How Thomas Friedman Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Globalization

“The reader will notice,” writes Thomas Friedman in the acknowledgment section of his new book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” “that I quote a great deal from two outside sources.” His first debt, to the Economist, is neither surprising nor controversial. Almost everyone else in the English-speaking world interested in foreign affairs takes a hard look at that journal every week. But Friedman’s second source is startling: ads from Madison Avenue. “For some reason,” he writes, “advertising copywriters have a tremendous insight into globalization.”

And globalization is what Friedman has sought to understand or, more accurately--and it is not clear that even he would quarrel with this characterization--at least conditionally, to celebrate.

I

This is first and foremost a triumphalist book. Friedman may indeed have written “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” as he insists with appropriate sobriety early on in the book, “to explain how [our] new era of globalization became the dominant system at the end of the twentieth century.” But too often, it seems that for him anatomization and celebration amount to the proverbial distinction without a difference--like, well, the advertising copy he finds so instructive.

In fairness, Friedman expends considerable effort in trying to rebut those of his detractors who contend, in his words, that “he loves globalization.” “I feel about globalization a lot like I feel about the dawn,” he writes. Like the dawn, Friedman insists, there is no stopping globalization. “All I want to think about,” he claims, “is how I can get the best out of this new system, and cushion the worst for most people. This is the spirit that motivated this book.”

Perhaps. But even in unpacking the meanings implicit in Friedman’s “inevitabilist” hedge against accusations that he is a booster who has confused himself with an analyst, the degree to which he has assimilated most of the cliches about globalization and delivers them afresh soon becomes apparent. By comparing globalization with the dawn, Friedman elides the fundamental distinction between a natural phenomenon and a geopolitical system. The first really is immutable. The second exists only so long as economic forces, military power, ideological hegemony, effective leaders and popular consent combine to warrant its continuation. Friedman is much taken by the advertising slogan of the brokerage house Merrill Lynch that “the world is ten years old” and uses it as a chapter title. But this is not thought; this is hype, as the copywriters who prepared the ad doubtless understood, even if Friedman does not.

The pity is that while hype is a copywriter’s job, it should not be that of the chief foreign-affairs columnist of the New York Times. Friedman is, of course, perfectly within his rights to believe that globalization is a good thing, even if that is the received wisdom of our age. And he is more than entitled to write a book making that case and suggesting, as he does with verve and sincerity throughout “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” various programs for its improvement. But his opinions should not license him to dismiss all criticisms of the current global order as being akin to criticizing an immutable fact of nature like the dawn.

Friedman’s book would have benefited greatly from a serious engagement with the ideas of such critics of globalization as Benjamin Barber, Zygmunt Bauman, John Gray and William Greider. But having arrived at contrary conclusions, he writes as if no further debate is warranted. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Friedman is taken, sometimes to the point of almost laughable vanity, both with himself and his metaphors. “Being the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times,” he writes, apparently with perfect sincerity, “is the best job in the world.” The fact that Friedman’s own views seem to leave few openings for the skepticism that is the good journalist’s intellectual stock in trade is disheartening. So is a certain tendency toward extreme and surely ill-considered statements. The Thomas Friedman who wrote in a column a few years ago that he didn’t “give two cents for Bosnia” makes his appearance more than once in “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.”

And judging by the book, Friedman’s ability to empathize with the plight of foreigners still seems, to put it charitably, selective. His own prejudices give him no pause. Perhaps because his hands-on experience as a reporter was in the Middle East, Friedman is quite capable of putting himself in the place of a citizen of some Third World country. His emphasis on there being no real choice for such people between the Lexus and the olive tree, that is, between American-style capitalism and traditional societies, may be too simple, but it is certainly arguable. And anyone who has traveled in the poor world must take seriously the argument Friedman makes (much of which, curiously, what remains of the Marxist and Third-Worldist Left would probably endorse) that, “[w]ith the end of the Cold War, globalization is globalizing Anglo-American style capitalism. . . . [I]t is globalizing American culture and cultural icons. It is globalizing the best of America and the worst of America.”

But appearances can be deceiving, and Friedman is singularly incurious about any ideological contra flow beyond that of warlords, traditionalists and Islamic fundamentalists. The imagined dialogue he presents in the book in which Syria’s Hafez Assad and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher debate the future is unconvincing and even embarrassing stylistically (there is a lot of useless embellishment like Assad asking Christopher if he can call him “Chris” and Christopher telling the Syrian president the State Department’s phone number). But the debate between them over their clashing conceptions of politics, economics and order is well-judged.

When Friedman seems far more ill at ease is in trying to imagine the way the world might seem to him were he the citizen of a rich capitalist country like Japan or France rather than an American. There are no invented dialogues in his book between, say, the departing U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and the new head of the European Commission, Romano Prodi. Presumably, that is because Friedman assumes that the European capitalist model is already doomed.

He says as much in a chapter--only one of the many in which he shows himself almost constitutionally incapable of resisting quips, metaphors and adages--called “Revolution is U.S.” In it, he expounds what he calls the “five gas stations theory of the world.” As Friedman puts it, “I believe you can reduce the world’s economies today to basically five different gas stations.” And he goes on to enumerate them: There is the Japanese gas station with expensive gas served by attentive staff; the American gas station, where gas is a dollar but you pump it yourself; the European gas station, where gas is five dollars and only one attendant is on duty and he is thinking about his six weeks’ paid vacation in the South of France; the Third World gas station, where gas is cheap but supplies intermittent, the payroll padded and the place run down; and the communist gas station, where there is no gas.

The passage is vintage Friedman--clever, superficially correct and, upon examination, deeply questionable. Most arguable of all is Friedman’s relentless insistence that “through the process of globalization everyone is being forced toward America’s gas station.”

Of course, there is no doubt that this is the way Americans see things. And for the moment, with the Dow at 11,000 and likely to climb higher, with Europe politically paralyzed and Japan seemingly unable to drag itself out of recession, the United States is riding high. And at such moments in history, it is unsurprising to find well-known commentators devoting themselves to books that demonstrate, seemingly irrefutably, the superiority of the particular top dog nation’s system or, as Friedman would probably put it, at least the inexorability of that dominance.

There are, to be sure, cracks in the story. A European diplomat who attended the G-7 economic summit in Denver two years ago groused to a reporter that the Americans spent all day extolling the virtues of their system and lecturing the Western Europeans about how bankrupt and noncompetitive theirs was, while at night warning people that it would be unsafe for them to walk too far from the hotel. Friedman knows this, of course, and part of his package of prescriptions for making the globalized world a better place revolves around dealing with the underclass both in the United States and in the rest of the world. Where he seems incapable of taking the necessary imaginative leap is in thinking through what will happen if this prosperity on which the American version of globalization is based is short-lived and if, in fact, this new world order that he wants both to extol and to help perfect is an enduring artifact or, to use the Wall Street language to which Friedman, who calls himself in the book an “information arbitrageur,” is peculiarly susceptible, if instead it is a bubble, doomed to explode in the way financial enthusiasms from tulipmania to the Japanese stock market of the 1980s have always eventually exploded.

II

It is likely that “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” will eventually seem as much the enthusiastic product of its overheated, arrogant moment in American history as those books published 20 years ago about Japan’s inevitable surpassing of the United States, like Ezra Vogel’s immensely influential and, in retrospect, amazingly wrongheaded “Japan as Number One,” were of theirs. What is infuriating about Friedman is not that he takes another view but that after the experience of so many commentators getting it so wrong about Japan he is still so sure that the historical die is cast in America’s favor.

More modesty on his part would have led him to write a better book. If, as he says, the world really is 10 years old, then what it will look like when the system has coalesced is surely not yet knowable. And yet Friedman, though he insists that he began his researches with “an open mind,” writes without any apparent doubt. There is nothing contingent in his narrative. He has found the key to the future--”the dominant organizing framework for international affairs”--and he is ready to tell his readers what it is.

And what it is, surprise, surprise, is America. By the end of his book, Friedman has lapsed into the hyphenated locution, “Americanization-Globalization,” and posits a world divided between those who have the sense to accept it and those who are either, as he puts it condescendingly, “not up to [it] or don’t want to be up for it for cultural, economic, or political reasons.”

Friedman dismisses those who do not see things this way intellectually--we are back to globalization being like the dawn again--but goes to some lengths to argue that they represent a grave, perhaps even the gravest threat to the global order he advocates. Inevitably, he trots out the usual suspects, the mullahs, terrorists and old-fashioned nationalists, to buttress his case. Walking into the lobby of a Tehran hotel in 1996, Friedman found himself confronted by the slogan “Down with USA” set in tile in the wall. His reaction? “Jeez,” I thought to myself, “That’s tiled into the wall! These people really have a problem with America.”

For Friedman, these enemies of globalization are throwbacks to a simpler time. “They want to have it one way,” he writes, “the old way, their way.” As Friedman recognizes, technology makes the job of striking at America much easier. He is not optimistic about the extent to which they can be prevented from acting. The best Friedman can offer is a largely hollow bromide, familiar to anyone who lived through a generation of liberal discourse about the poor in the United States. This is unsurprising. For all his embrace of new technologies and new paradigms, Friedman is every inch the old-fashioned liberal in this regard. His book ends, rather weakly and unconvincingly, with a plea for more foreign aid and, simultaneously, more pressure on developing countries to reform their banking institutions. If globalization is Americanization, he argues, then the United States has both a special interest and a special responsibility in making it work.

Taken on its own terms, Friedman’s argument is commonsensical. Its underlying assumptions are what are open to debate. When, for example, Friedman writes that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon,” one does not have to be a leftist to ask whether he is serious. Do the words Central America ring a bell?

It is not scapegoating America to reject this kind of exceptionalist twaddle. The United States is a great power and, like any great power, it acts and will always act out of a combination of interests and principles. There is nothing wrong with this; unlike globalization, it is probably inevitable. Indeed, to write a book or advocate a politics or a world view based on such a Pollyannaish view of United States power probably does the country a disservice, for it makes it far more difficult to make policy taking into account that other people may not see us as we (or at least as pundits of Friedman’s stripe) rosily see ourselves.

When the great bull market ends, this will doubtless be clearer. And it is no accident, I think, that the acknowledgment pages of Friedman’s book are crammed with names of CEOs and CFOs, finance ministers, central bank governors and beltway pundits, and without a single trade unionist. The furthest Friedman seems willing to go in giving voice to responsible dissenting voices is in brief sections that refer to George Soros and the World Bank’s James Wolfensohn. But while acknowledging their views, he does not discuss them seriously. Taking note of them is not enough, at least in a work of political and economic analysis that purports to be serious. Friedman’s tactic throughout the book is to deflect counter-arguments by alluding to them but not engaging with them. Soros and Wolfensohn are about as far as Friedman is willing to go in giving voice to dissenting voices, and while he acknowledges their views, he does not engage with them in any serious sense. And to take note of them is not enough, at least in a work of political and economic analysis that purports to be serious. There is no view about globalization that he does not touch on glancingly, but this ecumenism does not change the basic ideological monochromatism of his book.

When all is said and done, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” is the view from Davos. It is reported that there are now 6 million millionaires in the world, of which 4 million live in the United States. I have no idea if Thomas Friedman is one of them, but he certainly writes as if he is. Let me be blunt. Although apparently written in an effort to anatomize the new international system that, for lack of a better word, we call globalization, Friedman’s book is almost perfectly devoid of any critical distance from it. And where Friedman once, as foreign correspondent in the Middle East, understood the importance of getting the details right, of getting his boots muddy, both literally and metaphorically, Friedman the foreign-affairs columnist parachutes in, interviews grandees (and, like any parachute journalist, relies far too heavily on the wisdom of the cabdrivers who take him to and from his meetings with the great and the good) and flies out again.

In the process, the specific gravity of the places Friedman visits is lost. Instead of visiting countries, Friedman visits exemplifications. Country A is on the right road; it is accepting globalization. Country B is still clinging to the olive tree; it is on the wrong side of the future. Inevitably, in such a schematized vision, the complexities that Friedman might have discerned either fail to make their way into his account or are actually misrepresented.

Consider the case of Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” He writes that “[n]o two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” Friedman’s idea of course is that the more a country is assimilated into the global economy, the less likely it is to want to fight a war. And that is probably true. The problem is that most wars these days do not take place between states but within states. And in intra-state conflict, the poverty of the society or the degree of its integration into the world economy plays a far less important role, as witness the former Yugoslavia. There may not have been any McDonald’s in Sierra Leone, but there were plenty in Central America, as there are in the Balkans today.

Friedman knows this, of course, and in his “Golden Straitjacket” chapter leaves himself an out. “Civil wars and skirmishes,” he writes, “don’t count.” But the fact that he can impose this restriction on his theory and, later in the book, note in passing the obvious--that most wars these days go on within states--does not lead Friedman to reevaluate it. The obvious question is, where was his editor? The more important question is whether by refusing to argue through the implications of his own claims, Friedman fatally compromised his argument and turned what might have been an important book argued from the vantage point of the globalizers into a trivial piece of boosterism leavened with a few cautionary notes and a lot of picturesque detail?

III

There is so much that is absent from Friedman’s account. Africa is all but excluded, for one thing. But why talk about Africa? That would be depressing; it would force Friedman to confront the real implications that flow from talking about globalization being as inexorable as the dawn. “Nature,” Nietzsche wrote, “cynical in her sunrises.” In other words, the stars shine just as beautifully over a rose garden as over a massacre site.

Friedman doubtless would reject the suggestion that however sunny his view of the United States and however unshakable his optimism about a globalized world, assuming Americans continue to keep things together anyway, the thrust of his argument is toward cynicism and resignation and that what he has written is actually a paean to the established order of things.

And yet the cynicism is sometimes discernible in Friedman’s account, and his apparent willingness to accept that this Americanization-Globalization carries with it, implicitly, a red-lining or a writing off of much of the world, suggests just that. “Bosnia, Albania, Algeria, Serbia, Syria, and many African states,” he writes in a representative sentence, “[have been] unable to make the transition.” And he adds, apparently with approbation, “But these states are weak enough and small enough that the system just builds a firewall around them.”

It is in passages like these that another Friedman, not the homespun raconteur and well-intended reformer but the triage artist and the lover of establishments, the man who said he didn’t care about Bosnia, is suddenly on display. It is not as benign a persona as the one Friedman usually chooses to emphasize. But in the end, it is far more revealing about the implications of his arguments than all his good wishes for as many people as possible to share in the new global order. For he has written a book that ought to give American liberalism a bad name. Purportedly hard-headed and optimistic, can-do and open-minded, it is, however unconsciously, callous, ignorant, complacent, nationalistic and contemptuous of other cultures and other philosophical traditions.

Friedman thinks he has divined the future. Perhaps he has. It is likelier, though, that he has done something far less interesting and divined the present and mistaken it for the future.