I think that globalization did not turn out to be the Pan American panacea that people assumed it would be back in the 1990s. Two points just to bring up.

One is an example of what you're talking about. The interdependence that's actually a problem. Personal protective equipment made in China. China. And the worldwide shortage, it almost seems inevitable in that is China going to use the equipment first before they sell it to the United States? Or are they going to prioritize arrival over themselves? And I think the answer to that is fairly obvious. And the other point that's just kind of interesting to note is historically, this isn't a this isn't a one-off, this isn't the first time. You know, the United States was actually very involved in corporations in Nazi Germany. And just, it's not to speak actually particularly against those companies in any way. I mean, they were there before the Nazis.

But you actually have two versions of the drug company Merck was broken up, there's a whole bunch of different companies that actually have, German versions and American versions, and it dates back 80 years. I mean, are we looking towards something similar as we go forward, do you think? Or, I mean, you said you were agnostic to it, but I mean, I just wondered if you had any thoughts. So I think that these are exactly the kinds of parallels that we should be thinking about. And, you know, I was talking to folks the other day about China and the rise of China and its influence on pop culture. And as we know in a lot of movies and a lot of different ways,

the Chinese market and the role of the Communist Party of China in actually censoring and rewriting movie scripts has changed movies. Like, even in just trivial ways, I think it's Transformers 3, but it might be Transformers 4. I'm not that big of a stickler on those movies. But in one of them, they go to Hong Kong, and there is this really gratuitous scene where a People's Liberation Army official says, the Communist Party will always defend Hong Kong, in this case from Decepticons. But of course, the message is a lot broader.

And apparently we saw the same sorts of dynamics play out with Warner Brothers in the 1930s when they wanted to sell into Germany because the German market was so big that the Nazi party could have influence over what was filmed in the United States. So we have seen exactly these kinds of dynamics before. And my recollection, I was trying to check this really fast while you were we're talking. But my very strong recollection is that this is also why we have Fanta, because the Coca-Cola Corporation of Germany was cut off from the home market. They ran out of ingredients, and then during the war, they had to sell something that was soda-like and so, you know,

Fanta, right? Like one of the less objectionable legacies of Nazism, I suppose. So I do think that we're going to see a lot of different ways that this will play out. And one thing that I think that we should remember is that this is not hypothetical. We thought of the internet as something that would bridge different countries and really efface national differences. But instead, what we have is essentially now a U.S. and Western internet. And then there is a Chinese internet behind the Great Firewall. You know, there's a foreign ministry state spokesman, Zhao Li Jian, who is really active on Twitter. He's a really big troll for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He's an actual spokesman on Twitter. And the irony is that Twitter, like Facebook, like Google, does not exist in China. So we've already seen countries begin to break away and have different large parts of their economy, you know, break out because of great power concerns and because of power political concerns. And so I think that integration is just not going to be quite as all-encompassing a force as folks thought it would be. and, you know, the height of globalization in its first wave was 1913. And back then there was a guy named Norman Angel who was an English economist who wrote a book called The Great Illusion, which said that war would be so costly that the great powers would be crazy to ever go to war with each other.

And he wrote this in 1912. It was a bestseller, you know, kind of disappointing there at the end. Do you think that part of the problem here is, and I don't think that only America and capitalism does this, but that economic and political systems tend to sell themselves as morally good. And if you are morally good, then therefore it follows that you have to triumph in the end. Sorry, if you're good, you have to triumph in the end. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's like a Reaganist, Reaganish idea, right? Like, you are, if you are, capitalism is the morally correct economic system, right? And so because it is the morally

correct economic system, it has to succeed. It's like prima facie that it will succeed. I think that you're really on to something there. And there are different ways that people tell this story. And one way is back in the 18th century, you know, the original version of the capitalist peace hypothesis was that engaging in trade and commerce softened your manners. It made you a lot more likely to want to cooperate because that was the fundamental of all business. There's some irony there because that might have been the case among European countries, but this is also when the British East India company is conquering India. So apparently you could have trade and also not nice manners. But this was an argument about how capitalism, about how

one system would lead it to triumph over the others. There are other ways that you could talk about this. And one fashion that was really prominent during the Cold War was simply that capitalism was more efficient at producing things than communism. And so in the long term, it would just out-compete the communist system. But your point that everybody has a story like this is, I think, really well taken because I think that everybody does have a story like this. There's no way that you can get people to engage in a large social project without promising them that in the end it's not going to be futile.

And every project that we saw in the 20th century, that tried to contend for global superiority, imperialism, capitalism, capitalism, fascism, communism, all came prepackaged with a story about why its triumph was inevitable. And some of these had a problem, actually, which is that if you really believe, for instance, Marxist historiography, there was no need for you to do anything. And so eventually you saw these ideologies evolve defenses to say, like, look, the triumph is inevitable, but you still got to do something. You still got to do something right now to bring it about.

But every one of these ideologies came with some sort of justification for why it would eventually triumph. And I think that you just have to have that. I think that it is a natural response to the questions that you're going to get asked about, why should I make whatever sacrifices your ideological commitment requires me? Because they all require sacrifice. And the answer eventually is going to have to be because this is the right way to do. do things. And this is something that would have been familiar to defenders of absolute monarchy. It's something that would have been familiar to defenders of, you know, like actual Islamic

civilizations, actual Islamic countries that justified their basis. You know, go back and talk to the folks who were, you know, the Ming emperors. And they would say, well, our right to rule is based on the fact that we are upright and this is how we do things. So everybody has got that. Maybe one of these is right? I don't know. But it is definitely something that every society eventually has to have an answer for why their way of doing things has some sort of justification for prevailing in any long-term conflict. Yeah, I've got a friend that was once an ardent Calvinist and is now an ardent Marxist, and I think that's pretty funny. All right, I've just got a few more questions here. Something else that really struck me in the piece, and this is kind of a bit of a tangent,

but I thought it was really interesting and I wanted to ask you about it, was that this idea, and we've talked about it a little bit, this idea that American foreign policy needs an adversary or else it collapses. Can you talk about that a little more? Yeah. So American foreign policy, as we've known it since 1945, has never been purely self-justifying. And I'm going to sidestep a really big debate in social science about whether every identity requires some capital O other in order to exist. But just as a normal way of thinking about things, since 1945, the fundamental premise of American policymakers has been that America needs to be anchored

in the world. I think this is why it was so disorienting to people in 1989 to 1992 when the Cold War disappeared and then the Soviet Union disappeared in that order about what America was going to do. And There were all sorts of folks who were really afraid that the United States would become isolationist. John Meersheimer, who's a famous realist at the University of Chicago, said, well, now we're just going to go on to multipolarity, and you're going to miss the Cold War, because now things are going to get really brutal and really gruesome. Robert Kaplan wrote a book called The Coming Anarchy in which he basically predicted that Africa and the third world would collapse, because now the super powers wouldn't be there to stabilize them.

And, of course, like the opposite happens, right? It turns out that the superpowers were destabilizing the third world. And that getting rid of them meant that the third world, Africa, South Asia, and so forth, became a much calmer place. But for Americans trying to make sense of the world, if you have gone through, by the early 1990s, we were talking about now 50 years of the presumption that the United States is,

leading a cause against some adversary. First Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan as like a distant second, and then the Soviet Union, communist China as a distant second. The idea that America didn't have any enemies meant that there was suddenly no clear or easy story to tell. And I think that this was something that was discomforting to people because they assumed that, well, if we've reached the last level, if we're at the end of history, if we've defeated the final boss, why are we going to keep playing the game? And I think that when 9-11 happened and supplied us with a very ready-made set of narratives that people could latch onto, and you guys will remember this, right? From September 10th to September 12th, you cannot convey to undergraduates

how fast the snapback was and how quick everybody was to hitch on to Cold War or Second World, World War imagery. And almost, like, for all the sense of fear, people felt there was also a secret sense of relief, because now we knew who we were going after. And I think that this carried through. And so, you know, I think that we're entering into a world that is actually going to be as complicated as folks thought that the 1990s were going to be. Certainly, I don't see the United States and Europe as being as closely allied as they were during the Cold War. Russia is getting powerful. India is getting powerful. China's getting powerful. It's a much more complex world out there. My fear is that we're going to fall into one or another very simple story

and just kind of blindly follow that without really thinking about what's actually going on. And so the piece is really, if you read it very carefully, a call to be sober and sensible and not to follow all these intellectual fads because the next 10, 20 years are going to be super complicated, and we should not just say, like, here's one great 240 character foreign policy. We might actually have to have a more open, more reflective way about thinking about things. So what does Tom Friedman think about all this? What does he see the future as now? You know, this is a great question. I practice some really radical attention conservation, and so I don't read him as much anymore. He's still out there. Like, Tom Friedman, one, I know, is still out there and still talking to royal families and

still getting input about what the Middle East should be. Back in 2007, this is a long time ago, but he published what was basically like the Saudi peace plan for the Middle East. He is incredibly well connected. But Tom Friedman, too, you know, you get to a point as a public intellectual and your ideas no longer fit the world. And so Friedman had two or three bestselling hits in a row, really did tremendous numbers with those books. And then more recently, his books have just kind of been not really in keeping with what people are interested in. And I think that's because it's very hard to preach the gospel of greater integration when you're not talking about, you know, a China led by Deng Xiaoping or a Russia led by border.

We're talking about countries that are much more set on pursuing their national interest and on using the international system in a way to actually achieve their goals rather than being changed by the international system. And I don't think that Tom Friedman, too, is able to adjust to that. And the only thing in the world that's harder to get fired from than a Supreme Court seat is New York Times columnist. so I assume that he will still be out there offering his takes for 10, 20, 30 more years. But, you know, Friedman just does not feel relevant to the conversation. And again, it's just very hard to talk to undergrads about how relevant he was for so long, about 15 years where he was a leading voice on American foreign policy. And these days, you know, I'm a professor of foreign policy,

and I do not feel any particular need to keep track of what he's saying moment to moment. You know, the most recent Friedman piece I remember, and this one was from a few years ago, was like in Switzerland somewhere and he's buying groceries and the cashier has pink hair. And he's like, hey, you know, maybe everything's going to be okay. And it's kind of the thrust of the 800 word article. It was very bizarre. All right. I have, Jason, unless you have another question, I have one less question to go out on. All right.

So your Twitter bio says that you have been reproached by Gorbachev. What's going on there? So it turns out that an article that I wrote about Mikhail Gorbachev laying out the definitive history of the Pizza Hut commercial, it was a big hit, actually, like in the United States, kind of to everybody's surprise, but we were very gratified by that. And it was a monster hit in Russia. Russian media just found this article, and they went Gaga over it. So, you know, it did nicely hear, but there were segments on Russian national TV. about my article. And eventually somebody for one of the Russian stations, I'm not trying to be quiet, just can't remember which one it was,

talked to Gorbachev about this, and Gorbachev was kind of flustered and could not understand why he was being asked about this and basically said something the effect of, like, the journalist should be ashamed of himself for bringing up this history. And, you know, I was a little bit disappointed. Gorbachev doesn't know me from Adam,

I was a little bit disappointed in this because the thrust of the article I'd written was, it's really hard to make a way for yourself if you're the leader of a country that no longer exists. And that basically Gorbachev had come to this because of all these circumstances beyond his control. And he'd been trying to use these funds, yeah, to keep himself employed, but also to be somewhat of a check against the Yelton administration and to speak out for democratic reforms. those nuances got completely lost in translation. All anybody cared about was, you know, the very vague number that I could offer

because nobody wanted to speak on the record about how much Gorbachev was paid for that commercial. It was a lot. And so, you know, but in Russia, where Gorbachev to this day is just not very well-liked, I think that this became a way to kind of stick it to Gorby one more time. And he had the misfortune that this article came out a week or two after a Werner Herzog movie about him.

And so, you know, people had his number. They knew who to contact. And so that is the story of how I was reproached at secondhand by Mikhail Gorbachev. And the article is out there somewhere. But it was a very bizarre couple of weeks where, you know, I would, I stopped getting Google News alerts in English and started getting them in Russian. All right. The most recent article, though, is in foreign policy. It is the beautiful, dumb dream of McDonald's peace theory by Paul Musgrave. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet in walking us through all of this. Great to be here.