Do Not Ever, EVER, Read Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman engages in one of his classic starry-eyed woolgatherings that will become the foundation for his next great thesis

It’s funny that Tom Friedman begins his latest clusterfuck of a column in the New York Times with the phrase, “There has been a lot of worthless chatter…” because worthless chatter is precisely what follows for 900 words. Reading Friedman is usually very unpleasant and confusing, not because he has a knack for writing profound prose or making dense arguments, but because he rarely makes any sense at all. If you read enough Friedman columns, you’ll eventually realize that in the cases where he actually does make a well-reasoned argument, it is purely accidental.

Friedman starts off by positing that if only oil were cheaper—$25 a barrel—he would be in favor of the United States entering into talks with the Iranian regime about its nuclear program. But, he says, with crude at $70/b the Iranians would simply have too much leverage in the negotiations. So Tom, what would conditions be like with crude at $25/b? “Trust me, at $25 a barrel, [President Ahmadinejad] won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.” What else? “[N]othing would tell Iran’s leaders that they must change more than collapsing oil prices.”

Now, I seem to remember crude plummeting to $32/b just this February. What I do not remember from that time is Ahmadinejad admitting that the Holocaust happened, or the mullahs saying, “Gee, maybe we should put our nuclear program on the back burner and start thinking about the future of our economy because oil is down and our inflation and unemployment rates are out of control.” I don’t remember these things because they didn’t happen. Friedman is essentially saying that if crude had just dropped another seven bucks, the Iranians would’ve been ready to cry “uncle.” This scenario might be realistic for a state with a proven track record of giving a shit about its economy, but certainly not Iran. If Tom had done his homework, he’d know that for years Iran’s leaders have stood by with indifference as the country’s aging oil infrastructure has gone to hell, causing an estimated annual 10% decline in crude output. On top of this, Iran has to import over 40% of its gasoline and diesel needs because it simply lacks the capacity to refine its own goddamn crude, which is utterly ridiculous. And so I’m not quite sure why Friedman thinks $25 oil would have the Iranians whistling Dixie when nothing else has, but the man’s certainly entitled to hope.

Not content with giving a completely baseless and phantasmagoric hypothesis about how Iran would behave with oil at $25/b, Friedman proceeds to explain his half-baked “First Law of Petro-Politics” idea. Now I must warn you, it seems that whenever this man ponders some pressing political issue, his deliberation about it goes something like this: He conceives a rudimentary, black-and-white solution or explanation for the problem and asks himself, “Could it really be that simple?” to which he always answers, “Yes.” Hence he says,

“I believe in the ‘First Law of Petro-Politics,’ which [I pulled out of my ass and] stipulates that the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petrolist states—states totally dependent on oil exports to run their economies—operate in inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because leaders have to educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade. As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down because leaders just have to stick a pipe in the ground to stay in power.”

It sounds impressive for about 0.3 seconds until you realize that this “law” has no basis in reality—not on this planet, anyway.

Friedman presents us with the case of the Soviet Union, or “Exhibit A,” as he calls it. Keep in mind that the following remarks are supposed to support his “First Law of Petro-Politics.”

“In a 2006 speech entitled ‘The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,’ Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

“‘During the next six months,” added Gaidar, ‘oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.’”

Did anyone else notice that Friedman basically just torpedoed his own argument simply by mentioning the Saudis? Let’s concede that his account of what brought about the USSR’s demise in the 1980s and the subsequent democratic reforms is accurate, even though there were definitely other factors at work, such as an already faltering economy and ongoing political decentralization. Unfortunately for his “law,” our loveable protagonist invokes Saudi Arabia rather nonchalantly, as if no one will think to inquire how freedom in this ultimate “petrolist state” faired during the same period of time. After all, if any case should be “Exhibit A” then surely Saudi Arabia, then or now, is it.

If Friedman’s hypothesis is correct, we should find that Saudi Arabia (and other states “totally dependent” on crude oil exports), like the USSR (even though the Soviets weren’t “totally dependent”) underwent political reform. So the question is, did Saudi leadership “educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade” during this time? I’ll let our State Department lead off and cite a 1989 report to Congress:

“No new major developments affected human rights in 1988. As in previous years, there were continuing reports of mistreatment of prisoners and incommunicado detention. Civil liberties remain significantly restricted.”

Furthermore, there was (and remains) no freedom of religion and criticism of the government is prohibited. Oh yeah, and it’s a monarchy. The extremely low level of both political and religious freedom has been the status quo for a very long time and during various fluctuations in the price of crude. Therefore, Saudi Arabia, which Friedman tangentially mentions in an argument that is supposed to prove his “law,” completely discredits it.

But what about other “petrolist states” at this time? Surely at least some of them were in the process of educating and unleashing their people to innovate and trade in response to falling crude, right? Unfortunately for our mustachioed Morgenthau, the evidence points in the other direction. Take the year 1988, which like the preceding two years, saw relatively low (inflation-adjusted) crude prices. What was going on in 1988? Well the Ayatollah’s Iran responded to the cheap prices by continuing to arrest and execute thousands of political prisoners, which culminated in that year’s mass execution of anywhere between 10,000 to 30,000 people. Also happening in 1988 was Saddam’s attack on the Kurds in Halabja in northern Iraq. People weren’t being educated for innovation; they were being oppressed or outright killed. If anything is the opposite of giving your citizens more freedom, it’s mustard-gassing them. Granted, Iran and Iraq were embroiled in a war, but if the presence of conflict is going to be cited as an exception to the rule, then Friedman’s “law” is no law at all.

Besides, the Saudi case, along with the sorry state of freedom in other OPEC countries such as Angola and Nigeria (to name two less-Islamic oil states), are plenty enough to blow Friedman’s argument into a million little hydrocarbons. Let no one accuse the man of violating Occam’s Razor. If there’s a simple explanation for an immensely complex phenomenon, then by god Tom Friedman will find it. Even if it doesn’t exist.

-Max