The paper demonstrated the hypothesis through a complicated experiment in which college students were asked to makea judgment about something they could not know for certain -- guessing someone's weight in a photo -- before having their moods swayed either positively, negatively or neutrally by snippets from films intended to provoke either anger, euphoria or no strong feelings.
Convincing empirical evidence for the peace-interest hypothesis is a tall order as controlling for all the other factors which make for war or peace is difficult.
In essence, I believe this was not a failure of the drug or the mechanism but a failure of us as investigators to make sure we had sufficient disease in our population upon which to test our hypothesis--somewhat akin to trying to show one antibiotic is better than another or even a placebo, but selecting a population with no infection!