Politics & Power Quote by William Greider

Globalization, Greider suggests, isn’t being undone by sloppy accounting or even by the familiar outrage over “wasted” taxpayer money. It’s being corroded by something more structurally poisonous: the fusion of commerce with coercion. The line is a warning that the real hazard to an open world economy isn’t inefficiency; it’s legitimacy.

Greider’s phrasing does a lot of work. “Readiness to mix” implies habit, even eagerness, not an occasional policy lapse. “US commercial interests” is deliberately blunt, stripping away the nicer language of “free markets” and “development” to foreground who benefits. Then comes the scalpel twist: “self-appointed role as global protector.” That’s not just a critique of intervention; it’s an accusation of unilateral moral branding. Washington isn’t merely defending allies or responding to threats, it’s casting itself as indispensable, and then using that halo to advance its own economic priorities.

The subtext is that globalization relies on trust in rules, not faith in a referee with a thumb on the scale. When military power, diplomatic pressure, and market access start traveling together, trade stops looking like mutual exchange and starts resembling a protection racket with better press releases. Greider is also anticipating the backlash: once other nations read “global protector” as “global enforcer,” they begin building workarounds - alternative alliances, parallel institutions, guarded supply chains.

Contextually, this is classic Greider: skeptical of the post-Cold War consensus that American leadership is automatically benign, and alert to how the rhetoric of security can launder economic self-interest. The sentence lands because it reframes the debate from budget trivia to moral credibility - the currency globalization can’t print.