Thomas Pain

It is a sign of the extent to which Thomas Friedman has become simply another fact of life that 2025 passed with hardly any acknowledgement that it was his thirtieth anniversary as foreign affairs columnist at the New York Times. In his 2005 bestselling ode to corporate globalization, The World Is Flat, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner boasted with uncharacteristic prescience and characteristic incoherence of his own immunity from the disruptive effects of the economic system he devoted his career to championing: “There will be no outsourcing for me—even if some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.”

Now, twenty years after the publication of Friedman’s defining tome and three decades into his star columnist position, the United States’ newspaper of record has not yet found it necessary to replace him with someone who makes sense on a regular basis. Indeed, it seems Friedman’s devoted service as a mouthpiece for empire and capital has ensured his institutionalization at the paper, despite his relentless self-contradictions, failed prophecies, and inescapable cascade of gibberish. Before being given full rein to peddle his appalling opinions about how great American-led globalization is for everybody—in 1999, for example, he reported that conditions at a Victoria’s Secret garment factory in Sri Lanka were so fantastic that he claimed he would “let my own daughters work” there—Friedman occupied roles that required him to be slightly more serious. These included deployment as Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem in the 1980s, followed by a stint as the paper’s chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington.

As far as his famous “flat world” metaphor goes: it’s the result of a jaunt to Bangalore, where he discovered that the high-tech sector had transformed a tiny smidgen of India into a Friedmanian paradise and was thus sufficient to make sweeping generalizations about the world at large. While in Bangalore, Friedman was alternately propelled to near-orgasm by the instructions he received at a luxe private golf club (“Aim at either Microsoft or IBM”) and enraptured by the pronouncements of Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, who unwittingly planted the flat-world idea by casually commenting on global technological advancements: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”

The gist of Friedman’s pilfered metaphor is that, with the United States at the helm, globalization could lift massive numbers of people out of poverty—a leveling of the playing field, as it were, and a nice idea that no doubt soothed the patriotic conscience of many an American airport bookstore patron. And yet Friedman cannot over the course of a billion bestselling pages make the metaphor work. As I noted in my masochistic study of the Friedman oeuvre in 2011, it starts to become clear around page 536 that the book might have been more aptly titled The World Is Sometimes Indefinitely Maybe Partially Flat—But Don’t Worry, I Know It’s Not, or perhaps The World Is Flat, Except for the Part That Is Unflat and the Twilight Zone Where Half-Flat People Live. Evidence of the masses of people allegedly being lifted out of poverty by the flat world included Indian call center employees who now possessed credit cards and were able to purchase American goods, even as Friedman acknowledged that the high-tech sector accounted “for 0.2 percent of employment in India.”

Because Friedman’s dogged proselytizing worked well for the American corporatocracy, though, he was hailed as a brilliant oracle, simultaneously expanding his ego, pocketbook, and political influence. Shilling for free trade, another key component of his repertoire, has also garnered him a lot of establishment kudos, even when he appears to have no idea what he’s talking about. In March 1995, a few months into Friedman’s columnistship and a year after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, he headed down to Mexico to pen a dispatch on NAFTA’s progress. The trade deal was not mentioned, but the judgment of Ricarda Martinez, a sixty-year-old peasant living in a shack on the outskirts of Mexico City, was: “Mexico is now different—now we are poor.” This column stands out as a major deviation from Friedman’s modus operandi, in that he managed to speak to a non-elite member of the global populace—a rarity over his decades-long career, notwithstanding his self-professed “total freedom, and an almost unlimited budget, to explore” the world.

Counter the sexagenarian peasant, Friedman felt Mexico’s newfound poverty was ultimately nothing that couldn’t be fixed by more NAFTA. Fifteen years later, in 2010, he returned south of the border to report that although “about 40 percent” of Mexicans lived “below the poverty line,” free trade was still the way to go. His proof was a study of the top Mexican baby names in 2008 by economist Luis de la Calle, formerly Mexico’s trade and NAFTA minister in Washington, D.C., which found that “the most popular for girls, he said, included ‘Elizabeth, Evelyn, Abigail, Karen, Marilyn and Jaqueline, and for boys Alexander, Jonathan, Kevin, Christian and Bryan.’” In case we had missed the moral of the story, Friedman spelled it out: “Not only Juans.”

And there was more exciting news: “Wal-Mart de Mexico is expected to open 300 new stores in Mexico this year.” What more could Mexicans want after the gringos had ravaged their agriculture and torn apart their very social fabric with “free” trade? In 2013, Friedman went as far as to propose that Mexico would “become the more dominant economic power in the twenty-first century” because it had “signed 44 free trade agreements—more than any country in the world.” Ten years later, and the average Mexican worker still earns almost a fifth of his counterpart north of the border.

Friedman had incidentally prescribed similarly punitive treatment for the people of his own country, although it took him a while to decipher his own thoughts on such complicated economic matters. In a 2003 column headlined “Read My Lips,” he offered U.S. Democrats this advice: “You win the presidency by connecting with the American people’s gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept. The concept I’d argue for is ‘neoliberalism.’” Never mind that this prescription took place at the end of an article ostensibly advocating against then-President George W. Bush’s “maniacal” tax cuts and the attendant reduction in government services. Friedman eventually got a better grasp of his preferred “concept,” and the following year he was back condemning Congress for being “out to lunch—or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean.”

And he continued to do corporate bidding by pushing free trade deals destined to screw the working classes of an array of nations, going so far as to boast in 2006: “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” Had he bothered with any of the other words, he might have known that the “CA” stood for Central America.

But Friedman has used his oversized platform for more than just cheerleading on behalf of economic havoc. He has also been a devoted fan of U.S. military destruction—although he did offer an oddly straightforward hint at the connection between the two in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

Indeed, McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.

Granted, this “hidden fist” isn’t so good at concealing itself—just as Friedman isn’t very good at hiding his fondness for bombing the living daylights out of other countries. During the United States-led NATO assault on Yugoslavia in 1999, for instance, he effectively called for war crimes by urging “unreasonable” and “less than surgical bombing.” This being insufficiently ghastly for his taste, Friedman taunted those on the receiving end of those bombs: “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.”

In the case of Yugoslavia, Friedman’s fury may have had a little to do with the fact that a wrench had been thrown in his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention: the idea that “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” This illuminating thesis, as he explained in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, had been devised as he “Quarter-Poundered” his way around the world for the Times. Needless to say, the premise did not further its credibility when, the very year of the book’s publication, a whole bunch of McDonald’s-possessing NATO countries undertook the “less than surgical bombing” of another country that also possessed McDonald’s of its own. In subsequent editions of The Lexus, Friedman endeavored to rescue his Golden Arches Theory from the realm of utter invalidation by insisting that the “Serbian people” had decided that “they wanted to stand in line for burgers, much more than they wanted to stand in line for Kosovo.”

Nowhere, perhaps, has his penchant for “pulverization” been more dreadfully displayed than in Iraq, where in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion he pushed for democratization-by-war as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating” (in other words, to be done first and then debated, in good democratic fashion). In keeping with his habit of self-contradiction, Friedman could not keep track of his own reasons for the war, which was alternately said to be about oil, not about oil, the “most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched,” not at all liberal, a neoconservative project, and something the United States did just “Because We Could.”

In late May of 2003, two-and-a-half months into the bloody mess, the columnist made an appearance on Charlie Rose’s TV show, filmed in Silicon Valley, to showcase his uniquely obscene approach to democracy promotion. Telling Rose that, “looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about,” Friedman went on to explain with a straight face that the U.S. invasion had been in response to the “terrorism bubble” that had materialized in “that part of the world” and made itself known on 9/11—never mind Friedman’s own repeated acknowledgement that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Anyway, the terrorism bubble meant that America “needed to go over there, basically,” and “take out a very big stick”:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society; you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well. Suck. On. This.

Three years after prescribing the oral rape of Iraq and many tens of thousands of dead civilians later, Friedman took to the pages of the Times to complain that the United States was “baby-sitting a civil war” in the country instead of “midwifing democracy.”­ These turns of phrase befit the man who no less than Edward Said had deemed worthy of a 1989 Village Voice intervention, devastatingly titled “The Orientalist Express.” Writing in response to Friedman’s first book, Said remarked on the “comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas” as well as his “unearned egoism,” drawing attention to the journalist’s advice that America simultaneously behave in the Middle East as friend, grocer, a “son-of-a-bitch,” and, of course, obstetrician. As per Orientalist tradition, inhabitants of Arab and Muslim lands are regularly cast as fetuses and/or infants desperately in need of the West to whip them into civilized democratic shape, and in 2012 Friedman retroactively decided that the United States had acted as a midwife after all in Iraq—a “well-armed external midwife,” to put it precisely.

No discussion of the devastation wrought by Friedman’s pen would be complete without the Palestinians, who could be referred to collectively as “Ahmed,” he decided back in 1988, which did not prevent him that year from receiving his second Pulitzer or from being promoted to the Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington. Friedman’s first Pulitzer was awarded for his coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut in 1982, in which several thousand Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered by right-wing Christian militiamen. The massacre was abetted by the Israeli military, which had staged an apocalyptic invasion of Lebanon that year.

As Friedman recounts in From Beirut to Jerusalem, the massacre was “something of a personal crisis” for him, tarnishing the image of his beloved Israel—a state he likes to say “had me at hello.” In the end, he made no effort to conceal his view that he, Thomas Friedman, was the true victim of the carnage, rather than the thousands of dead. Recounting his exclusive interview with Major General Amir Drori, the Israeli commander in Lebanon, Friedman admitted he “was not professionally detached in this interview . . . What I was really saying, in a very selfish way, was ‘How could you do this to me, you bastards? I always thought you were different. I always thought we were different.’”

It was certainly a moment of anguish for someone accustomed to wearing “Israel as a badge of pride,” and who had spent high school summers on a kibbutz south of Haifa at a time when “everything and everyone in the country seemed larger than life. Every soldier was a hero, every politician a statesman, every girl a knockout.” His disillusionment by Sabra and Shatila was fleeting, and he soon returned to championing Israel’s killing of Palestinians and Lebanese—as in March 2002 when, a few days prior to another Israeli massacre in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin, he announced that “Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Israel’s atrocities have also provided him with plenty of opportunities to babble nonsensically. In the midst of Operation Cast Lead—the twenty-two-day Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that began in December 2008 and killed 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children—Friedman inflicted on his readers such passages as:

The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?”

Friedman then advised the Israelis to target civilians in Gaza, since this had worked so well during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon that killed some 1,200 people. According to Friedman, Israel’s determination to “exact enough pain on the civilians” of Lebanon was “not pretty, but it was logical,” and the civilians of Gaza now needed to endure a similar “logic”—meaning, of course, war crimes.

In August 2025, almost two years into Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip, the true death toll of which may be close to seven hundred thousand, Friedman surfaced with another of his intermittent critiques of Israel. As one may have expected, however, it was not the people being annihilated who were suffering: “Israel is now well on its way to making itself a pariah state—to the point that Israelis will think twice about speaking Hebrew when traveling abroad.” How tragic. To be sure, Friedman’s thirty-year pedestal on the New York Times Opinion page has been, to borrow his mealy-mouthed words, “painful to watch.” It’s one of the longest runs in modern journalism, and the moral of the story is hardly a surprise: you can still make bank in a downsizing media industry as long as you eschew logic and empathetic thought in favor of toeing the imperial line—preferably in the most pompous and exaggerated manner possible. Meanwhile, as Friedman’s employment continues to constitute a war crime unto itself, surely there’s still somebody in North Korea who wants that columnist job.