Image by Ivy Sanders Schneider
Back during the end of history, Thomas Friedman presented his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” in a 1996 New York Times op-ed. As he put it, “no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” There was “no question,” he declared, that McDonald’s “is part of this worldwide phenomenon of countries integrating with the global economy and submitting to its rules.”
Today, while McDonald’s-hosting Lebanon attempts to recover from months of McDonald’s-hosting Israel’s bombings, and McDonald’s-hosting Venezuela faces the threat of military intervention from the McDonald’s-birthing U.S., it seems fair to say that the rules of the global economy have failed to usher in an era of peace. And even as McDonald’s locations continue to proliferate, people around the world are starving. As of 2024, a quarter of the world’s population faced moderate or severe food insecurity. In 2025 alone, famines have been declared in Palestine and Sudan, and food crises are ongoing in countries including Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Haiti, Mali, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Nigeria, as well as Lebanon and Venezuela.
Nutrition isn’t going so well on fast food’s home turf, either. The longest government shutdown in U.S. history left 42 million people without the SNAP funds they needed to buy groceries. And restoring SNAP entailed creating longer-lasting problems for food safety: the deal that ended the shutdown gutted existing food contamination standards and blocked future regulations of ultraprocessed foods, which now constitute over fifty percent of the calories Americans consume at home.
There is enough food grown each year to feed ten billion people. And yet, with an agricultural system structured by unequal exchange and exploitative class relations, the global economy is simply not getting everyone fed. In this Dispatches section, we asked writers to reflect on why, and how, that’s the case. Some assess the conditions under which food is produced, distributed, and consumed, while others consider the violence enacted on the international underclass Friedman referred to as “those who do not benefit from this globalization.”
Perhaps Friedman based his theory on the wrong fast-food restaurant. Nearly a decade after his op-ed, the chain’s chief competitor landed in Afghanistan for the first time: in 2004, to raise morale among American soldiers occupying the country, the U.S. military established a Burger King at Bagram Airbase.
