The Beautiful, Dumb Dream of McDonald’s Peace Theory

As tanks exploded and refugees fled in the latest round of Armenia and Azerbaijian’s war over Nagorno-Karabakh, social media became another battlefield—with some surprising participants. That included the local branch of McDonald’s, which posted some ardently (and brief-lived) pro-Azeri sentiments on Twitter.

For Americans who remember the lazily optimistic foreign-policy analysis their country produced in the 1990s, it was a poignant moment. A company once held up as a disincentive to war had become a participant in one. It’s another blow to the idea that economic globalization by itself can...