More Friedman Than Friedman

Today's column is like the Tom Friedman column to end all Tom Friedman columns. As usual, I 100 percent agreed with his conclusion (the U.S. needs better science education) before I started reading him on the subject, but as he's been writing on it, the inept nature of his argumentation is giving me serious doubts about my former view. As for the question raised by Kevin Drum's review:

There are broader downsides to globalization too, but although Friedman managed to write tellingly about them in Lexus, they are addressed only briefly and with little passion in World. In fact, he reprises one of his pet theories from Lexus, the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which states that no two countries that both have a McDonald's will ever go to war with each other. In World, it becomes the “Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention”: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain like Dell's will ever fight a war against each other.

What's startling about this isn't the theory itself, but Friedman's admission that he didn't even start thinking about it until the late 1990s. After all, this is an idea with a long pedigree. Scholars have noted for decades that liberal democracies almost never go to war with each other, and as far back as 1910 Norman Angell famously—and with famously poor timing—wrote that the spread of mercantile interconnections had made conflict so irrational that large-scale war was henceforth futile. He had logic on his side, but that didn't stop large-scale war.

But whether Angell was wrong or just premature, Friedman doesn't address the issue even in passing. He simply writes as if this were a brand new insight of his own. Is this because he really thinks it is? Or because he figures his readers aren't interested in long dead history? There's no telling. But for readers who are familiar with this history, Friedman's lack of curiosity about it—in a field he's so obviously enthusiastic about—makes it hard to take him seriously.

When I was a sophomore in college I took "Globalization and Its Discontents" which Friedman co-taught with Michael Sandel and Stanley Hoffman. It was clear in the course that he is perfectly aware of Angell's work. His stance at the time was that the post-1989 wave of globalization was qualitatively different from the pre-WWI era of global integration because contemporary globalization involves a heavier element of interconnectedness through cheap transcontinental telecommunications (and not just trade in goods) and that this alters the situation. In short -- Angell was premature. It was a slightly odd line to take since the pre-WWI globalization did, in fact, involce a telecommunications revolution (the telegraph and the early stages of the telephone) and because the more obvious line is that nuclear weapons rather than information technology, are the difference-makers.

I note that there's actually a subtle difference between the "Golden Arches" and "Supply Chain" versions of the theory. Golden Arches is a variant of Kant's democratic peace theory which holds that states with certain internal characteristics won't fight. "Supply Chain" is a version of Angell's idea -- capitalist peace theory -- which has to do with economic organization but. At any rate, I haven't read the book, so I can't say for sure if the point here is that a corporation like Dell would be politically influential eough to be able to prevent the outbreak of a war, but if that's what he's saying, it's quite wrong. Invading Iraq has had, quite predictably, the effect of raising oil prices in the short term. This, equally predictably, has been devastating to GM and Ford, both of which had become extremely dependent on sales of very large SUVs. GM and Ford have a lot more political influence than Dell has. And, of course, a disproportionately large number of the war's leading critics in congress did, in fact, represent the state of Michigan (probably a coincidence related to Michigan's large Arab population). Nevertheless, a war we got.