WHEN GLOBALIZATION FAILS

The tattered history of the notion that free, international trade ensures the permanence of peace and the disappearance of war.

Macdonald—a former investment banker, now an author (A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy, 2003)—returns with a two-century history, noting how, continually, events and violence have shattered the notion that trade will bring peace among nations. He begins in the 19th century and describes Pax Britannica, a time, he writes, when “it all seemed so simple.” But history is not static, and France began its steady return to power after Waterloo while the United States, following the Civil War, began its own journey to the pinnacle of world power. Macdonald then devotes chapters to our major wars (world wars I and II) and shows how and why the trade-peace theory just did not obtain. He focuses on economic factors throughout: the hunger for coal, the thirst for petroleum, the passion for raw materials. He revisits the post–World War I failures of Versailles (France wanted Germany’s resources; Germany wanted them back) and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II—a move that, had it been successful (as it nearly was), would have considerably altered subsequent world history. The second half of the text deals with Pax Americana: how the United States achieved it, how it has attempted to administer it and how current events are fracturing it. The author concludes with accounts of the rises (and increasing sways) of India and China and the enduring contention and concern in the region about access to the Strait of Malacca and the control of key Pacific islands. Macdonald concludes with an eight-point list of factors in the more-or-less enduring post–World War II peace among the world’s powers. He does not believe America can afford a new isolationism.

Sturdy, scholarly, sharply focused, closely reasoned.