Friedman, 1998
May 31, 2010. Israeli commandos slaughter nine Turkish humanitarian activists on board the Freedom Flotilla endeavoring to deliver aid to besieged Gaza. The event takes place in international waters. Thomas Friedman’s reaction is to put the word humanitarian in quotation marks and to announce that Turkish “concern for Gaza and Israel’s blockade is so out of balance with … other horrific cases in the region” that Turkey is risking its “historic role as a country that can be Muslim, modern, democratic.”1
One of the horrific cases cited by Friedman is the recent destruction by “pro-Hamas gunmen”2 of facilities at a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza. It thus appears that, if the Turks do indeed wish to “get back in balance,”3 they will have to ignore not only Hamas’ official condemnation of the destruction in question but also Israel’s history of attacks on regional U.N. institutions, which—unlike Friedman’s preferred “horrific case”—have not been casualty-free.4
Two weeks after the flotilla assault, Friedman travels to Turkey to deliver a scheduled presentation at Istanbul’s Özyeğin University about his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America.5 Although he mercifully refrains from discussing his audience’s lack of balance, it seems more than slightly ironic that an American columnist who has just written off the elimination of nine Turkish activists by a U.S.-funded army as a “setup”6 is now lecturing an auditorium full of Turks on how “a lot of bad stuff happens in the world without America, but not a lot of good stuff.”7 As for Friedman’s ejaculation that “green is the new red, white, and blue, oh yes it is, baby,” this is only subsequently amended to reflect the geographical circumstances: “And it’s the new red and white in Turkey.”8
Near the end of his two-hour lecture, our columnist stumbles into revealing that the book he is promoting “is really about America. It’s not about energy,” and that both The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded “have nothing to do with technology or environment at heart” but are instead “basically cries of the heart to get my country focused on fixing itself.”9 Lest said country misinterpret these cries as encompassing genuine concern for biodiversity or the possibility that the Internet can lift the global poor out of poverty, Friedman subsequently embarks on the even more transparently focused mouthful That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World We Invented—And How We Can Come Back, which he manages to describe in a 2011 Fox Business interview as “the first book I’ve really written about America.”10
As for Friedman’s qualifications as overseer of the U.S. return to glory, it is helpful to review some of his signature theories and policy prescriptions from past years and to make note of how these have ultimately fared. Given space constraints, it is impossible to devote much analysis to more short-lived gems, such as Friedman’s 1996 suggestion that “the U.S. should flood Iraq with counterfeit Iraqi dinars. It would wreak havoc. Because the U.S. has blocked the sale of money-printing presses, ink and paper to Iraq, Washington can already print better Iraqi money than Baghdad can,”11 or his post-9/11 recommendation regarding potential U.S. partners in the struggle against Osama bin Laden: “The Cali cartel doesn’t operate in Afghanistan. But the Russian mafia sure does, as do various Afghan factions, drug rings and Pakistani secret agents.”12
One of the best-known components of Friedman’s résumé is the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, the birth of which he describes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
For all I know, I have eaten McDonald’s burgers and fries in more countries in the world than anyone, and I can testify that they all really do taste the same. But as I Quarter-Poundered my way around the world in recent years, I began to notice something intriguing. I don’t know when the insight struck me. It was a bolt out of the blue that must have hit somewhere between the McDonald’s in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the McDonald’s in Tahrir Square in Cairo and the McDonald’s off Zion Square in Jerusalem. And it was this: No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.13
The Lebanese McDonald’s is invoked as proof of the theory’s validity, with no regard for the fact that Israel is at the time of writing engaged in a continuing military occupation of south Lebanon punctuated by deadly bombing campaigns. Friedman deals with other theoretical complications that have arisen since the release of the first edition of The Lexus in 1999—namely the war by nineteen McDonald’s-possessing NATO countries on McDonald’s-possessing Yugoslavia—by arguing that the outcome of the conflict demonstrates that citizens of nations that have developed economically to the point of being able to host McDonald’s establishments prefer American fast food over wars. Serbia’s capitulation is cast as a result of its citizens’ decision that “they wanted to stand in line for burgers, much more than they wanted to stand in line for Kosovo.”14
Friedman’s additional excuse that “the Kosovo war wasn’t even a real war”15 is meanwhile called into question by such things as his own article from 1999 stating that “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation.”16 That Friedman’s regular consumption of McDonald’s, designated symbol of the globalization and economic integration that are supposedly “having a restraining effect on aggressive nations,”17 has not had a similar effect on his personal propensities is clear from his encouragement of NATO’s air campaign (“Give war a chance”18) and his repeated entreaties for “sustained,” “unreasonable,” and “less than surgical bombing”19 to prevent the inhabitants of Belgrade from continuing to partake in “Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo.”20
Decreeing the need for “a new Serbian ethic that understands how to live in 21st-century Europe,”21 Friedman threatens the Serbs: “Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”22 This leap onto the bandwagon of ethic-inducing pulverization in a war partly undertaken to expand and empower NATO in the post–Cold War world is difficult to reconcile with Friedman’s own definition of himself as “a long and cranky opponent of NATO expansion.”23
Readers of Friedman’s column are often reminded that New York Times columnists are not permitted to endorse U.S. presidential candidates. The blatant endorsement of war crimes like collective punishment, however, is apparently less polemical, even when columnists cannot keep track of their own reasons for said punishment. In separate reflections on the war with Serbia published two months apart in 1999, Friedman writes in the former that “once the [Kosovar] refugee evictions began … using a huge air war for a limited objective was the only thing that made sense.”24 He then lets slip in the latter that he may indeed understand the true sequence of events: “NATO bombed, and [Slobodan] Milosevic began ruthlessly killing and evicting Kosovar Albanians.”25
When it comes time for McDonald’s installation in the Baghdad Green Zone, the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention is abandoned in favor of concoctions like Friedman’s Tilt Theory of History, which applies to situations in which “you take a country, a culture, or a region that has been tilted in the wrong direction and tilt it in the right direction.”26 Friedman subsequently offers the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention in The World Is Flat, according to which “no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.”27 We are left to assume that pre-war Iraqi oil exports to the United States did not constitute part of a major global supply chain.
Another overly simplistic theory that somehow continues to elude the very minimal amount of scrutiny that is required to debunk it is Friedman’s First Law of Petropolitics, which I will refer to by its convenient acronym. The FLOP, which debuted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2006, posits that “in oil-rich petrolist states, the price of oil and the pace of freedom tend to move in opposite directions.”28 According to Hot, Flat,
