For the NY Times’ Thomas Friedman, Politics Does Not Stop at the Water’s Edge
Appearing on Michael Smerconish’s podcast, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that he was conflicted about the outcome of the Iran War. On the one hand, he wants the U.S. and Israel to defeat Iran militarily, but on the other hand he doesn’t want President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu getting credit for the victory. For Thomas Friedman, politics definitely does not stop at the water’s edge.
Friedman justifies his confliction about the war by calling Trump and Netanyahu anti-democratic and terrible people. This is the same Thomas Friedman who once wrote glowingly about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders as “a reasonably enlightened group of people,” and who has been accused of uttering pro-China, anti-American propaganda points in interviews and in his columns. Apparently, Friedman is okay with anti-democratic autocracy when the CCP practices it, prompting David Harsanyi to write that Friedman suffered from “authoritarian envy.”
The Times’ top foreign policy columnist was also a strong proponent of the Iraq War and the Bush administration’s irresponsible crusade to bring change to the Arab world. And in a 2019 interview, Friedman defended his position on that war as his “personal crusade” to bring “multicultural pluralism” to then nations of the Middle East. His failure to learn from that debacle is reason enough to question his judgment about foreign affairs.
Friedman, of course, is not the only American columnist or politician whose politics does not stop at the water’s edge. All American wars, including World War II (the so-called “good war”), have had their domestic political opponents. But Friedman’s position on the current war against Iran is different from principled opposition to the war. Friedman supports the war. He wants U.S. and Israeli forces to militarily defeat Iran, but not if victory politically strengthens President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
American patriots in 1781 and 1815 didn’t want to militarily defeat the British but only if the victories didn’t benefit George Washington or James Madison. Those Americans who wanted our armed forces to defeat Mexico in the late 1840s, the Confederacy in the 1860s, Spain in 1898, Germany in 1918, Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1940s, North Korea and China in the early 1950s, North Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, Iraq in 1991, and Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decades of the 21st century didn’t condition their desire for victory on whether it would politically strengthen Presidents Polk, Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Those Americans wanted victory regardless of who was the commander-in-chief.
But not Thomas Friedman in this country’s current war against the brutal, ruthless, totalitarian Iranian theocracy. Apparently defeating a regime that has killed many Americans and many thousands of its own people over the last 40-plus years, that is the chief sponsor of terrorism in the world, and that has attempted to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery systems takes a back seat to preventing Trump and Netanyahu from gaining politically from such a victory. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome (and perhaps Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome) on steroids.
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