U.S.-sponsored free trade coalitions could “go to hell.”29
Additional oil-related coincidences accrue over the years, as Friedman observes that Bahrain, the first Persian Gulf oil state to start running out of oil, is not only “the first Gulf state to hold a free and fair parliamentary election, in which women could run and vote” but also “the first Gulf state to hire [consulting firm] McKinsey & Company to design an overhaul of its labor laws … and the first Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States.”30 The evidence of the correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom becomes insurmountable one afternoon in 2006 over lunch with Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, and—after sketching a graph to this effect on his napkin—Friedman woos Naím with such statistics as that “when oil was $25–$30 a barrel, George W. Bush looked into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s soul and saw a friend of America there,” but that the current view consists of oil companies and democratic institutions “that Putin has swallowed courtesy of $100-a-barrel oil.”31
Friedman fails to mention that, around the same time that Bush was reading Putin’s soul, Friedman himself was encouraging his readership to “keep rootin’ for Putin,” whom he touted as “for real,” “Russia’s first Deng Xiaoping,” and the architect of the country’s transition from “Das Kapital to DOS capital.”32 As for Friedman’s assertion in The World Is Flat that the primary cause of the demise of the Soviet Union “was the information revolution that began in the early to mid-1980s,”33 this notion is discarded in favor of the new FLOP-friendly argument that high oil prices in the 1970s followed by $10-a-barrel oil prompted the Soviet collapse.
That the 2007 edition of The World Is Flat, released the year after the FLOP’s birth, is not amended to reflect the new thinking could be construed as a sign that manuscript size and frequency of publication may sometimes trump content and conviction. Undeterred by the possibility that the abandonment of past predictions might encumber one’s current credibility as foreign affairs sage, Friedman is tasked by Naím with turning his napkin into an article.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded outlines the expansion of the napkin into four separate graphs:
On one axis, I plotted the average global price of crude oil going back to 1979, and along the other axis I plotted the pace of expanding or contracting freedoms, both economic and political—as measured by the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” report and the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World Report”—for Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria.34
According to Friedman, the resulting four graphs indicate that
as oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation, and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in these countries—as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started, and companies privatized. But as oil prices started to soar after 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs tended to erode in these countries.35
This correlation sounds delightful, especially when it is compounded by compelling evidence such as that “a Westernized Iranian woman reporter in Tehran once said to me as we were walking down the street: ‘If only we didn’t have oil, we could be just like Japan.’”36 The project’s flaws, however, are numerous, and cannot be compensated for via Friedman’s simple disclaimer that “this is not a scientific lab experiment.”37
First of all, the graphs do not take into account the wide range of freedom indicators listed by Friedman.38 The graph on Iran, for example, plots crude oil prices against “Freedom to Trade Internationally,” which in the Iranian context is presumably a reflection of the intensity of sanctions by international actors. It is difficult to argue that this specific category is at all representative of the general level of domestic freedom.
The Nigeria graph plots oil prices against “Legal System and Property Rights,” while the Venezuela graph plots oil prices against the country’s Freedom House rankings. All of the graphs indicate an inverse relationship, but a glance at the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” data from 1973 to 201039 turns up contradictions such as these:
1. Following a string of “Partly Free” years, Nigeria’s Freedom Status switches to “Not Free” in 1993. This is precisely the year of the Nigerian oil field privatization that appears on Friedman’s cumulative FLOP graph as one of three global historical events signifying an increase in the pace of freedom.
2. Venezuela has maintained a “Partly Free” status since 1999, even when Chávez was telling various international entities to go to hell.
3. Bahrain transforms from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” in 2009, despite Friedman’s insistence—undeterred by his own discussion in The World Is Flat of the Bahraini regime’s Internet censorship and reliance on walled palaces and Sunni dominance—that dwindling oil reserves have forced the country’s democratization.
More important than any of these contradictions, however, is Friedman’s cheerleading of the U.S. war on Iraq “to create a free, open and progressive model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world to promote the ideas of tolerance, pluralism and democratization”40 when he is already convinced in 2002 that unless the United States “encourage[s] alternative energies that will slowly bring the price of oil down and force [Arab/Muslim] countries to open up and adapt to modernity—we can invade Iraq once a week and it’s not going to unleash democracy in the Arab world.”41 This same year he nonetheless classifies the invasion of Iraq as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating,” even while admitting that it “would be a huge, long, costly task—if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don’t know if it is.”42
Taking into account the speculation by oil economist and World Bank adviser Dr. Mamdouh Salameh in 2008 that the invasion of Iraq has thus far trebled the price of crude oil,43 Friedman’s 2006 proposal for a Geo-Green party in the United States to “advanc[e] political and economic reform in the Arab-Muslim world, without another war”44 acquires an even more tragicomic hue. According to Friedman, “however the Iraq war ends,” the Geo-Green party will stimulate alternatives to oil and thus “gradually bring down the price, possibly as low as $25 to $30 a barrel”—i.e., the approximate price of oil in 2002.45
Recent years have seen a surge in Friedman’s insistence on the need for “nation-building at home,”46 in order to resolve issues ranging from the United States’ “mounting education deficit, energy deficit, budget deficit, health care deficit and ambition deficit”47 to Penn Station’s “disgusting track-side platforms [that] apparently have not been cleaned since World War II”48 to the fact that, while China spent the post-9/11 period enhancing its national infrastructure in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, “we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.”49 Friedman’s fury over funding cuts to the National Science Foundation might be more understandable, however, had:
1. The NSF appeared somewhere on the 2002 hierarchy of most-important-even-if-impossible-tasks.
2. He specified that the Iraq war be fought without Humvees.
3. He not advised Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 to “connect up with that gut fear in the American soul and pass a simple threshold test: ‘Does this man understand that we have real enemies?’” by “drop[ping] everything else—health care, deficits and middle-class tax cuts—and focus[ing] on this issue. Everything else is secondary.”50
Consider for a moment that over half of U.S. government spending goes to the military,51 an institution Friedman lauds as the protector of American economic hegemony in The Lexus:
Indeed, McDonald’s
