as one of America's leading interpreters of foreign affairs. I suspect I am not alone in finding his breathless enthusiasm for globalization irritating; he sees it as win-win all around, if only the United States will get out there and lead it properly. I also suspect his fellow liberals in the United States find the whole gung ho tone maddening; they want more concern about how globalization is damaging the United States—not hymns to its praise. For a non-American reader, however, it is refreshing to find someone who has some grasp of what is taking place and why—and how enormously it benefits the United States.

But this is also Friedman's blind spot. He is too ready to cast globalization as something driven by the financial markets, new technology, anddo not. If you go to war, the costs of losing the connections to the global economy are higher than ever, which leads Friedman to his "golden arches of conflict resolution" thesis. No two countries boasting a chain of McDonald's have ever gone to war, he contends. McDonald's stands as a proxy for how much any country has accepted the straightjacket and herd. Globalization means prosperity and peace. (This was evidently written before the NATO bombing of Belgrade.)

A Global Invisible Hand

While Friedman is right in his description of the golden straightjacket and the policing powers of the electronic herd, he tries continually to locate them in some stateless cyberspace. The straightjacket is in fact the Washington Consensus (not even mentioned in his index); its enforcers are the U.S.