America need simply warn renegades that if they menace neighbors or torture dissidents, they will be disciplined by the all-powerful global market. Foreign policy becomes an exercise not in coercion, but in education. This is globalization's appeal to a country both obligated to keep the world safe and increasingly reluctant to do so. It allows American elites to imagine that the security won for this country in struggle is now protected by a force both unstoppable and benign. And it allows them to imagine that rising and aggrieved powers will embrace a world governed by free trade as well, even though it locks them into a position of political and military subservience .
Globalization is the narcissism of a superpower in a one superpower world.
It allows America to look at the world and see its own contentment and its own fatigue. And it has provided the same false comfort to lone superpowers in the past. That's where Norman Angell comes in. The Bottom Line Under the Clinton Administration, Angellian globaloney is being translated into institutions, treaties and international obligations that will greatly complicate future U.S. governments' efforts to exercise sovereign power. This may, in fact, prove to be one of Mr. Clinton's most regrettable legacies in the foreign and defense policy arena.