The post-euphoric world

WASHINGTON, DC: What we are witnessing in the spreading turmoil around the world—in Iraq, in Ukraine, in Gaza—is the silent rejection of a central tenet of US post-World War II foreign policy: that global prosperity would foster peace and stability. Countries would rather trade than fight. Promoting economic growth would suppress the divisive forces of nationalism, ideology, religion and culture. So we thought.

It’s an idea with a long pedigree in American thinking, going back to at least Thomas Jefferson. The purpose of free trade, he and his followers believed, “was not merely to promote commercial prosperity everywhere but to promote peace everywhere,” writes historian Gordon Wood. Free trade “would tie nations together peacefully and change the way international politics had traditionally been conducted.”