David Held’s “Toward a New Consensus: Answering the Dangers of Globalization,” (Summer 2005), is at once ominous and ambiguous. While globalization and US President George W. Bush are castigated, there is precious little substance for the conclusion that both have “left the world with severe inequalities.” Held fails to understand that human history is an uninterrupted story of inequality, injustice, and poverty. Only in the last century have we begun to turn the tide.

Held condemns US economic and security strategies, but his characterizations are caricatures. He asserts a Washington Consensus view that “a positive role for government is to be fundamentally distrusted” and that the prevailing security doctrine constitutes “a return to the view of international relations as a ‘war of all against all.’” These provocative statements ring hollow when backed by ambiguities such as this sentence: “A combination of developments points toward a very disturbing combination of negative factors.”

Serious analysis of the global scene begins with facts—namely, that 17 percent of the world’s population lived on less than a single US dollar per day in 1970 (in inflation-adjusted dollars using purchasing power parity terms). Thirty years later, the proportion was seven percent. This is what globalization hath wrought. Held offers no similar statistics to support his viewpoint. Instead, he raises the specter of rising global inequality (though one finds it hard to believe poor Africans resent the world’s richest man, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, whose foundation has spent billions of dollars donating vaccines in the last year). The story of recent years is that the world’s poorest countries are catching up, not falling behind. Inequality is losing its salience as a critique.

Regardless, Held maintains hostility toward foreign capital and skepticism of markets and trade. He asserts that the necessary precondition for economic growth is “state-led economic and industrial policy.” The irony, however, is that China and India are growing today only after cutting back on state-led economic planning.

Held points to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as examples of successful developing economies that did not hew to every orthodox principle. True, neither has the United States. But could there be three clearer cases in which globalization and US engagement are beneficial? First, property rights are robust in all three countries, as are the rule of law, free markets, and trade openness. Second, in all three nations the United States played a leading role, unlike the United Nations, which continues to shun Taiwan. Third, the United States contributed to these countries its military and security umbrella. Though many observers find difficult to believe that US military engagement in Iraq is humanitarian in any way, they should ponder the continuing role of the US soldier in Bosnia.

Research I have been conducting with Garett Jones, assistant professor at Southern Illinois University, indicates that the presence of US troops since 1950 provides a significant boost to the growth rate of host countries. In our working paper, we find that the presence of 10,000 US troops per year over many decades leads to a one percent increase in per capita GDP growth per year, after other causal variables are considered.

US confidence and power to reshape other cultures is casually called imperialism. But the United States is best understood as a promethean power—with a vision of liberation at its core—which promotes universal values such as transparent governance that enforces human rights, including property and democracy. I tremble for the world’s poor when I hear rising calls for the United States to disengage from the world, for what comes next is unlikely to be promethean in nature.