The Effect of US Hegemony on the World

On Globalization
1
The difference between internationalization, transnationalism, and glocalization are that each represents a different aspect of globalization. Glocalization is what happens when international products are adapted to meet the particular needs (cultural or socio-economic) of the locality/community where they are sold. So for example, Nabisco might make Oreo cookies that look and taste one way in the U.S., but when the same company makes the “same” cookie for sale in Asia, it looks and tastes completely different because of cultural expectations that the Asians have regarding how a cookie should look and taste. The company adapts its product to the locality.
Transnationalism describes the way in which products are produced: products are completed in stages, with each stage being completed in a different part of the world; for instance, when a car company like Ford produces an automobile, it will consist of parts that are made in Asia, Europe, Central America, North America and so on. Many products today are transnational.
Internationalization refers to the process of expanding companies around the world to multiple nations so that they can penetrate more markets. A company will become international when it begins selling products in a new market that is foreign to its domestic market. IKEA, for example, represents internationalization, as does Wal-Mart which is found in many countries around the world (Ritzer, Dean, 2015).
2
Friedman’s “Theory of Everything” is premised on the idea that the U.S. has been a benign hegemon, warmly touching the lives of nations around the world. I do not agree with this premise, as the whole of the 20th century shows that the U.S. has been routinely engaged in toppling foreign powers and regime change—from the Spanish American War to the Middle East wars today, which are focused on regime change in Syria. The U.S. is bent on controlling and expanding its empire, in maintaining the status of the dollar (which is why Trump is so busy agitating North Korea—it is to drive a wedge between Russia and China and destabilize their plans to turn the U.S.’s uni-polar world into a multi-polar world).
3
The global spread of capitalism is having a mixed effect on human development and security (Lechner, Boli, 2014). On the one hand, it can raise the living standard of countries and create more comfortable conditions for all—but on the other hand, it can engender fierce competition so that great levels of inequality between the haves and the have-nots exist. Even in the U.S. this is seen as the gap between the rich and the poor grows, while wages stagnate and the cost of goods and services (from education to housing to health care) all increase exponentially. This would represent the negative effects of capitalism—but to be fair, today’s form of capitalism should really be described as a hybrid because it has so many elements of socialism in it. For example, in the U.S., we privatize the profits but socialize the losses—for everything from banks to education to manufacturers. Tax payers are put on the hook for busts, even though they are not the ones who made the bad business decisions that resulted in the need for bailouts. So many so-called capitalist countries are dependent on the monetization of debt that the system is now overbloated with liabilities, and like dominoes they appear to be lined up so that when one fails, the whole Ponzi-like scheme will collapse. Capitalism has, in other words, been corrupted by too much easy credit.

References
George Ritzer & Paul Dean. 2015. Globalization: A Basic Text. Oxford: John Wiley &
Sons Ltd.
Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli (eds). 2014. The Globalization Reader. Fifth Edition.
Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.