Those interested in geopolitics have their own cultural references. The last is a reference to Thomas Friedman's "A Manifesto for the Fast World" (NYT, 1999). The more complete context is:
> It's true that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does not end geopolitics -- the enduring quest for power, the fear of neighbors, the tug of history. What globalization does is simply put a different frame around geopolitics, a frame that raises the costs of war but cannot eliminate it.
> That is why sustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active involvement of the United States. All the technologies that Silicon Valley is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C.
> The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. ''Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,'' says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. ''If a lesser power were promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.''
See http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-for-t... for the McDonald's/McDonnell Douglas quote, but I started the context from the end of the previous page to show why McDonald's was relevant in the first place.
The 'Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention' is from Friedman's 1999 book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree' .