Today’s Guardian notes another casualty in the Russian-Georgian conflict:
It’s known as the McDonald’s theory of war, but has nothing to do with hand-to-hand combat over a bacon and egg McMuffin. No country with a McDonald’s outlet, the theory contends, has ever gone to war with another.
The logic is thus: countries with middle classes large enough to sustain a McDonald’s have reached a level of prosperity and global integration that makes warmongering risky and unpalatable to its people.
The author of the theory was Thomas Friedman, the year 1996; make of that what you will.
(HT: Chris Blattman)
