[dalke]

Those interested in geopolitics have their own cultural references. The last is a reference to Thomas Friedman's "A Manifesto for the Fast World" (NYT, 1999). The more complete context is:

> It's true that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does not end geopolitics -- the enduring quest for power, the fear of neighbors, the tug of history. What globalization does is simply put a different frame around geopolitics, a frame that raises the costs of war but cannot eliminate it.

> That is why sustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active involvement of the United States. All the technologies that Silicon Valley is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C.

> The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. ''Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,'' says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. ''If a lesser power were promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.''

See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-for-t... for the McDonald's/McDonnell Douglas quote, but I started the context from the end of the previous page to show why McDonald's was relevant in the first place.

The 'Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention' is from Friedman's 1999 book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree' .

[dragonwriter]

The Golden Arches Theory (even before it was disproven by the Russia-Georgia war of 2008) -- and similar theories like the "democracies don't fight wars against each other" theory -- have always been silly things that take rely on people not understanding math. You've got a feature that (at the time the theory is articulated) is historically fairly recent and that, when you take the number of pairs of countries that have been in wars that have occurred in any given time frame and the total number of pairs of country that have existed in the same time frame, and the total number of pairs of country that share the feature in question, where the expected value of number of wars between countries sharing the trait that is supposed to protect against war would be closer to zero than one if wars were randomly distributed and the feature had no effect, and then the theory uses the (utterly unsurprising) fact that the actual number of wars between countries sharing the trait is zero as the whole basis for an argument that sharing the trait prevents war.

[dalke]

If you read the Wikipedia page about the book you'll see Russia-Georgia listed as 1 of 5 such counter-examples, going back to the US invasion of Panama in 1989.

You'll also see his responses.

But I'm not trying to justify either which way. My point is that there are certain concepts in geopolitical dialog that are used as short-hand to express a larger concept. Expressions like "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas" are to outsiders as meaningless as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" or "information wants to be free".

In other words "[Schmidt] struggled to verbalize many of [his politics], often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department micro-language of his companions" can be turned around - Assage uses a different language than you or I, though he doesn't struggle to verbalize his politics.

[dragonwriter]

Your point about context was well made, my response was a tangent inspired by your post, not an argument against it.