Should Tom Friedman Celebrate Jimmy Carter’s ‘Achievements’?

Friedman Pines for China

Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer winner and the New York Times’s foreign-affairs columnist since 1995, has long maintained a set of curious views about world affairs. Most prominent, perhaps, is his elevation of climate change above all other issues facing America and the world. The subject so activated him that, in 2008 while promoting his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, he wished that the U.S. could become “China for a day,” so that our government could use its dictatorial power to enact the planet-saving taxes, regulations, and product bans that would then be irreversible.

Interviewed on the Colbert Report, Friedman described his “fantasy” thusly:

[W]hat if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could … authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don’t want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus, and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

Reminded by Colbert of the totalitarian character of China’s Communist regime, Friedman simply replied, “It is a measure of the frustration a lot of people in the green movement have — certainly me,” that America’s democratic system (in the form of Republicans in Congress and the Presidency) had blocked the passage of an eco-leftist agenda.

Late in his book, in his “China For A Day” chapter, Friedman expressed his envy that China’s government could effectively ban thin plastic bags, for instance, without resistance. (Once we reverted to a democratic system, Friedman was confident that pressure from public-interest groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council would sue violators of the ban — including the Federal government itself — “all the way to the Supreme Court.”)

That is why, Friedman argued, just adopting the Chinese system for a day — imposing all the right taxes, regulations, and standards needed to launch a clean power system — would be of inestimable value:

[O]nce the directions are given from above, we would be overcoming the worst part of our democracy (the inability to make big decisions in peacetime), and the next day we would be able to enjoy the best part of our democracy (the power of our civic society to make government rules stick and the power of our markets to take advantage of them).”

Friedman repeated his argument in a column the following September, where he observed that “watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.”

While “one-party autocracy,” Friedman added, “has its drawbacks … when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward.” China’s continuing to add hundreds of coal-powered electric plants annually apparently didn’t faze him.

Though Friedman subsequently modified his praise of the Chinese regime when it demanded the right to censor Google’s offerings, his curious elevation of climate politics came to the fore most recently in a January 5 column posing the question, following Jimmy Carter’s death, “What If Reagan Had Been More Like Carter?” Acknowledging that “Carter had his share of missteps,” Friedman stressed that “he was way, way, ahead [sic] of his time on clean energy.”

In an “alternate reality” Friedman called “Chasing the Sun for All Mankind,” Reagan would not have “removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof … with the aim of kicking the solar industry and inspiring Americans to adopt clean energy in the wake of the  1970s oil crisis and gas lines.” Instead, Reagan “would have ordered every U.S. government building to install advanced photovoltaic solar cells on its roof,” since they “were increasingly commercially viable in the 1980s.” “As a result,” Friedman dreams, “America would have become the Saudi Arabia of solar panels,” making “the world” vastly different.

Admittedly, Friedman notes, “Reagan’s energy legacy is also complex in retrospect,” since “[b]y doubling down on fossil fuels — while also spurring Saudi Arabia to pump more oil,” he “helped to drive the global price of crude oil down,” as “part of a deliberate and successful strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union, which lived off oil and gas exports,” thereby helping “to bring down the Berlin Wall and liberate Eastern Europe.”

But the real payoff of that strategy, in Friedman’s view, is that it “paved the way for the consolidation and expansion of the European Union, which is today a huge driver of clean energy and climate change mitigation.”

Friedman concludes that despite his Presidential “stumbles,” Carter thus deserves to be celebrated, not only for his foresight on clean energy, but because of his “vision and persistence on Middle East peace.”

But Friedman’s judgment on both scores needs to be challenged.

Democratic governments in European nations like Germany, France, and Britain, along with Canada are suffering from considerable instability nowadays, in substantial degree owing to their governments’ ill-thought-out “Green” policies — generating higher prices and lower economic growth, and rendering the Continent more dependent on exports of gas from Russia. Under Angela Merkel, Germany even went so far as to shut down its nuclear power plants, the most efficient source of emissionless energy, at the behest of the Greens.

Carter and the Middle East

As for the Middle East, Carter deservedly received acclaim for brokering the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1979, although his diplomacy was only a secondary factor. In reality, the impetus for the treaty came from the leaders of the two signatory nations, beginning with Anwar Sadat’s courageous visit to meet with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1977 (for which Sadat later paid with his life, victim of an assassination by the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas); the fact that the two leaders flew to the U.S. in the first place was an indicator that they were amenable to peace.

This followed, of course, Carter’s utter failure to recognize the threat to world order that Iran’s ayatollahs would pose once they seized power.

Though Carter subsequently sought to enhance his reputation as a Middle East peacemaker in his 2006 book Peace Not Apartheid, claiming “to present facts about the Middle East that are unknown to America,” he simply contributed to blackening Israel’s reputation by attributing to it a policy of “apartheid” towards Palestinians, and then blaming negative reviews on the influence of the “pro-Israel lobby” on U.S. media.

He thereby downplayed the significance of the series of terrorist attacks on Israel, including the two intifadas of preceding years. Carter failed to acknowledge that the “land for peace” model that worked with Egypt had no relevance for Hamas and other groups dedicated to Israel’s total destruction. But it heightened the need for Israel to defend itself even after generous offers of strategically crucial geography.

And by using the term “apartheid” (following Hamas’s usage), as if Israel treated Arabs as the government of the Union of South Africa had once treated its black residents, Carter disregarded the fact that Arabs constitute a significant proportion of Israeli citizens within the nation, enjoying not only the same liberties as other Israelis but also the right to elect members of the Knesset.

As former Carter adviser and then head of the Carter Center Dr. Ken Stein (who resigned in protest, followed by the rest of the Center’s board, on account of Carter’s remarks) has pointed out, Carter, the first President to negotiate with Hamas (as a private citizen), failed to appreciate the difference between the willingness of Sadat to negotiate peace and the unwillingness of dictators like Syria’s Hafez-al-Assad and terrorist groups like Hamas to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Since they wouldn’t budge, Carter apparently concluded that the road to peace lay in blaming Israel.

In response to widespread criticisms of the book’s inaccuracies from  figures such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton’s coordinator of Middle East policy Dennis Ross, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi emphasizing that Carter did “not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel,” Carter still insisted that Americans were “reluctan[t] to criticize any policies of the Israeli government … because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee [sic] and the absence of any significant contrary voices.”  He hoped thereby to tear down the “impenetrable wall” that supposedly stopped Americans from seeing the Palestinians’ “plight.”

But it was Carter, during his Presidency and after, who displayed an extraordinary blindness and gullibility regarding world affairs, and not only in the Middle East. Having warned Americans in an address at Notre Dame University shortly after taking office against their supposedly excessive fear of Communism, he was forced to recant his views following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan late in 1979, remarking that the invasion had taught him more than he’d ever realized about the ideology. (Rather expensive on-the-job training.) This led him to cancel America’s participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Still, over the long run, Carter retained his naiveté about both the Middle East and Communism. Endeavoring to stave off American sanctions aimed at halting North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, Carter visited Pyongyang in 1994, inducing the Clinton administration to reach a “deal” with the dictatorship that would “freeze” its nuclear development. (For this accomplishment he was recently hailed in an online publication called The Diplomat for having “Stopped the Second Korean War.”)

Friedman’s celebration of Carter’s supposed achievements is not surprising, given their shared underestimation of the real dangers facing the world. While Carter’s efforts at personal humanitarianism through his work at Habitat for Humanity merit applause, along with his domestic policy of deregulation, neither he nor Friedman has offered a sensible guide for American policy, or for the world’s safety and freedom.

READ MORE from David Schaeffer:

Resist a Constitutional Convention — and Gillibrand’s Skullduggery

Carter: A Man of Little Consequence, Spoils His Farewell

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