Thomas Friedman runs into a brick wall of reality

Posted by Joshua Holland at 1:39 PM on October 26, 2006.

That Thomas Friedman, the New York Times' super-columnist, is considered a leading liberal public intellectual pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how deranged our political discourse is.

Friedman's a narcissistic simpleton who married a billionaire and now spends his life writing columns about how the guy he had lunch with yesterday proves that unfettered global capital is just fabulous for the whole of society.

Normon Soloman does a good job today showing how Friedman, like all global corporatists, sees the world with cookie-cutter consistency. Everything is filtered through his flat-earth goggles; it's all nice and neat and simple, and damn any facts that get in the way. Earlier this year, he confessed to Tim Russert: "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."

Unlike Friedman, Jonathan Weiler, a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina and a colleague at The Gadflyer, actually knows what he's talking about. I've referenced his book, Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform, a couple of times -- it's well worth a read.

Anyway, I wanted to share Weiler's take-down of Friedman's latest piece, on Russian "petropolitics," because it so well illustrates the degree to which The Moustache of Understanding* just pulls these columns right out of his ass.

So, with permission, Weiler:

Jonathan Weiler: Make Him Stop

The bad news is that every time I see that Tom Friedman has written something about Russia, I cringe, awaiting the worst in his tendency to painful, insidious over-simplification. The good news is - he never disappoints. So, it was today in his column "The Really Cold War." (Times Select)

Friedman's opener:

The Berlin Wall fell almost 17 years ago. At the time, the future seemed clear: The fall of the wall would unleash an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people -- and for about 15 years it did just that. Today, though, when you stand where the Berlin Wall once stood and look east, you see a countertide coming your way. It is a black tide of petro-authoritarianism emanating from Russia, and it is blunting the Berlin Wall tide of free markets and free people.

Honestly, I don't know where he gets this stuff. The past fifteen years in formerly Communist Eurasia have witnessed a decidedly mixed bag, with dramatic openings and transformations (though painful) in places like the former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. Farther East, in Ukraine and Russia, for example, significant pluralistic openings were tempered, from 1991 forward, by rampant corruption, mafia violence and grinding economic depression. By the time we reach the essentially unreformed Central Asian Republics and the troubled Caucasus, poverty, violence and repression have been the norm.

Calling all of this an unstoppable tide of free markets and free people is, even by Friedman's standards, shockingly shallow and inadequate.

On the subject of Russia, Friedman explains why it's newly menacing the good people of Europe:

Russia is a classic example of what I like to call "the First Law of Petropolitics," which posits that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse relationship in petrolist states -- states with weak institutions and a high dependence on oil for their G.D.P. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up. The day the Soviet Union collapsed the price of oil was near $16 a barrel. And as the price of oil goes up the pace of freedom goes down. Today, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, flush with surging oil and gas profits, is crushing domestic opponents, renationalizing major energy companies, throwing out Western human rights groups and generally making himself the big man on campus in Europe.

I have previously attempted to explain, in great (or mind-numbing, if you prefer) detail, why Friedman's application of his "First Law of Petropolitics" is so badly flawed. In a nutshell, he's trying to tell a story here that simply doesn't fit the facts. President Putin has been essentially cracking down on Russian civil society since the day he took office, way back on New Year's eve, 1999. Though some of his actions have been more egregious recently, like the new laws forcing "re-registration" of NGOs, Putin's attacks on independent television date back to 2000 and when I was interviewing human rights activists in Moscow in January 2002, the pall that had been cast over their activities was already unmistakable by that time, leaving a sense of defeatism and resignation.

I have also written before that the seeds of the current authoritarian regime were all sown during the Yeltsin years, and with the full, effective support of the United States. Russian politics were far more free-wheeling and cacophonous in the mid-1990s, and groups were freer to engage in independent, adversarial activity. But, at critical moments, such as the 1993 political deadlock the resulted in the destruction of Russia's parliament, or the 1996 general election, in which Yeltsin came from behind to beat his Communist challenger, the regime deployed undemocratic and illegal means of ensuring the desired outcome. If democracy is, at its core, what the political scientist Adam Przeworski calls institutionalized uncertainty, Russia in the 1990s would have failed that test. And, oh by the way, Russia has launched two wars in Chechnya since 1994, obliterating over 100,000 people in the process and I dare Friedman to find a relationship between that set of developments and the price of oil.

Friedman devotes considerable column space to quoting various European observers and politicians about Russia's newfound ability to flex its muscle as an energy giant. This prospect, of an assertive, aggressive Russia bringing Europe to its knees by its control of the oil spigots is made more menacing, Friedman warns us, by the fact that Russia is also a nuclear power. It's in discussions like these that you can see why non-Americans would find our arrogance and blindness so utterly irritating. I mean, imagine a major nuclear power using its economic and resource leverage to influence global politics - the gall of it all! Of course, that the United States has hundreds of military bases ringing the planet and far greater global reach - not all of it deployed for good purposes, in case Friedman hadn't noticed - that's not a problem. But, Russia using its energy resources for leverage - now, that's a world historic crisis.

Friedman does make one concession to the actual facts of the past fifteen years: "In fairness to Mr. Putin, turnabout is fair play. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was enfeebled, the U.S. and the E.U. crammed NATO expansion down his throat." But that acknowledgment doesn't salvage the piece. It's myopic, ill-informed and pointlessly alarmist.

All this from our leading commentator on global affairs.

*Hat-tip to reader lamar for the Moustache of Understanding link.

Tagged as: russia, thomas friedman, putin

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.