Flattening Will Get You Nowhere

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 469 pages

Nobody here but us flat people, living here in this flat world. That’s the message Thomas L. Friedman wants to convey after we finish reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.

It’s not true, of course: the world is plenty vertical—hierarchical, bumpily uneven in the distribution of resources, power, and controlling secrets—and it’s becoming more so. But Friedman has history on his side, or at least his sense of an inevitable history, derived from a perhaps surprising, albeit well-known, voice from the 19th century.

In Friedman’s telling, you and me, plus blue-collar workers, Third World farmers, New York Times columnists, and Bill Gates, are all living in a flattened planet on which the forces of globalization are buffeting and transforming us. And, oh yes: each of us, regardless of wealth or power differentials, should do our part to accelerate the progressive rush of the future.

In his 469 pages, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner scopes out the planet’s new contours, offering this considered judgment: “Both classic economic theory and the inherent strengths of the American economy have convinced me that American individuals have nothing to worry about from a flat world—provided we roll up our sleeves.” Note the jaunty “we,” as in, we’re all in this together, folks, here in Flatworld.

Yet for all his propagandizing for flatitutude, Friedman seems to spend his time in the far pavilions, atop the commanding heights. The inspiration for the book, he tells us in the first few pages—beginning a long skein of name-dropping—came from Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys Technologies Limited in Bangalore. And the rest of the book features a cavalcade of corporate leaders, from Reuters to Wal-Mart to UPS to Intel to Rolls-Royce to JetBlue to Dell to eBay. In between CEO-fluffing, Friedman shares the names of favorite airlines, cool family friends, and TV networks that have paid him money.

Not surprisingly, such chumminess with chieftains has softened, not to say dulled, his critical faculties. Wal-Mart, for example, gets slapped around more in the pages of Fortune than in Friedman’s book. Similarly, Boeing’s decision to outsource aeronautical jobs to Russia is treated as unalloyed good news because, he is assured, there’s a “shortage” of such engineers in the U.S. Then the unnamed honcho of a major European multinational reveals “we are a global research company now”—which revelation the Times-man treats as a scoop—and former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo takes Friedman aside and shares this pearl: Mexico and Latin America have “fantastic potential.”

Of course, high-level hobnobbing yields up some good stuff, too. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell recalls that when he wanted to examine old treaty texts, he simply Googled them; in other words, technology enabled him to bypass the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy. And Microsoft’s Bill Gates shares a mini-insight: “When you meet Chinese politicians, they are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion with them—you are never discussing ‘give me a one-liner to embarrass [my political rivals] with.’”

Friedman has done his homework on such just-in-timely topics as how computers are made, how supply chains operate, and how browsers function. This behind-the-scenesing and inside-the-machinesing will be familiar to readers of business magazines and perhaps an issue or two of Wired, but Friedman wields a deft pen as he provides both anecdotes and historical context. In the ’50s, he recalls, the Interstate Highway System flattened America, making it “so much easier for companies to relocate in lower-wage regions, like the South.” Today infrastructural improvements are flattening the world as a whole, such that “3 billion people who had been frozen out of the field suddenly found themselves liberated to plug and play with everybody else.”

One might suppose that Joseph “creative destruction” Schumpeter has been an influence on Friedman, but in fact the Austrian economist is nowhere to be found in this book. Instead, Friedman provocatively—and revealingly—gives maximum intellectual credit to an earlier German-speaker: Karl Marx.

It first occurs to the reader that Friedman is playing name-games with communist lore in chapter two, titled “The Ten Forces That Flattened the World.” That label seems like an inside-jokey play on John Reed’s eyewitness account of the Bolshevik revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World. But then in the next chapter Friedman brings in Marx big time. According to the author, “reading The Communist Manifesto today, I am in awe at how incisively Marx detailed the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and how much he foreshadowed the way these same forces would keep flattening the world right up to the present.” Which is to say, the phenomenon of world-flattening is nothing new; it’s been going on, albeit accelerating, for more than two centuries.

Such an admission might seem to undercut the cutting-edginess of Friedman’s book, but the author doesn’t seem to care; he’s too busy reveling in Marx’s purple prose, which stretches, unedited, over more than a full page. Indeed, Marx made Friedman’s argument long before Friedman: “All fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,” Marx wrote a century-and-a-half ago, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Meanwhile, even as capitalism is pulverizing tradition, the bourgeoisie, per Marx as quoted by Friedman, is chasing after markets “over the whole surface of the globe.” The bottom line is that “all old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.”

Friedman is no communist, not at all. If anything, he is the opposite; as in his similar book from 2000, The Lexus and The Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, he is something of a cheerleader for billionaires and their value system. But for all their vast differences in economic ideology, the two writers from two different eras share a similarity as they prophesy the deterministic destiny of the world. And that’s the debt, only partially acknowledged, that Friedman owes to Marx. Like his predecessor, Friedman works from a materialistic worldview, a vision of history in which events unfold in certain ways—ways that are inevitable as well as desirable. It’s a secular utopianism, promising a near-heaven here on earth.

And the path to such a possible semi-paradise, Friedman maintains, is closer economic and social integration across the planet. He notes that the familiar social contract “has been ripped up with the flattening of the world,” but he scorns most attempts to reweave that contract—“don’t try to build walls,” he commands, referring to trade barriers. So what to do instead? Friedman endorses a Clintonish litany of programs to build “human capital,” aimed at bolstering the middle class—although he never pauses to consider that maybe, in a flattened world of near-perfect competition for the cheapest possible labor, there’s virtually no limit to the downward pressure on wages. That’s a basic point that Friedman fails to acknowledge; to do so would cause ordinary Americans to question his econo-utopianism.

Meanwhile, Friedman is determined to block wall-building, expressing the same fervor as the British economist Richard Cobden, who declared in 1857, “Free trade is God’s diplomacy. There is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace.” Indeed, the Cobden quote graces one of the volume’s chapter headings.

No wonder Friedman is disdainful of the emerging anti-globalization coalition, dubbed the “Wall Party,” which will shuffle existing partisan and cultural alliances as it opposes what might be called the Flat Party. There is no doubt whose side he’s on as he arrays old value systems, represented by blue-collar workers and traditional religion, against new value systems, represented by the world-flattening forces of capital and technology:

Let’s face it: Republican cultural conservatives have much more in common with the steelworkers of Youngstown, Ohio, the farmers of rural China, and the mullahs of central Saudi Arabia, who would also like more walls, than they do with investment bankers on Wall Street or service workers linked to the global economy in Palo Alto, who have been enriched by the flattening of the world.

He’ll take Goldman Sachs and Hewlett-Packard any day.

And while Friedman evinces a certain amount of sympathy for Third World left-behinds, as any reader of his Times column knows, he has no patience for the platform of the Religious Right. Continuing on the same kulturkampf-y theme, he adds:

‘The Passion of the Christ’ audience will be in the same trench with the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO, while the Hollywood and Wall Street liberals and the “You’ve Got Mail” crowd will be in the same trench with the high-tech workers of Silicon Valley and the global service providers of Manhattan and San Francisco. It will be Mel Gibson and Jimmy Hoffa Jr. versus Bill Gates and Meg Ryan.

But of course, there’s something deeply flawed about the Friedman vision of free trade. In a word, it’s not free. Let’s consider the three elements of true free trade—mobile capital, mobile goods and services, and, just as importantly, mobile labor. Do all three elements obtain today? Will they ever? Of course not.

It is true, thanks mostly to the barrier-busting World Trade Organization, that investment capital today is pretty much mobile anywhere in the world. And as for goods and services, the WTO has lowered many of the barriers; Toyota and Aetna aren’t totally free to go wherever they want, but they’re substantially free. Yet the third category, labor, is relatively immobile. Yes, there’s more migration than ever, but human beings are sticky and illiquid compared to money and manufactures. That is, workers and their families, rooted in one place, will always be stolidly vulnerable to factory closings—and their paychecks vulnerable to the mere threat of such closings.

So while the world might look flat from the Fortune 500’s windows or from Friedman’s laptop, those near globalization’s millions of ground zeros find the environment looking rather steep. Moreover, one might ask, does the ever-growing American government look as if it’s getting flatter—or is it fatter? In Washington, the government veils itself ever further inside the folds of “national security,” as federal buildings look increasingly like kremlins. Nationwide, the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, and other bureaucratic proofs that war is the health of the state continue to multiply, if not metastasize.

Friedman has little to say about this sort of de-flattening. Nor does he talk much about foreign policy, which has been his stock-in-trade for a quarter-century now. In his terse treatment of a flattened world’s foreign policy, he devotes considerable attention only to transforming the Middle East, which is the area of the world, he tells us, that is most in need of American ministrations.

Yet interestingly, one would never know from this book that Friedman was a strong proponent of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yes, he has bashed George W. Bush as often as he could over the past five years, but in the moments when it mattered most, he maintained his support for Bush’s war policy. On September 13, 2003, for example, he told Tim Russert on CNBC that there had been three “great bubbles” in the past decade—Nasdaq, Enron, and Arab terrorism. And so, he continued, “We need to go into the heart of their world and beat their brains out, in order to burst this bubble.”

But now, two quagmiring years later, the bubble that has burst is optimism about American policy in the Middle East. No wonder Friedman’s book does not mention his support for the Iraq War; his entire policy prescription for Iraq is merely a single phrase in a long sentence, urging America to work toward “stabilizing Iraq.” Well, who destabilized it?

Yet the author has faith in himself and his judgment—and it’s his book, after all. So he tells us that he was visiting Cairo when a young man came up to him and said, “Keep writing what you’re writing.” Thus Friedman joins all the other point-makers who have miraculously found cab drivers who agree with them—and state their agreement in perfect sentences.

The author will no doubt write more about the Middle East in his next book, in which he will perhaps explain why the Arabs so stubbornly resist the inevitable logic of world-flattening. But as for the rest of the globe, he has a two-part dream.

The first part, as we have seen, is a kind of inverted Marxist utopianism, in which capitalism has replaced communism as the wave of the future.

The second part of the dream is transferred Lennonist lyricism—as in John Lennon, the late Beatles musician. In the concluding chapter of the book, simply titled “Imagination”—adapting the name of Lennon’s best-known song—Friedman quotes an IBM scientist-sage: “We need to think more seriously than ever about how we encourage people to focus on productive outcomes that advance and unite civilization.” Continuing, the IBMer declares, to Friedman’s obvious approval, that peaceful imaginations are needed to “minimize alienation and celebrate interdependence rather than self-sufficiency.” Wow. In other words, Marx, who always worried about capitalism-caused alienation, has gained new disciples to carry out his utopian destinarianism.

That’s a world that’s not flat, nor even vertical. Instead, it’s totally dream-weaving Friedmanism, with a little help from his friends.
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James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. He served in the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

An interesting review and dissection of Friedman's clap-trap. I agree with most of Pinkerton's points, some of Friedman's drivel I myself would castigate in far stronger terms.

James Pinkerton is an authentic conservative, but he appears to have followed too much into Buchanan's line of thinking. Pinkerton's anti-war, and over-weening anti-State (Patriot Act Paranoia) axe-grinding besmirches his own credibility. Sad to say, it appears that he is looking for Neo-cons under every bed.

An illustrative example of such obsessive focus is his review of Friedman's fellow-traveller, Thomas Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map" which I incorporate herein. Barnett does deserve almost negative review he gets, but I don't believe that he is a neo-con. In my assessment an out-and-out Left-wing liberal, who is aiding and abetting our nation's destruction with a willfully blindered...indeed naive... view of the strength and determination of our enemies...particularly China, and ignorance of history. Think along the lines of Alger Hiss, and you have your man. Fortunately, Rumsfeld finally, at long last,fired him this December (perhaps Barnett's open support of John Kerry did him in), and he no longer can spew his China apologetics from within the USN War College.

Whatever the reason, Thank God he is gone!

The following lengthy review by James Pinkerton, former Reagan and Bush '41 White House aide and currently at the New American Foundation and Newsday as a columnist. It appears in the current (6 December) issue of The American Conservative.

Here is the complete text, with commentary to follow: Books

[The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Putnam, 385 pages]

Don't Say the (Other) N-Word
by James P. Pinkerton

IF YOU EVER find yourself wondering why Iraq has proved to be a quagmire, you might take a look at The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett.

The book's optimism is as bold as the administration's promises of Iraqi "jubilation" that we heard two years ago. Indeed, for those seeking a "new operating theory to explain how this seemingly 'chaotic' world actually works," the dust jacket assures us, "Barnett has the answers." But answers for whom? The book does not explain the world as it is; Barnett's two-variable analysis—people are driven by economics, except when they must be kept in line by American military force—has already been refuted by world events. Instead, the author answers a different, sneakier, question: how does one establish neoconservativism as the dominant politico-military paradigm—without using the word "neoconservative"? That is, how does one mainstream radical ideas, making them seem as normal and American as apple pie and PowerPoint?

Barnett's mission, seemingly, is to synthesize two strands of neoconservatism. One is the "conservative" interventionism of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the Bush 43-ized Republican Party. The other strand, perhaps more important in Barnett's view, is the liberal interventionism of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and much of the Clintonized Democratic Party. To be sure, Friedman's economism, leading to utopianism, has been discredited in the eyes of many, even before Iraq. Yet other Americans remain susceptible to a Barnett vision of the post-Cold War world—namely, a "grand strategy on par with the Cold War strategy of containment," a strategy in which the U.S. leads civilization against the dark forces of barbarism.

Barnett, a senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, is touted on the dust jacket as having "given a constant stream of briefing over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policy-makers." And now, the jacket continues, "he gives it to you."

Actually, this briefing will cost you $26.95. The U.S., meanwhile, has committed close to $200 billion for the war in Iraq—which Barnett cites as "obviously" the first action item for his geostrategic plan—so why start pinching pennies now? A few hours spent with this book will leave the reader with a better understanding of how marchers of folly first put their boots on. In Barnett case, it begins with a map of the world, a little jargon, a few factoids—and a brash theory unalloyed by judgment or historical perspective.

Yet Barnett appears to have influence in the U.S. government. In addition to his post at the Naval War College, he has also worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Center for Naval Analyses; if the Pentagon had disapproved of Barnett's bold title, presumably the brass could have stopped him from using it. Instead, they funded his work and even blurbed his book.

Barnett's Big Idea is to draw lines across the planet delineating the "functioning Core" and the "non-integrating Gap." The Core consists of the rich countries of North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, plus Russia, China, and India. The Gap includes most nations of Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southest Asia.

The great work of the 21st century, Barnett says, is for the "connected" Core countries to come to the rescue of the "disconnected" Gap regions. How to do this? One route is foreign aid, another is trade. Yet another is the military—yes, armed intervention. That is, the Core must prove its systemic superiority by invading the Gap. Paying no mind to St. Augustine, Barnett explains, "My definition of just wars is exceedingly simple: They must leave affected societies more connected than we found them." In other words, perpetual war for perpetual connectivity.

So the idea is globalization in all forms, by all means. Indeed, Barnett goes into full pompous-reverential mode to declare The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a "seminal volume." One might think of Barnett as Friedman with a security clearance. This Pentagon guru declares, "America's national interest in the era of globalization lies primarily in the extension of global economic connectivity." With that single thought in his head, restated endlessly across nearly 400 pages, he reduces all the complexity of the world down to one simplicity: whether or not countries are "connected." And like Friedman, he never doubts that the U.S.—the worldwide history of failed colonialism notwithstanding—can reliably do the connecting.

In a weak moment, Barnett admits, "globalization's progressive advance will trigger more nationalism around the world, not less." Then he catches himself—the cure for measles of nationalism, he insists, is more globalism. "For each time we expand globalization's Functioning Core, we expand for all those living within it the freedom of choice, movement and expression." Prosperity, in other words, begets harmony.

But is affluence really the antidote to war? As Aristotle once observed, no tyrant ever conquered a city because he was cold and hungry. And the Stagyrite knew whereof he spoke: his pupil Alexander the Great suffered little deprivation in his Macedonian royal family. Yet Alexander's chosen form of "movement and expression" was to conquer the world.

But we haven't got to the real thrust of the book, which is that it's the mission of the Core—all united, of course, as one big connected and integrated family—to fill in the Gap, with treasure, blood, and the American way. This shiny, happy vision includes such unhappy Core-iors as France, Germany, and Russia. Indeed, Barnett even sees China as "a serious strategic partner in managing global stability." Do I hear the word "Taiwan"? Only by ignoring a dozen nuclear-edged feuds among the richer nations does Barnett get to the Friedman Station—to the terminus of a certain historical view, to the place where history ends because everyone is sitting peaceful and pretty. That is, if they are on the right side of the global tracks.

Because on the wrong side of the tracks, Barnett warns, lies a world of despair and danger. So even as the Core forms its multinational condominium, it must venture forth to slay the monsters. Barnett explains, "If the Core seems to be living the dream of Immanuel Kant's perpetual peace, then the Gap remains trapped in Hobbes' far crueler reality." As a result, America's globocop destiny is manifest: "American soldiers will end up being the tip of the spear."

If some of this is starting to seem familiar, that's because those ideas that were not cribbed from Friedman were taken from Wolfowitz.

Thus we come to "The National Security Strategy of the United States," released by the White House in September 2002. That document, on which Wolfowitz had been working while serving in the Bush 41 administration a decade earlier, asserted that the world now has only "a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."

But since not everyone recognizes the blessings of this single model—aka the American Way—the U.S. should intervene as necessary to give history a shove. Operation Iraqi Freedom was the beta test for the new strategy. And although the war hasn't gone exactly as planned, President Bush continued to prove that theory often trumps reality, insistently describing Iraq as the first step on the long march to peace and freedom for the world.

Yet interestingly, the word "neoconservative" never appears in this book's index. In fact, Barnett goes to great lengths to disguise the neocon-y nature of his argument. At one point, he launches into a reverie in which he claims to be "the real Fox Mulder," referring to the '90s TV show "The X-Files." Continuing in his self-dramatization, Barnett describes a sinister conspiracy inside the U.S. government: "Now the ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government, a term used by Timothy McVeigh types] conspirators basically have control of the Pentagon, with the Jews Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith running the show." The ZOG running the military? What are we supposed to make of that? One suspects that the purpose here is for us to have a good laugh, thus chuckling away legitimate concerns that perhaps neocon world-historical utopians are careening America over a cliff top.

The suspicion Barnett is carrying heavy neocon baggage, however disguisedly, increases as he turns toward the Middle East; there he wipes away centuries of history and oceans of blood with his simplifying globalizing brush. "What makes suicide bombers possible?" he asks. The answer: "It's not the poverty, because most of the terrorists are middle class and educated. It's that they have no realistic expectations of a better life for themselves or their children." This economic-determinist dogma might amuse the late Mohammad Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of 9/11, who had made his way to affluent Germany before embracing al-Qaeda ideology. Nor would it explain the mysterious rise in suicide bombing in "liberated" Iraq, rising from, well, zero into the hundreds since the Connectivity invasion. In fact, as Robert Paper of the University of Chicago demonstrated, the single biggest factor in suicide bombing is the bombers' desire to drive out foreign occupiers. Pape goes unmentioned by Barnett.

Instead, Barnett plows ahead with his variable-less view of the world, leading him to dismiss all patriots everywhere as retrogrades: "When individuals cannot find opportunity in life, they are reduced to fighting over what's left over: the land and the cultural identity they attach to its history." Such nostalgic rootedness, he maintains, is only for losers. It's far better to "define a society by connectivity and the individual opportunities it provides." Then, Barnett cheers, "You will see the primordial attachment to the land disappear . . . as mobility trumps tradition." So when that Great SUV-Day arrives, patriotism will become obsolete. And as for Americans, we can build condos atop Bunker Hill and pave over Gettsbury.

Barnett ends by offering a world-fixing to-do list: "ten steps toward this world worth creating." And although the book was published just this year, it looks as though he might want to rework some of his presentation slides.

The first item on his list has already been tried: The Iraq War. Dutifiul apparatchik that he is, Barnett lauds "our efforts to recreate Iraq as a functioning, connected society within the global economy." We feel no surprise there—although maybe his further prediction, that "the Middle East will be transformed over the next two decades" needs to be tweaked a bit.

Item two on the list: apply the Iraq solution to North Korea. Writing with the jingoistic breeziness of someone who has never seen combat and never understood how a war turns out, Barnett announces, "Kim Jong Il must be removed from power and Korea must be reunited." He add, "There is simply no good reason why Northeast Asia should put up with this nutcase any longer."

Of course, some might argue that the "good reasons" for negotiating with Pyongyang include its six to eight nuclear weapons. But if neoconservatism doesn't exist in Barnett's exoteric vocabulary, it's no surprise that realism doesn't feature in the text of his book.

Item three: Iran. Once again, Barnett sees regime change as a great idea. Echoing his neocon mentors, he wants to make "Iran the greatest reclamation project the world has ever seen."

Some might note that this list echoes George W. Bush's axis of evil. Indeed, Barnett is lavish in his praise of his commander in chief, even if it means trashing another Republican president: "I prefer comparing George W. Bush to Harry Truman rather than Ronald Reagan." Why is that? "Reagan didn't win the Cold War but had it handed to him on a silver platter." In other words, according to Barnett's revisionist history, the world situation that Ronald Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter in 1981—Soviets occupying Afghanistan, NATO drifting toward defeatism, pro-Castro forces winning in Central America—presented nothing more than a silver-platter challenge.

So we thing again of that one group of nominally conservative thinkers who argue that the Gipper is overrated. Yup, it's the neocons, the Straussian silent partners in Barnett's book. They're the ones who lump Reagan in with the quarter-century of American presidents before Bush 43 in order to support the claim that America's Middle East policy has been weak and morally cloudy since the fall of the Shah of Iran.

And what else does Barnett recommend? Faster immigration, please. Europe, he avers, needs to "move beyond 'guest workers' and into American-style encouragement of immigration flows." Indeed, "The right-wing anti-immigrant politicians need to be shouted off the political stage and pronto." Moreover, after encouraging Europe to become more like the U.S. on immigration policy, Barnett next encourages the U.S. to become more like the United Nations. In his dream scenario, the U.S. would merge with Mexico and by 2050, a "United States" president would be elected directly from the former Mexico. As Steve Sailer has noted, the neocon vision is a two-step: first, America invades the world; then America invites the world.

America, meet Tom Barnett. Your government rates him as one of the best and brightest. He endorses the radical world-remaking foreign-policy agenda of the neocons, although he won't quite come out and say it. Yet, lest anyone mistake him for a mere stooge of the neocons, he endorses a few nation-remapping ideas that are even more radical than anything the neocons have proposed, at least in public. So this would-be Clausewitz, writing from the bosom of the military-industrial-PowerPoint complex, demonstrates that the neocon bubble has yet to burst. If his book is any indicator of the future, then we ain't seen nothing yet.

James J. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New American Foundation in Washington, D.C. He served in the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

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