Remember the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention?
Way back in 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed, “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.”
It was a little tongue in cheek, but the theory generally made sense: Once a country was sufficiently open to American culture to welcome the hamburger chain to its shores and was sufficiently plugged into the global economy, its interest in military aggression dropped significantly. When your populace is economically prosperous enough to happily chow down on Big Macs and McNuggets, it’s less likely to get whipped up into a military frenzy by some warmongering leader with dreams of conquest.
Alas, the Golden Arches Theory didn’t hold up for very long. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia, and during the first few days of the airstrikes, the McDonald’s in Belgrade was badly damaged by arsonists. Then Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, followed by Ukraine in 2014, and so now, having a McDonald’s is not a guarantee against being invaded or bombed by some other country that also has a McDonald’s.
The year 2026 begins with a radically changed geopolitical landscape. The Trump administration has taken military action against Iran and Venezuela, and the president is again threatening to annex Greenland, a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Meanwhile, the president is also unilaterally declaring that the United States will assure the security of Qatar, even though a previous president warned that “the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”
That previous president, of course, was Donald Trump.
Perhaps it is time for a new theory to fit our dramatically different notion of who is an American ally and who is a potential foe. Consider that no two countries with a Trump-branded property have ever fought a war against each other — at least, not while they’ve had that Trump property.
You see, the Trump International Golf Club is coming to Doha, Qatar. And the president doesn’t want any troublemaker coming along and militarily threatening “a world-class 18-hole Trump International Golf Course, a Trump Golf Clubhouse, and … high-end branded villas overlooking the golf and the beach with direct access to beach and neighbouring anticipated luxury lifestyle destinations.” War is bad for business and scares away the golfers. The only bunkers Trump wants being built over there will be filled with sand.
The new alliance of countries with Trump properties — call it the “coalition of the billing” — includes a lot more nations than you might expect. The nonpartisan watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reviewed Trump Organization press releases and calculated that the president’s business is affiliated with 23 Trump-branded projects in 17 countries: Ireland, India, Indonesia, French Saint Martin, the Maldives, Oman, the Philippines, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Vietnam.
Of course, all these deals require the national governments to sign off on them and sometimes more. “In Oman, a Trump hotel, golf course and residences are being developed on land owned by the government as part of a development in which an official tourism agency is a partner. A Trump hotel in Serbia is being built on government-owned land, too,” wrote Walker Davis of CREW.
Is this an insane conflict of interest? Yes. Is this also a sign that all these governments are now in an entirely unintended “Trump coalition” and that the president of the United States would have a strong interest in preventing any of them from going to war with each other? Also, yes.
Sure, it’s an ugly mess, but this also gives our snubbed traditional allies a path forward. There’s a playbook for how to get what you want from this administration. Call up Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trumpand find some pretty stretch of beachfront or lakefront and start talking about how big and expensive you want your Trump-branded hotel, casino, golf course, strip club or whatever to be. There’s no need for the Prime Minister of Denmark to argue that the U.S. has no legal basis for annexing Greenland. If you think Trump gets hung up on little things like the law, check out the White House TikTok, a social media platform Congress banned in January 2025 — and the Trump administration has refused to enforce.
Look, I get it, Denmark. This is an embarrassing way to conduct foreign relations. But think of it this way: We are just one Trump Tower Copenhagen announcement away from the administration forgetting about its dreams of a Greenland conquest.
The post Just call it the ‘Trump Property Theory of Conflict Prevention’ appeared first on Washington Post.
